London’s Royal Academy of Arts has acknowledged that the death mask of JMW Turner, one of the Academy’s most prized possessions, may have been stolen more than 15 years ago, with no one at the museum noticing the mask’s disappearance until another institution asked to borrow it in 2002. However, it is also possible that the mask is still somewhere in the Academy’s vast collection, and staffers are hoping to turn it up during an ongoing cataloguing project.