In 1974, an employee of the National Museum of Gdańsk, Poland, accidentally dropped a 17 cm round table from Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564-1636), Woman wearing embers (1626), representing the woman of a peasant holding pliers with smoking embers in one hand and a cauldron in the other. The employee discovers that the table had been replaced by a photograph. A drawing of Crucifixion From Antoine Van Dyck (1599-1641), not far from the work of Pieter Brueghel the young in the museum, had also been replaced by a reproduction.
A few days after this discovery, a Polish customs officer who had reported the illegal export of works via the Baltic port of Gdynia would have been killed, immolated by fire. The surveys on the death of the customs officer and on the disappearance of the table were closed shortly after.
Fifty years later, a small painting loaned by a private collector for an exhibition at the Musée de Gouda (Netherlands) awakens the curiosity of journalists from Dutch magazine Vindwhich find in their research a newspaper article on the burglary of Gdańsk in 1974, accompanied by a black and white photograph of the table. As they seem to recognize the work of Pieter Brueghel the young, they call on Arthur Brand, Dutch investigator specializing in artistic crime, nicknamed “Indiana Jones of the art world”.
Arthur Brand continues the investigation. While the painting is kept in a museum in Venlo, in the south of the Netherlands, the investigator consults Interpol (the international criminal police organization) and concludes that the small table found is the real: “We have checked and rebuilt it, including information on the back of the table. It was concordant “confirmed Richard Bronswijk from Dutch police to AFP.
“It’s quite spectacular” said Arthur Brand, “A great moment which means a lot for Poland (…) The flight was committed by an expert. First of all, few people dared to fly something in a museum under a communist dictatorship. Second, few people had the necessary contacts to export it ”.
The identity of thieves remains a mystery, however. Arthur Brand underlines that, when the investigation by Polish police in 2008 were reopening, all the archives relating to the theft had been destroyed to the point that the members of the secret services were certain that the culprit was one of their own.
The investigation concerning Brueghel’s table is still underway: the police now seek to understand how the table was able to end up in a private collection. In parallel, the police informed the Polish authorities that all the measures would be taken to restore the work to their original collection. The police will soon provide “information on the transfer of the table”, the value of which is unknown. “It’s great that the work has resurfaced after all these decades” said Ingmar Reesing, curator of the arts of the Gouda museum, to AFP.
