A “spectacular” stolen Flemish masterpiece has been rediscovered hanging on the walls of a provincial Dutch museum thanks to the efforts of an art detective and an antiques magazine.
The 17cm-wide painting by Pieter Brueghel the Younger of a farmer’s wife with hot coals in one hand and a bucket of water in the other is thought to have been stolen from a Polish museum by secret service agents in 1974.
Arthur Brand, an art detective who confirmed that the painting was now in the Netherlands, said: “Normally, when something is lost for half a century, not in that many cases you recover it. The longer it takes, the more likely you never see it again … It was all pure luck that everything fell into place.”
The 17th-century painting had been hanging in the National Museum in Gdańsk, Poland, when on 24 April 1974, a cleaner knocked it from the wall, the frame broke, and she discovered the painting had been replaced with a photograph. A sketch by the Flemish artist Anthony van Dyck called The Crucifixion had also been switched with a copy.
The two works went on Poland’s “most wanted” list until, last year, a Dutch art and antiques magazine called Vind (Find) wrote about a new show at the Gouda Museum, where the Brueghel was on loan from a private collector. Vind traced a black-and-white photograph of the painting in Poland and contacted Brand to inquire whether it could be the same one.
After locating five similar paintings by Brueghel, contacting Dutch and Polish police and the museum, Brand made a match – and Poland has now officially requested the artworks’ return.
“It is quite spectacular,” Brand said. “And the story behind it is quite spectacular too. It’s a great moment because of how much it means for Poland – it’s on their list of most-wanted paintings and they have waited 50 years probably thinking it would never come back.”
The theft had been an expert job, said Brand. “First of all, not many people dared to steal something from a museum in a communist dictatorship. Second, not many people had the contacts to bring it abroad.
“When the Polish police reopened the case in 2008, all the archives concerning this theft were destroyed and some former members of the secret service later declared that they were sure that somebody in their organisation was involved.”
