A 58-year-old man has been arrested in the Netherlands for allegedly swiping two paintings of Dutch masters Vincent van Gogh and Frans Hals of mice locked up by the coronavirus pandemic, officials said.
Police spokesperson Maren Wonder announced on video on Tuesday that the man had been arrested in Baarn, a municipality about 40 km southeast of Amsterdam, according to Reuters.
No details were released about the unnamed suspect.
The paintings – Van Gogh’s “Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring” and “Two Laughing Boys” by Hals – were not recovered and appealed to the public for help in locating them, Wonder said.
The Van Gogh is valued at $ 6.6 million and the painting Hals, which dates from 1626, was valued at $ 18 million by one expert, reports the news agency.
“For months, intensive investigations into the robbery of both paintings have been conducted under the direction of the public prosecution,” reads the Dutch police statement.
This image provided by the Groninger Museum on Monday 30 March 2020 shows the painting of the Dutch master Vincent van Gogh entitled “The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring” which was stolen from the Singer Museum in Laren, the Netherlands. (Groninger Museum via AP)
The Van Gogh was stolen from the Singer Laren Museum near Amsterdam on March 30 – on what would have been the 19th-century painter’s 167th birthday – while it was closed due to coronavirus measures, reports Agence France-Presse.
“Parsonage Garden” comes from relatively early in the master’s career, before embarking on his trademark post-impressionist paintings such as “Sunflowers”.
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According to the AFP, ‘Two Laughing Boys’ were stolen during a burglary in August in the Hofje van Mevrouw van Aerden museum in Leerdam.
The painting – featuring two laughing boys with a mug of beer – was previously stolen from the same museum in 2011 and 1988. It was recovered after six months and three years, respectively.
Dutch art detective Arthur Brand, nicknamed the “Indiana Jones of the Art World” because he found a number of lost paintings, praised police for their masterpiece collar.
This photo, taken on 3 November 2011, shows the district head of Alblasserwaard, Bart Willemsen, showing the restored painting “Two Laughing Boys” by Frans Hals that was stolen from the Leerdam Museum in May 2011. (Photo by ILVY NJIOKIKTJIEN / ANP / AFP via Getty Images)
“Another great success for the Dutch police,” Brand said in a tweet. “The plot thickens …”
Van Gogh’s paintings were a regular target for criminals.
Two of his works were exhibited again in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam two years ago after being stolen in 2002.
The paintings – the “View of the Sea at Scheveningen” from 1882 and the “Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church at Nuenen” from 1884/5 were found in 2016 by Italian investigators when they raided a house near Naples belonging to ‘ a notorious Mafia drug baron, AFP reported.
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Three of Goghs’s stolen from the North Brabant Museum in 1990 later reappeared after a Dutch criminal agreed with prosecutors.
Hals – a contemporary of Rembrandt and Vermeer during the Dutch Golden Age – is best known for works including ‘The Laughing Cavalier’, which hangs in the Wallace collection in London, and ‘The Gypsy Girl’ in the Louvre in Paris.
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