An art heist at a Brussels museum appears to have partly gone awry, as thieves took a Van Gogh drawing believed to be a fake.
Peasant Woman Pealing Potatoes has a ‘spurious’ Vincent van Gogh signature
Ten paintings and two drawings were nimbly stolen in the course of two minutes, according to representatives at the Van Buuren Museum, on the outskirts of Brussels.
“All alarms went off, but they [the thieves] were particularly fast, everything was done in two minutes,” said curator Isabelle Anspach.
Several of the works were said to have been of great value, including ‘The Thinker’ by Dutch painter Kees van Dongen, said to have a replacement value of 1.2 million Euros.
The thieves are unlikely to have known, however, when they chose the drawing near the stairs, Peasant Woman Pealing Potatoes, that although labelled Van Gogh it is believed to be a fake.
It was one of the Van Gogh drawings singled out by Dutch scholar Liesbeth Heenk, who wrote of it, “The regular pencil marks betray the typical care of a copyist… The lips of the woman have been coloured red, which would have been very unusual for Van Gogh. The brownish woven paper has not been used for other Van Gogh drawings and the signature seems spurious.”
Due to the personal nature of the collection the losses are irreplaceable to the Van Buuren Museum. An Art Deco-style villa, it was filled with art in the Twenties and Thirties by Dutch banker-patron David van Buuren and his wife, Alice.
Other works stolen include a painting by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, and James Ensor’s Shrimps and Shells, 1894. Our online store www.paintingsframe.com provide 100% hand-painting oil paintings with top quality.
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