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Image source: Arthur Brand
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Arthur Brand said he and police agreed not to reveal the man who returned the painting for his own safety
A Van Gogh painting stolen from a Dutch museum in March 2020 is back in safe hands after a three-and-a-half-year search to recover it.
Dutch art detective Arthur Brand said he was given the 139-year-old painting in a pillow and an Ikea bag by a man who came to his front door.
“I did this in full coordination with the Dutch police and we knew that this guy was not involved in the theft,” he said.
In 2021, a career criminal was sentenced to eight years in prison for the incident.
But by then the painting, which cost several million euros, had already changed hands.
The parish garden in Nuenen in Spring was originally stolen from the Dutch town of Laren, southeast of Amsterdam. The thief used a sledgehammer to smash two glass doors at the Singer Museum at the start of the coronavirus lockdown.
It was on loan from a museum in the northeastern city of Groningen, which hailed the work’s restoration as “wonderful news.”
The French-born thief, 59-year-old Nils M, who lived not far from Laren, was convicted a few months later of stealing the work and a painting by Frans Hals from a museum in Leerdam, near Utrecht. His DNA was found at both crime scenes.
According to communications intercepted by police, the 1884 Van Gogh painting, also known as “Spring Garden,” had been purchased by a criminal gang that intended to use it in exchange for shorter prison sentences.
Mr Brand, who worked with Dutch police to find the work, told the BBC that they knew it would be passed from one group to another in the criminal underworld because no one wanted to touch it.
Eventually he was approached by a man in Amsterdam who offered to return it in exchange for complete confidentiality, partly because it was a headache for him to continue to keep the painting.
“I was at a birthday party and he was waiting under a tree and explained to me why he wanted to do this,” Mr Brand told the BBC.
The painting was then delivered to him at his home on Monday afternoon, while the director of the Groningen Museum waited on the street corner in a bar to authenticate the work.
It was protected by a pillow that was covered in blood, he added, because the man cut his finger while getting it out.
A spokesman for the Dutch police’s art crime unit has confirmed that the recovered painting is authentic, and Andreas Blühm, the head of the Groningen Museum, has expressed his joy at its safe return.
“Over the last few years, I started asking myself: Will I still be there to see it? [return]?… I saw immediately that it was real. “It is slightly damaged but can be repaired,” he told the De Telegraaf website.
The museum said Spring Garden is currently in the hands of the Van Gogh Museum and it could be weeks or months before it goes back on display.