Detectives have announced that they may have a lead in the investigation of the Vincent Van Gogh painting that was stolen from the Singer Laren Museum in Holland on March 30.
The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring (1884) was on loan from another Dutch museum at the time of the theft. The museum had been closed due to Covid-19 when thieves shattered the glass doors with a sledgehammer.
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Now, art detective Arthur Brand has acquired a photograph in which the stolen painting, worth an estimated $6 million, appears between a May 30 copy of the international edition New York Times and the book Meisterdief, a biography of Octave Durham, an art thief who stole two Van Gogh paintings from the Van Gogh Museum in 2002.
The photograph is said to have been shared in mafia circles and was brought to his attention by an unnamed source.
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“In some cases when art is stolen, the thieves get nervous, they can’t get rid of it or they think the police is on their tail so they destroy it,” Brand told The Associated Press. “So these pictures show that we are dealing with professionals. So the painting is still alive, I wanted to say.”
Arthur Brand, who is considered the art world's leading crime expert, is well-versed in finding stolen artworks. Last year, he aided in recovering Picasso's Buste de Femme (Dora Maar), which had been taken from a Saudi Arabian sheikh's yacht in 1999. Brand started investigating the stolen Picasso in 2015 when he heard that it was circulating in the Dutch underworld. Brand's contacts brought the painting in black plastic bags to Brand in Amsterdam, who turned it over to an insurance company after verification from a Pace Gallery expert.
