It's hard but not to feel a little torn when you hear about major art thievery stories. Admit it, there’s romance, even lust in such audacious desire for a piece of art. There is also, well, the idea that art is being stolen and taken from public view. Recently, an art thief entered the Singer Laren Museum in the Netherlands and stole an incredible work of Vincent van Gogh, The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring (1884). Amazingly, this was a fairly low tech of a robbery: literally, this dude (yes, dude) took a sledgehammer to a few doors, grabbed and ran!! No ducking under laser security, no James Bond maneuvers. Just a sledgehammer.
As Artnet reports, "The painting, which was on loan from another Dutch institution, the Groninger Museum, has not been located. The oil-on-paper work measures roughly 10 by 22 inches, and was painted around the same time as Van Gogh’s famous The Potato Eaters, when the artist was back home with his family in a rural part of the Netherlands. The composition is of a person standing in a garden before trees and a church tower."
