Visitors to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art looked on in astonishment yesterday as a man removed a priceless masterpiece from the gallery wall and proceeded to eat it, washing it down with red wine.

Security personnel were called to the first floor gallery after members of the public saw Miguel Baptiste Hernandez, 36, remove Portrait of a Young Woman with a Fan by the seventeenth-century Dutch painter, Rembrandt, from its frame.

He then spread a small tablecloth on the floor, removed from his rucksack a half bottle of Californian Pinot Noir, a glass, and a set of condiments, before tucking into the canvas.

By the time police arrived at the museum Hernandez was licking his lips and wiping his mouth on a napkin, having eaten the entire painting.

“It’s the most extraordinary thing I've ever seen,” said Mr Tonto Creamcrackers, a museum security expert and TV chef from the Netherlands, who was in the gallery at the time. “I could understand if he’d eaten a still life by Willem Kalf, with all those delicious grapes and lobsters, but a portrait? It shows that even art is now a victim of consumerism.”

Mr Hernandez – rapidly dubbed Hannibal Hernandez by bemused museum staff – is now in custody awaiting trial. Members of the Metropolitan Museum’s conservation department are standing by outside his cell armed with rubber gloves and a pair of tweezers, ready to inspect his stool in the vain hope that partially digested fragments of the painting might be retrieved and restored.

Huge Firmly Whipping-Boy

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