March 30, 2020
A Van Gogh Stolen in the Dead of a Lockdown Night
In March 2020, thieves smashed into a shuttered Dutch museum and stole a Van Gogh — on the artist's birthday, during the Covid lockdown.
In the small hours of 30 March 2020 — Van Gogh's birthday — a thief smashed through the glass doors of the Singer Laren museum near Amsterdam, closed for the pandemic, and made off with 'The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring'.
The early, sombre work had been on loan from the Groninger Museum. Its theft, while the world was locked indoors, felt like a particularly brazen pandemic-era crime.
The painting would remain missing for more than three years, recovered only in 2023 — a saga that gripped the Netherlands and beyond.
Image: “Van Gogh - The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen” — Vincent van Gogh, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.