A Dutch art detective has recovered a precious Vincent van Gogh painting that was stolen from a museum in a midnight heist during the coronavirus lockdown three and a half years ago, police have said.
Arthur Brand took possession of the missing painting, The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring, painted in 1884 and worth €3m-€6m (£2.6m-£5.2m), at his Amsterdam home on Monday, stuffed in a blue Ikea bag.
Brand, known as the “Indiana Jones of the art world” for tracing a series of high-profile lost artworks, told AFP that confirming the painting was the stolen Van Gogh was “one of the greatest moments of my life”.
“Arthur Brand, in cooperation with the Dutch police, has solved this matter,” Richard Bronswijk, of the Dutch police arts crime unit, confirmed. “This is definitely the real one, there’s no doubt about it.”
Brand told AFP that frequent calls by him and the Dutch police to hand back the stolen artwork finally paid off when a man, whose identity was not revealed for his own safety, handed Brand the painting in a blue Ikea bag, covered with bubblewrap and stuffed in a pillow casing.
A video clip supplied by Brand showed him unpacking the painting in his lounge and gasping in astonishment when he realised what it was. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said.
The painting was taken from the Singer Laren Museum near Amsterdam on 30 March 2020 in a heist that made headlines around the world.
Dutch police released video images shortly after the burglary showing a thief smashing through a glass door in the middle of the night, before running out with the painting tucked under his right arm.
In April 2021, police arrested a man named in Dutch media as Nils M for the theft. He was later convicted and sentenced to eight years behind bars. He was also convicted for stealing another masterpiece, by Frans Hals, called Two Laughing Boys in a separate burglary.
“After a few months I heard from a source in the criminal world who had bought the Van Gogh,” said Brand, who has gained fame for his remarkable recoveries of stolen art, including the “Hitler’s Horses” bronze statues, a Picasso painting and a ring that once belonged to Oscar Wilde.
This man, identified by Dutch media as Peter Roy K, was behind bars for a separate case involving the large-scale import and export of cocaine, Brand said. K wanted to use the painting as collateral to negotiate a reduction in his sentence.
Brand confirmed Peter Roy K’s identity, stressing he had said before that “no deal for a reduced sentence would be made”. The whereabouts of the Van Gogh, however, remained a mystery until two weeks ago when a man contacted Brand saying he wanted to return it.
After some negotiation, Brand persuaded the man – who had “nothing to do with the theft”, according to the art detective – to hand back the artwork.
“The man told me: ‘I want to return the Van Gogh. It has caused a massive headache,’” because it could not be used as a bargaining chip, Brand said. “In an operation done in close coordination with the Dutch police, we got the painting back,” he added.
The painting, from relatively early in Van Gogh’s career, before the prolific artist embarked on his trademark post-impressionist paintings, has been handed back to the director of the Groninger Museum, from where it was on loan to the Singer Laren Museum.
Hals’ Two Laughing Boys remains missing, but Brand said he hoped that painting would also be returned soon.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
