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A tour of the Oxford Picture Gallery housed in Christ Church, Oxford University’s richest college, will reveal Old Master paintings and works on paper by the likes of Leonardo and Michelangelo, among other great masterpieces.

Its thick walls are designed to evoke medieval structures, and it has the appearance of a fortress. It’s seemingly impregnable and described as incredibly safe.

As of March 14, however, it will be exactly a year since those walls were breached, and three artworks were stolen in a heist that is still baffling law enforcement.

The Telegraph spoke to art historian Jacqueline Thalmann, who has been the Picture Gallery’s live-in curator since 2003.

She was called to the scene when an alarm went off but didn’t think anything of it because the alarm had sounded before for “perfectly innocent reasons”.

After deactivating the alarm, she looked around and everything seemed fine, until the porter who had gone ahead, said: “Oh, Jacqueline, there’s a ladder”.

 “I don’t remember leaving a ladder there,” she thought, matter-of-factly. Then, as she took in the lighting tracks and cables dangling from the roof; the bare chains for supporting pictures visible on the wall, the penny dropped.

“Oh, my God.” She rang the lodge who, at 11.41pm, dialled 999.

The thieves had broken in through a skylight and climbed in via that ladder. By the time police started searching the area, they had vanished with three paintings.

Three paintings, together worth around £10 million, including: a sketch in oils almost 3ft high, of a soldier on horseback by Anthony van Dyck, later court painter to King Charles I (who lived at Christ Church during the English Civil War); and, slightly smaller, a lively – albeit heavily restored – study by Annibale Carracci, another leading Baroque artist, of a boy in a baggy white shirt drinking from a glass.

“Both have a strange universality that transcends time,” Thalmann tells [The Telegraph’s Alastair Sooke] “They were the paintings that everyone wanted to take home.”

The theft of the third painting was unexpected – a 17th-century landscape by someone less familiar, the Neapolitan painter, printmaker and poet Salvator Rosa which was worth significantly less than the other two.

This is odd because its value on the black market would be much lower. Typically, art thieves choose works by big names that hold around 10% of their value in the criminal underworld and are used as collateral in illicit deals.

Footage from inside the gallery suggests at least two thieves wearing head torches. There were probably more on the roof, because two of the three paintings (the Van Dyck and the Rosa) were passed up to accomplices there, who broke the pictures out of their frames. None of the canvases was cut, so all three are, hopefully, still intact on their wooden stretchers.

The thieves then went through a series of walled gardens and made their way through the cathedral’s cemetery, before scaling the gallery’s rear wall. From there it’s possible that they escaped by boat or passed along a path known as Dead Man’s Walk, before crossing a footbridge over the Cherwell to end up on the Iffley Road

No ransom note has been offered and police have been working with specialist officers from other British forces, as well as Europol, to explore whether this is one of a series of crimes across Europe targeting paintings from the same period of art history.

Today, Thalmann remains upset about the missing paintings. The Van Dyck, in particular, she says, “has an almost unmediated directness. It is in very good nick.”

Along with the Carracci, it has been protected by the college, and enjoyed by the public, for more than 250 years.

She believes “deep down” that they will come back, and that Rosa’s painting is the key to solving the mystery.

Because, in the lower left corner, five soldiers are studying a map. Are they hatching a plan? Thalmann’s hunch is that the painting was taken as a memento because there were five crooks in the gang.

If she’s right, it would take just one vengeful thief, after falling out with the others, to leak new information to the police. And Van Dyck’s soldier would come galloping back to his proper home.

Only time will tell.

[source:telegraph]