A 58-year-old man was arrested in the Netherlands for allegedly stealing two paintings by Dutch masters Vincent van Gogh and Frans Hals from museums closed by the coronavirus pandemic, officials said.
Police spokeswoman Maren Wonder announced on video on Tuesday that the man was arrested in Baarn, a municipality some 40 kilometers southeast of Amsterdam, according to Reuters.
No details were released about the unidentified suspect.
The paintings – Van Gogh’s “Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring” and Hals’s “Two Laughing Boys” – have not been recovered and asked the public for help in locating them, Wonder said.
Van Gogh is valued at up to $ 6.6 million and Hals’s painting, which dates from 1626, was valued at $ 18 million by an expert, the news agency reported.
“For months, intensive investigations into the theft of both paintings were conducted under the leadership of the prosecutor,” said the statement from the Dutch police.
This image provided by the Groninger Museum on Monday, March 30, 2020, shows the painting by Dutch master Vincent van Gogh entitled “The Parsonage Garden in Nuenen in Spring”, which was stolen from the Singer Museum in Laren, The Netherlands. (Groninger Museum via AP)
The Van Gogh was stolen on March 30 – what would have been the 19th century painter’s 167th birthday – from the Singer Laren Museum, near Amsterdam, while it was closed due to coronavirus measures, Agence France-Presse reported.
“Parsonage Garden” comes relatively early in the master’s career, before he embarked on his post-impressionist paintings, such as “Girassóis”, his trademark.
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“Two Laughing Boys” was stolen during an assault in August at the Hofje van Mevrouw van Aerden museum in Leerdam, according to AFP.
The painting – which shows two boys laughing 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, who was nicknamed “Indiana Jones of the Art World” for finding a series of lost paintings, praised the police for their masterpiece collar.
This photograph taken on November 3, 2011, shows the head of the Alblasserwaard district, Bart Willemsen, showing the recovered painting “Two laughing boys” by Frans Hals, which was stolen from the Leerdam Museum in May 2011. (Photo: ILVY NJIOKIKTJIEN / ANP / AFP via Getty Images)
“Another big hit for the Dutch police,” said Brand in a tweet. “The plot gets complicated …”
Van Gogh’s paintings have been a frequent target of criminals.
Two of his works returned to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam two years ago, after they were stolen in 2002.
The paintings – the 1882 “View of the sea at Scheveningen” and the 1884/5 “Congregation leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen” – were recovered by Italian researchers in 2016 when they raided a house near Naples owned by an infamous drug lord Mafia, AFP reported.
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Three van Goghs that were stolen from the Noordbrabants Museum in 1990 resurfaced after a Dutch criminal reached an agreement with prosecutors.
Hals – a contemporary of Rembrandt and Vermeer during the Dutch Golden Age – is best known for such works as “The Laughing Cavalier”, which is in the Wallace Collection in London, and “The Gypsy Girl” at the Louvre in Paris.
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