An early Rembrandt portrait that has not been on public view for more than two decades and has a lively criminal past — it was stolen at gunpoint from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, more than three decades ago — will re-emerge for several months, beginning on Tuesday at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

The 1632 painting, “Portrait of a Girl Wearing a Gold-Trimmed Cloak,” has been lent to the museum by an anonymous New York collector, the museum said yesterday, and will be exhibited through 2008. It was sold at auction to the collector in 1986 by its longtime owners, the heirs of Robert Treat Paine II, a descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, for what was then a record price for a Rembrandt, $10.3 million.

In 1975 the painting almost disappeared from view for good. It had been on loan from the Paine family to the Museum of Fine Arts for decades when two men purchased tickets to the museum around noon on one April day. They were...

The Polish port of Gdansk is to provide the backdrop for a new film based on the life of Irish patriot James Connolly.

Connolly - executed for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising - will be played by Peter Mullan of Trainspotting fame.

The film, due to be filmed in late 2008 or 2009, will be shot in Poland because Dublin has become far too modern.

"Dublin has become Google city," said Tom Stokes of Rascal Films.

"All the old docklands buildings have been obliterated.

"Gdansk is one of the few ports that still have the big, old, red-brick warehouses that once dominated Dublin's docklands.

At 79, Patricia Berberich is certainly old enough to have heard of Rosie the Riveter, but when it came to placing a face with the name, she admits her mind was blank.
So, when the woman dining with her one evening this spring at the McLean retirement home mentioned having been the model for artist Norman Rockwell's World War II-era heroine, Berberich politely excused herself to do a little research.

"My instinct was to get right to the Internet and look it up," she said. "Then I sent off to (the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass.) to get a poster so she could sign it."

Berberich was hardly the first to make that request of Rosie, whose real name is Mary Doyle Keefe. Since posing for Rockwell in 1942, she has signed countless posters and autographs.

The painting, for which Keefe posed twice and was paid $10, came to embody the can-do attitude of American women whose work helped win the war. It is arguably among the...

The Italian Culture Ministry yesterday returned 41 archaeological artifacts of Middle Eastern origin to the Iranian ambassador in Italy. The pieces date between the 8th and 14th centuries and were part of a larger haul of 309 objects found by the ministry’s art-theft police in September 2005 at an antiquities fair near Milan. Experts at the National Museum of Oriental Art in Rome studied the artifacts and determined which countries they belonged to. Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli told reporters at a news conference that the Italian government had always repatriated objects it believed had been looted. “It is our moral, political and scientific obligation to do so,” he said.

From Lafayette, Wis., to Fayette, Me.; from Fayetteville, Ark., to Lafayette County in Missouri; even in La Grange, Wyo., and La Grange County in Indiana the renowned Frenchman Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette left his mark (or at least the name of his estate east of Paris, La Grange). Lafayette, as he was more familiarly known here, also left his visage on 19th-century punch bowls and serving plates, clothes brushes and bank notes, pitchers and paintings.

But this was not just because Lafayette was this nation’s “French founding father,” the comrade of George Washington, the military leader who spent more than a quarter million dollars of his own money to supply troops during the Revolutionary War, the dedicated ally who came here against the wishes of his king, his family and his wife. (“The welfare of America,” he wrote in 1777, “is intimately connected with the happiness of all mankind.”) Alone, those achievements, however important, did not...

Claus Graf von Stauffenberg, who tried to kill Adolf Hitler with a briefcase bomb on July 20, 1944, is everywhere these days. But does he really deserve all the attention?

German soldiers on Wednesday celebrated what would have been Stauffenberg's 100th birthday.

Considering he's been dead for more than half of the 100 years since his birth, Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg sure is making a lot of headlines these days. Not only is Tom Cruise playing the colonel, who tried to assassinate Adolf Hitler with a briefcase bomb on July 20, 1944, in the movie "Valkyrie," set to come out this summer. But on Thursday, Germany's Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung honored the courageous young man on the occasion of his centennial.
Stauffenberg's assassination attempt, which took place in the Führer's forest headquarters known as the "Wolf's Lair," was "an act of liberation," Jung said. Moreover, the courageous act formed a model for...

ALLENTOWN, Pennsylvania: Fresh-faced soldier Paul Yoder dashed off a letter to his mother on Feb. 10, 1945, acknowledging receipt of a package from home and discussing the snowy weather on the German front.

"Things look a little better," he wrote in hurried, barely legible script. "Maybe one of these days the war will be over. We keep praying that it will."

Yoder was killed in action a day later. He was 19. His mother likely did not see the letter until after the Western Union telegram that delivered the grim news of his death.

Yoder's story, and many others, are told at a major new exhibit on World War II whose primary theme is sacrifice — both at home and on the battlefield. Officials at the Lehigh Valley Heritage Museum in Allentown say the show, which took more than a year to put together, ranks among the largest of its kind in the United States.

After cranking up his Edison Diamond Disc Phonograph by hand, Timothy Brooks gingerly drops a needle onto the black plastic disc, bringing forth a boisterous jazz tune.

Along the walls of his Glenville home, Brooks has more than 10,000 other antique records, representing almost a half century of collecting 78 rpm records at rummage sales, auctions and through the Internet.

While showing off several of the ancient phonographs, Brooks explained how the primitive state of recording technology forced singers to belt out every song at top volume to imprint a sound.

"There wasn't a lot of crooning in the old days," Brooks said.

Brooks, 65, a television executive and writer, said that from the melodies of minstrels and street singers to spoken orations by world figures, old records are a portal that provide important historical insights into early 20th century America.

The dresses might have been longer and the relationship advice more conservative, but 144 years ago, the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine was studied no less keenly than the pages of Cosmopolitan.

Published by Isabella Beeton - better known as Mrs Beeton, the celebrated Victorian cook - it was an indispensable guide for those ladies of high society who were terrified of committing a fashion faux pas.

Now that 19th-century style advice will be available to modern women when a rare 1863 copy of the monthly magazine is auctioned at the end of the month.

In it, readers were advised what was - and was not - appropriate to wear in the autumn and winter seasons. The bound album, complete with vibrant colour plates, focused on hats, headwear and all the associated accoutrements because "bonnets are in great variety and in great favour just now".