Opportunistic Thieves Just Stole a Prized Van Gogh Landscape From a Locked-Down Dutch Museum Under Cover of Night

Thieves have taken advantage of
the distraction provided by the public health situation to steal a
prize Vincent van Gogh painting from a museum in the Netherlands.
Under cover of darkness, the bandits targeted the Singer Laren
museum in Laren, east of Amsterdam, and made off with the Dutch
master’s The Parsonage
Garden at Nuenen in Spring (1884) while the institution was closed to the
public.

“I am extremely pissed off that
this happened,” the museum’s director Jan Rudolph de Lorm said at a press
conference on Monday.
“This is a huge blow. This is extremely difficult, especially in
these times.”

The break-in at the museum
happened in the early hours of Monday morning, at around 3:15 a.m.
The thieves smashed a large glass door at the front of the museum
to access the building. Police reached the scene after the museum’s
alarm was triggered, but the perpetrators had vanished by the time
they arrived, according to a statement from the local
authorities.

To add insult to injury, the
painting does not even belong to the museum—it was on loan from the
Groninger Museum in Groningen, the Netherlands, according to the
police. The 1884 work was
the only painting by Van Gogh in the Groninger Museum’s collection.
It was painted when Van Gogh was living in Neunen, where his father
was a pastor, between 1883 and 1885, and depicts the ruins of the
village church, which the artist could see from his father’s house.
(The date of the theft also happens to be the artist’s birthday: he
was born on March 30, 1853.) 

“The Groninger Museum is shocked
by the news,” the museum said in a statement. A spokesperson
declined to comment further, citing the police
investigation.

Police have launched a criminal
investigation and are reviewing security footage and questioning
local residents. They have also launched a broader appeal for
information and are requesting any security footage captured by
other cameras in the neighborhood. Laren is one of the most
affluent towns in the Netherlands.

It is unclear whether anything
else was stolen from the Singer Laren’s 3,000-piece collection. The
museum was established in 1954 by Anna Singer, the widow of the
American painter William Singer, to showcase their collection. It
includes works by Dutch artists Jan Toorop, Chris Beekman, and
Herman Kruyder, among others. Most Dutch museums shuttered on March
14 in an effort to preserve public health; the Singer Laren museum
is closed until June 1. 

The post Opportunistic Thieves Just Stole a Prized Van Gogh
Landscape From a Locked-Down Dutch Museum Under Cover of Night
appeared first on artnet News.