Moored in the Port Vauban at Antibes, the 72-metre Lürssen Coral Island was in for repairs in March 1999 when a Picasso portrait of the artist's lover Dora Maar disappeared from one of its suites. A professional art handler had been hired to remove the owner's art collection which included not just Buste de Femme, as it was known, but another Picasso and a Matisse – for safekeeping. They were taken down from their secure fixings, carefully wrapped and crated and moved from the saloon in which they hung to a cabin, which was locked but not alarmed. When the art handler returned to collect them five days later, Buste de Femme had vanished.
It is not the only important painting to have gone missing from a yacht. Three years later, in not dissimilar circumstances, by Marc Chagall disappeared from a yacht in Savona, Italy. Happily, both were subsequently recovered. The Chagall turned up in a house in Turin II years later, and two of the yacht's crew were arrested and charged. And in 2019 the Picasso came to light in the Netherlands, tracked down by a Dutch detective tipped
