Art crime continues to grab headlines and bereave museums, galleries and private collectors alike. We’ve compiled a list of some of the world’s most wanted paintings.

Leonardo da Vinci, Madonna with Infant Holding a Yarnwinder (1500-10)

On 27 August, 2003, Leonardo da Vinci's painting was lifted by thieves from the Duke of Buccleuch's Drumlanrig Castle in Scotland, UK. The two men responsible allegedly joined a public tour of the castle and overpowered a guide before stealing the masterpiece, which experts say is worth up to £30 million.

Jan Vermeer, The Concert (c1665-6)

Vermeer’s The Concert (one of the greatest of his remaining 36 paintings) was stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum, Boston, on 18 March, 1990 – the biggest heist in US history. The thieves dressed as policemen and convinced security they were checking the museum. The priceless work pictures a man playing the lute, a young woman playing the harpsichord and another singer.

Rembrandt van Rijn – The Storm on the Sea of Galilee

One of the most stolen artists ever, a worryingly large number of his paintings are listed as ‘whereabouts unknown’. This priceless work – the only known seascape painted by Rembrandt – was also stolen in the 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum heist in Boston, USA.

Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman (1938)

The head of the woman in this painting (valued at £4 million) is that of Dora Maar, the half-Yugoslav woman who was Picasso’s lover for nine years. It was stolen from a Saudi’s yacht, ‘Coral Island’, in March 1999 in Antibes, France.

Paul Cézanne, Auvers-sur-Oise (c1879-1882)

This landscape painting, valued at £3 million, was stolen on 1 January, 2000, from the Ashmolean museum, Oxford, UK. The thief entered the museum through the skylight. The painting depicts a cluster of small white cottages set in a tree-filled and lush valley.

Vincent Van Gogh, View of the Sea at Scheveningen and Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church at Nuenen (1882 and 1884 respectively)

In December 2002, thieves broke through the roof of Amsterdam’s Van Gogh museum and stole these two Van Gogh paintings, worth at least $10 million each. View of the Sea at Scheveningen shows a foaming, stormy sea and thundery sky, executed on the spot at the beach resort near The Hague. Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church at Nuenen is said to have been intended for Van Gogh's mother and his father who had become a pastor at the church in 1882.

Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon (1951)

This portrait by one British painter of another is worth an estimated $1.4 million. It was stolen in broad daylight from the Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie on 21 December 2000.