The Singer Laren Van Gogh

The Netherlands, the night of the twenty-ninth and thirtieth of March 2020. The country was three weeks into its first national lockdown. Schools were closed. Restaurants were closed. Museums were closed. The Singer Laren Museum, in the small wooded village of Laren about thirty kilometres east of Amsterdam, had shut its doors to the public on the twelfth of March in line with national health guidance. The streets of Laren, on the night in question, were emptier at three in the morning than they had been at any point in the previous fifty years.

At approximately three fifteen AM on Monday the thirtieth of March, a single man approached the museum's main entrance. He was wearing — by the security camera footage — a black hooded jacket and a face mask, which in March 2020 was not in itself unusual. He carried a sledgehammer. He swung. The doors gave.

Three minutes inside

The Singer Laren is a small private museum. It houses a substantial collection of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Dutch art, including Mondrian, Toorop, and several lesser-known but well-regarded Dutch painters. It has, on temporary loan from the Groninger Museum, a single small painting by Vincent van Gogh: Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring. Painted in 1884. Oil on paper, mounted on panel. Approximately twenty-five by fifty-seven centimetres.

It is a small painting, from an early period in Van Gogh's career, before his time in Paris and Arles. The garden is the garden of his parents' parsonage in the village of Nuenen, in the southern Netherlands, where he lived briefly in his twenties. The painting is, by the standards of his later, more famous work, restrained. Dark earth. Bare branches. The perspective drawing into the parsonage at the centre. It is not, in the public imagination, an obvious target. It is not the Sunflowers. It is not the Starry Night. But it was, on the night in question, the most accessible Van Gogh in the Netherlands.

The security camera footage shows him entering through the smashed front doors, walking directly through the entrance hall, turning left at a specific corridor, walking past three other paintings without pausing, and arriving at the wall where the Van Gogh hung. He lifted the painting from its hooks. He turned around. He walked back out. Total time inside the museum, by the footage's timestamp: approximately three minutes and twenty seconds.

The date

The thirtieth of March 2020. Vincent van Gogh's birthday. He would have been one hundred and sixty-seven years old. The Dutch and European art press, in the days after the theft, repeatedly noted the date. There has been speculation that the date was deliberate — that the suspect had, in some sense, marked the painting's significance by stealing it on the painter's birthday. There has also been speculation that the date was incidental — that the suspect had simply chosen a night during the lockdown when the streets were empty and the museum was closed.

Three years missing

For three years, the painting was missing. The Dutch police investigated. Interpol was involved. The standard channels of art-theft recovery were activated. The painting did not appear at any auction house, any gallery, or any private collection. It did not appear on the international stolen-art database in any subsequent transaction record. It was, for thirty-six months, simply gone.

In April 2023, an Amsterdam art detective named Arthur Brand — who has, over a long career, recovered a substantial number of high-profile stolen artworks through informal negotiation with criminal networks — received a delivery at his home. The delivery was a small package, wrapped in protective paper, with a note. The note was in Dutch. It was unsigned. The package contained, when Brand opened it, the painting.

It was returned to Arthur Brand. Anonymously. With no demand. With no statement. With minor surface damage, including a scuffed corner and a slight tear at the top edge, but with the painting itself intact. Brand contacted the Dutch police and the Groninger Museum within the hour. The painting was authenticated. It was, indisputably, Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring. It was returned to the Groninger Museum on long-term display.

The conviction

One man was, by April 2023, in custody on the original theft charge. A Dutch national named Nils M. — his full surname suppressed in initial Dutch press in line with Dutch privacy convention — had been arrested in 2021 in connection with a separate art theft, the theft of a Frans Hals from a Dutch museum in 2020. Forensic evidence, including DNA matches recovered from the Singer Laren door frames in the original 2020 investigation, linked him to the Van Gogh theft as well. He was tried at the Lelystad District Court in 2021 for the Hals and the Van Gogh thefts. He was convicted on both counts. He received a sentence of approximately eight years.

But the painting was returned anonymously, two years after the conviction, from a person — or persons — who were not the convicted defendant. Who that person is, what their connection to the painting was, and what motivated the return, has not been publicly established. Brand has, in interviews, indicated that he received the painting from someone who had decided that holding the painting was no longer worth the risk. He has, characteristically, not named the source.

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Listen to the full story on The Vault, Episode 17. Stream the episode here.