It’s the rare gangster film that has at its center a painting by a 19th-century French artist, in this case Edouard Manet. “Chez Tortoni” (1875) is his portrait of an unknown Parisian man sitting at a cafe table drawing in a sketchbook. With a half-finished glass of beer at his side, he looks at us with a keen sense of concentration, the rakish tilt of his tophat being a perfect rhyme to the angle of his pencil. In typical Manet fashion, the canvas is as curt as it is incisive.

One can’t help but wonder: Who’s looking at “Chez Tortoni” now? The Manet canvas was stolen from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 along with a dozen other objects, including paintings by Rembrandt van Rijn, Edgar Degas, and Johannes Vermeer. All of these losses are dear, but the theft of “The Concert” (circa 1664) is particularly galling, as there are few enough Vermeers as it is — about three dozen. The so-called Sphinx of Delft wasn’t the most prolific of men.