The Singer Laren Van Gogh
The Netherlands, 30 March 2020. The third week of the first European COVID lockdown. The streets of the small wooded village of Laren, thirty kilometres east of Amsterdam, are emptier at three in the morning than they have been at any point in fifty years.
A single man approaches the locked front door of the Singer Laren Museum with a sledgehammer. The doors give. He walks through the entrance hall, turns left at a specific corridor, walks past three other paintings without pausing, and arrives at the wall where Van Gogh's "Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring" — on long-term loan from the Groninger Museum — is hanging. He lifts it from its hooks. He turns around. He walks back out. Total time inside the museum: three minutes and twenty seconds.
The date is Vincent van Gogh's birthday.
For three years the painting is missing. In April 2023 it is delivered, anonymously, in a small package, to the Amsterdam art detective Arthur Brand — who has spent a long career recovering high-profile stolen artworks through informal negotiation. The painting is intact. It is returned to the Groninger Museum within hours. The convicted defendant, Nils M., had been in custody on a separate Frans Hals theft since 2021 and was tied to the Singer Laren by DNA from the door frames. Whoever returned the painting has never been publicly identified.
Maren and Ellis on a Van Gogh stolen on Van Gogh's birthday from a country that, that night, was as quiet as it has ever been.
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