On Monda y, May 11, 2009, thieves broke into the City Museum of IJsselstein in Holland and stole four 17th- and 19th-century landscape paintings. The artworks stolen were by 17th century Dutch painters Pieter de Neyn and Jan van Goyen, and paintings by 19th-century Dutch artists Willem Roelofs and Adrianus van Everdingen. In their haste to exit the museum after the alarm went off, thieves dropped and damaged two paintings by Salomon van Ruysdael and Salomon Rombouts. The paintings were on mostly of the town of IJsselstein (a suburb of Utrecht) and were on loan from the Dutch government. Officials are wary of putting a value on the paintings in case thieves want to use that information to offer the paintings back for a ransom.
This theft happened just 10 days after another heist at the Scheringa Museum for Realism in Spanbroek, another small town in Holland. At the Scheringa Museum thieves took two paintings, one by Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali and another by Polish art deco artist Tamara de Lempicka.
Tiny Country Rich in Art
The Netherlands is a country that has a rich heritage of art and painting and has over 1,000 museums that are visited by over 30 million people very year. Even tiny museums like those in IJsselstein and Spanbroek have access to a large array of paintings by Dutch and Flemish masters all in the collection of the Dutch government. But many of these smaller museums in Holland also lack security that is in synch with the quality and value of the artwork. In layman’s terms: Holland seems to have become an easy mark for art thieves.
Masterpieces in Every Museum
To give you an example of how rich the artwork is in Holland: Twenty years or so ago, I traveled to Haarlem, Holland and visited The Teyler’s Museum. I have traveled the world and seen many museums and to this dayThe Teyler’s Museum remains one of my absolute favorite spots in the world. Perhaps the best surprise was a series of small Michelangelo drawings that were kept behind cute little curtains that the viewer parted to see the drawings and then close when finished. In hindsight, it would have been quite easy to distract the ancient guard and to have run off with the Michelangelo drawings.
How Do You Sell Stolen Art?
Of course, the hard part for any art thief is not the stealing of the art, it’s what to do with the art once it is stolen. There is an underground marketplace for stolen artwork but finding the hidden entrance to this world must be half the battle. In recent years Interpol has formed a stolen art network, and museums have maintained a stolen art newsletter for decades. In this way art institutions and law enforcement agencies work to communicate to art auction houses such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s so that stolen artworks are intercepted before they are fenced.
Hopefully in the face of so many art thefts in Holland the government will make greater efforts to subsidize better security for these tiny, but priceless museums in the Netherlands.
