“We knew that the painting would go from one hand to another hand in the criminal world, but that nobody really wanted to touch it because it wasn’t worth anything,” according to the art detective Arthur Brand , who is known for retrieving stolen artworks. “You could only get in trouble. So it was a little bit cursed.”
Perhaps that is why on Monday night he received an unusual visitor at the door of his apartment in Amsterdam, holding a battered, blue Ikea bag. Brand ran up his stairs with the bag, carefully unwrapped a long painting from bubble wrap in front of a colleague videoing the moment, and compared the back with an image he had been sent as “proof-of-life” that the Van Gogh still existed. It was the same. “It’s him ,” he said. “Vincent van Gogh is back . What a day .”
The painting, The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring , was stolen in a smash and grab in the early hours of 30 March 2020 from the small Singer Laren museum in the Netherlands. The gallery was closed owing to Covid restrictions at the time and the heist made headlines across the world.
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