The golden loo is gone.

A solid 18-karat gold toilet, titled “America” by its creator, Maurizio Cattelan, was stolen early Saturday from an exhibit at Blenheim Palace, the Oxfordshire birthplace and family home of Winston Churchill.

The toilet was part of a larger exhibit featuring Mr. Cattelan’s work that began on Thursday.

As befits someone who would make a toilet out of gold, Mr. Cattelan’s response to the theft was a bit, um, cheeky.

“At first, when they woke me up this morning with the news,” he said in an email to The New York Times, “I thought it was a prank: Who’s so stupid to steal a toilet? I had forgotten for a second that it was made out of gold.”

He said of the work: “‘America’ was the one percent for the 99 percent, and I hope it still is. I want to be positive and think the robbery is a kind of Robin Hood-inspired action.”