Oddlet: Adam Worth · 1 min read
Aug 25, 2026
The Lady Must Go Home
What kind of master criminal steals a Gainsborough, then sleeps on top of her for twenty-five years?
Adam Worth was, by the formal assessment of Scotland Yard, the Napoleon of the criminal world. He ran a transatlantic syndicate, tunneled a million dollars out of the Boylston National Bank in 1869, and is widely fingered as the model for Professor Moriarty. He forbade his men from violence. He killed no one.
In May 1876, he stole a painting to bail his brother out of jail.
The painting was Gainsborough's Portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, cut from its frame on Old Bond Street weeks after Agnew's bought it for a record £10,500. His brother was freed the next day on a technicality. Worth kept the Duchess anyway. He rolled her paint-side out, had a false-bottomed trunk built so they wouldn't be separated on ocean crossings, and called the theft an elopement. He called her the Lady.
For twenty-five years he slept on top of her, flattened between two boards beneath his Mayfair mattress. In a Belgian prison a rival paid inmates to beat her location out of him. He did not say.
In 1901, dying and broke, he carried her to Chicago and handed her to the Pinkerton detective who had hunted him for decades.
"The Lady must go home."
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- Wikipedia — Adam Worth — Core biographical chronology: German birth, Cambridge MA upbringing, Bull Run wound, bounty jumping, Bullard partnership, Boylston Bank tunnel job, Henry J. Raymond alias, 1876 Agnew theft, 1892 Belgium arrest, 1901 ransom in Chicago, 1902 death, Highgate burial, Anderson 'Napoleon' nickname, marriage to Louise Boljahn.
- Wikipedia — Portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (Gainsborough) — Painting facts: 127 × 101.5 cm; Christie's sale 6 May 1876 to William Agnew for £10,500; theft, 25-year disappearance, March 1901 Chicago exchange, J.P. Morgan purchase ≈$150,000; 1994 Sotheby's sale to 11th Duke of Devonshire ($408,870) for Chatsworth.
- Pinkerton — The Art Thief and the Detectives — Pinkerton-authored account of William Pinkerton's encounters with Worth; Worth's 1899 letter; $25,000 March 1901 exchange in Chicago; Pinkerton's $700 gift to Worth's children; characterisation of Worth as 'the most remarkable criminal of them all.'
- History.com — Theft of the Duchess of Devonshire — Confirms 6 May 1876 Christie's record sale, theft three weeks later, Worth's motive to bail out brother John, betrayal by Joe Elliot and Junka Phillips, Pinkerton-brokered 1901 return.
- Ben Macintyre, The Napoleon of Crime (publisher page)
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