At 2:00 a.m. on New Year's morning, thieves broke into the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and stole a favourite painting of mine, one of the most beautiful landscape paintings in the world, Cezanne's "Auvers-sur-Oise". The painting is from Cezanne's transition period, when he was studying with Pisarro, and it has the high horizon line and style of that master, but also the splintering of planes and natural geometries that were becoming essential elements of Cezanne's later style. The Web copy shows nothing of its consummate experimental grace, and the emerging use of colour as a spatial marker -- the roofs and hillside greens interpenetrate like overlapping chords of music -- but here it is:click here. Like the long lost Vermeer from the Isabella Gardiner in Boston, it is now anyone's guess what its fate will be. It may be seen again, or not: it may turn up in a garbage can, or on the walls of some rich jerk; or it may be torched to destroy the evidence. It has gone into limbo. No great thought: just a report on more stupid vandalism against fragile beauty.