Van Gogh paintings snatched then found
van Gogh painting snatched from a Dutch museum during the Covid-19 lockdown, AFP looks back at some other heists involving works by the Dutch master:
On August 21, 2010, Van Gogh's "Poppy Flowers", worth $55 million at the time, was cut out of its frame in broad daylight at the Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum outside Cairo.
An investigation revealed that the museum's alarm system did not work and that 30 out of 47 surveillance cameras were out of order.
It was the second time the small painting from 1887, which is still missing, had been stolen — the first was in 1997, when it was taken from the same museum and was found only 10 years later, in Kuwait.
Van Gogh's «Blossoming Chestnut Branches» (1890), among four Impressionist masterpieces valued at more than 112 million euros, was stolen from a Zurich museum on February 10, 2008, in one of Europe's biggest-ever art heists.
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Three masked men entered the Emil Buehrle Collection at the Kunsthaus Zurich, held up staff at gunpoint, loaded the paintings by Cezanne, Degas, Monet and Van Gogh into a car and sped off.
The Van Gogh and the Monet were later found in an abandoned vehicle in the car park of a nearby psychiatric hospital.
On April 27, 2003, a Van Gogh watercolour, «The Ramparts of Paris» (1887), was stolen from the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, northern England, along with two other paintings, one by Picasso, the other by Gauguin.
The police quickly received a tip-off leading to a public toilet just metres away, where they found the paintings rolled up inside a cardboard tube. The Van Gogh suffered a tear in the corner and the two others showed water damage.
