Video shows how thief used sledgehammer to steal van Gogh painting from museum

Credit: DaytonDailyNews

Video footage showed how a thief used a sledgehammer to steal a prized Vincent van Gogh painting from a Dutch museum last month.

The Singer Laren museum, located east of Amsterdam, was closed due to the coronavirus pandemic when a thief entered the building on March 30, using a sledgehammer to break through reinforced glass doors, The Associated Press reported. The thief stole van Gogh's oil painting, "The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring 1884," and remains at large.

The video footage, shown Tuesday night on the Dutch television show "Opsporing Verzocht," shows the man leaving the museum with the van Gogh painting under his right arm and the sledgehammer under his left arm.

Police hope they will receive more leads after publicizing the video, the AP reported.

“It looks like they very deliberately targeted this one Van Gogh painting,” police spokeswoman Maren Wonder, said on “Opsporing Verzocht."

The painting, which measures 10 inches by 22 inches, was on loan to Singer Laren from the Groninger Museum from the Dutch city of Groningen.

Evert van Os, the managing director at Singer Laren, said in a statement that the video footage did not show the entire burglary, and defended the building’s security measures.

“The burglar broke through a number of doors and several layers of security that had been approved by security experts,” Van Os said in the statement. “The footage released does not therefore allow any conclusions to be drawn as to the quality of security at Singer Laren.

“At the moment, however, the only thing that matters is that the footage should yield useful tips and that the painting should be returned undamaged to the Groninger Museum as soon as possible.”

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