The Painting by the Famous Artist Was Stolen from the Dutch Museum on the Birthday of the Artist.
Due to COVID-19, we have lost our ordinary life and the painting by the famous Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh. The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring (1884) was taken overnight from a small museum, Singer Laren Museum in the Netherlands. Since the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic, March 13, the Museum had been temporarily shut down to help preventing the spread of virus. According to the police statement, the alarm went off around 3:15 a.m. on early Monday morning. When the time officers arrived, all that they found was the shattered glass front door and an empty showcasing in which the painting was displayed. The thief or thieves had already disappeared.
“I feel enormous anger and sadness. Because especially in these dark days that we are in, I feel so strongly that art is here to comfort us, to inspire us and to heal us,” said the museum’s curator, Jan Rudolph de Lorm, over the theft.
The painting was created within 1883 to 1885 while Van Gogh stayed in the town Nuenen where his parents lived. It shows the ruins of the local church in the town. The painting never belonged to the Singer Laren Museum where the painting was stolen; it was on loan from another museum in the Netherlands, Groninger Museum, for the exhibition “Mirror of the Soul”.
It is not the first time for the Singer Laren Museum targeted to a heist. In 2007, seven statues were stolen from the museum’s garden including the well-known bronze cast The Thinker by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. The sculpture was found and damaged that it missed one leg.
People are wondering whether Van Gogh’s 167th birthday is related to the heist. But Mr. de Lorm, the curator of the museum, insisted that the thieves probably didn’t know about this and it’s just a strange coincidence.
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