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Alamy
Security was increased the last time Frans Hals’ painting Two Laughing Boys with a Mug of Beer was stolen from a small museum in the Dutch city of Leerdam.
But it was not enough to stop art thieves from forcing the back door open and closing it for a third time.
One of the Old Masters of the Dutch Golden Age, Frans Hals painted the work in 1626.
Art detective Arthur Brand said he believed it was “stealing to order”.
“It’s very difficult to secure small museums because it costs too much money. If they want your stuff, they’ll get into it,” he told the BBC.
Two Laughing Boys was first staged in 1988 alongside a work by Jacob van Ruisdael. Both paintings were recovered three years later.
The same paintings were taken over again in 2011 from the museum Hofje van Mevrouw van Aerden and found six months later.
Frans Hals specialist Anna Tummers said at the time that the painting was “a wonderful example of his loose painting style … it was very playful, bold and loose”.
How it was stolen
Police said thieves broke into the museum in Leerdam, south of Utrecht, in the early hours of Wednesday. The alarm went off at 3:30 a.m., but when they arrived at the museum, the thieves were gone. They are now searching CCTV footage and working with art theft experts and forensic teams.
Since the theft in 2011, the most valuable pieces of the museum have been stored in an area that is not open to the public that can only be visited with a member of staff, Dutch media report. No one in the museum was ready to comment on the latest theft.
But Arthur Brand, an art detective who specializes in retrieving sets of works, said a theft of this kind was expected. Criminals had bought sets of art and exchanged them for shorter prison terms, he said.
Examples are drug dealer Kees Houtman who in the early 1990s tried to trade Van Goghs for a reduced sentence. A Naples mafia boss would later trade works stolen by art thief Octave Durham from the Amsterdam Van Gogh Museum in 2002 for his own shorter sentence.
In March, a Van Gogh work, Spring Garden, was stolen from a museum in Laren, north of Utrecht, and it was thought that there would be more thefts from museums without top security.
The art detective also linked the latest theft to a recent breakthrough by Dutch and French police, who cracked a top-secret communication system used by criminals. This has enabled the police to make progress on a number of criminal cases.
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The problem for the criminals, he said, was that the Dutch government would no longer buy sets of art.
How gallery was set up in London
Smaller Dutch museums are not only targeted by art thieves.
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Dulwich Picture Gallery
Security is expensive and cumbersome for smaller museums such as the Dulwich Picture Gallery
Last November, an attempt to stop two Rembrandts was stopped at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in south London.
A burglar broke into the gallery, but police intervened before the paintings could be taken away.
Although Dutch authorities have a good record in retrieving sets of art, works can often disappear for years. It took 23 years before a painting by Gustav Klimt was recovered after it was seized from a modern art gallery in Piacenza, northern Italy.
It was eventually found in a hole in the gallery wall by a worker who stumbled on a metal panel while wiping ivy from the wall.
