AMSTERDAM – A 17th-century painting by the Golden Age master Frans Hals was stolen from the wall of a museum in the Netherlands early on Wednesday morning.
It was not the first time “Two Laughing Boys” was taken from the museum in Leerdam, near Utrecht, Dutch police said on Thursday. The same painting was previously exhibited in 2011 and 1988.
Thieves broke into the museum, Het Hofje van Aerden, apparently by forcing the back door open, setting off alarms at 3:30 a.m. local time, police said, and took “Two Laughing Boys,” a 1626 painting.
“We have no idea where the painting is at the moment,” said Hanneke Sanders, a spokeswoman for the central Dutch police.
Officials at the private museum declined to comment. It is closed due to the pandemic.
In 2011 – as in 1988 – “Two Laughing Boys” was set together with a painting by Jacob van Ruisdael, a 17th-century Dutch master.
The theft Wednesday was similar to the previous one, and did not appear to be an elaborate heist, said Arthur Brand, a Dutch detective of private art crimes. The museum is small, he said, and the thieves are fast. “The alarm goes off, but those guys are gone in three minutes.”
In 2011, the painting was found roughly six months later, and police are expected to arrest four people, aged 48 to 62, from the Amsterdam area.
After the theft in 1988, it took three years to get the painting back, Ms. Sanders said. In both cases, the perpetrators were convicted, she added. “We are at a very early stage in the investigation,” she said. “We ask people if they have a video or have seen anything; any help is welcome to get it resolved. ”
The painting is worth “several millions”, said Mr. Brand. “It’s an important job.”
The mayor of the municipality that includes Leerdam, Sjors Fröhlich, called the theft “sad art news” on Twitter. Mr. Fröhlich said an extensive investigation was underway, and he urged people to call the police if they had seen anything, adding that he hoped the painting would return to the museum soon, “where it belongs to the home. “
Mr Brand speculated that this painting was chosen precisely because it had been stolen earlier, and thieves assumed it “should be important.”
In March, a 1884 Vincent van Gogh painting was stolen from another small museum in the Netherlands. “The Pastoral Garden at Nuenen in the Spring” was taken from the Singer Laren Museum, about 20 kilometers southeast of Amsterdam, on what would be van Gogh’s 167th birthday. At the time of the theft, the Singer Laren had just closed due to the pandemic.
Mr Brand said he saw a pattern in recent art thefts in the Netherlands. It is not uncommon for thieves to sell masterpieces to criminals such as drug lords, who in turn can use a work of art as leverage to diminish a sentence, he said.
In 2002, for example, two paintings were stolen from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. In 2016, Italian police found the two of Goghs in a house near Naples owned by a member of an Italian drug trafficking gang. A year later, the paintings were returned to the museum in Amsterdam.
Mr Brand said he would pursue Hals because he stole van Gogh’s in March.
“They have me after them now,” he said. “I will search until I find it.”
