On New Year’s Eve I received a video message from Viv, one of my walking friends. Although it was in the form of a song, I couldn’t understand the words, because they were in Hindi. However, I could sense what he meant to convey and the obvious sincerity in his voice made this a soft, kind and moving message.
Viv was born in Mumbai, in India, and he often sings Hindi songs for his friends when they are having a drink with him at home in the evening. Occasionally, I even hear him singing softly to himself when we are walking along the waterfront. Viv loves music and so do I, which most of you would know. (refer post 2 – “There is music in the Air”).
While quite a few of the people I know are music lovers, others are painters. In fact, many of my friends are artistic. So, today I thought I would write something that may possibly be of interest to those of you who love art.
It’s an unusual story about a Vincent van Gogh painting, which had been found and safely returned, three years after it had been stolen from a museum in The Netherlands. I was interested in this story because Vincent van Gogh had lived and worked in Nuenen, which was the village where one of my sisters, Marjan, had lived. Sue and I visited Marjan and her husband, Eric, several times in our earlier years and in 2004 they introduced us to the Van Gogh Village Museum. (Sadly, my beautiful younger sister passed away in 2010).
The story which follows is about a painting, “Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring”, which had been stolen, in 2020, in the middle of the Covid epidemic. The painting was recovered by a Mr Arthur Brand, an art detective, who had negotiated its return with the people who had access to it. The painting was reported to be worth between $5 and 10 million Australian dollars. Some of Van Gogh’s later paintings are thought to be worth at least 10 times that amount but this painting was one of his earlier ones.
According to Mr Brand the theft of a masterpiece amounts only to trouble, both for the thief and the collector. It’s called art “theft” but, according to him, it’s better described as art “kidnapping”. No one wants to hold on to it. Collectors may want to show it off, but they can’t do so without the risk of being caught and ending up in prison. Masterpieces are difficult to hide.
In the case of the Van Gogh painting the thief was caught and convicted and so was the person who organised the theft, but the painting itself had vanished and had probably been circulated among criminals “like a hot potato”. Arthur Brand, miraculously, managed to find the person who had access to it and had convinced him to hand it over.
Mr Brand is well known as a very successful art detective. His nickname is “The Indiana Jones of the art world”. He knows both the art world and the criminal world, and he has recovered several other famous paintings. I’ve read that his grandfather went to school with Han van Meegeren, one of the world’s best known art forgers of the 20th century.
The painting which was recovered by our “Indiana Jones” was one of Van Gogh’s earlier works, painted during his so-called “Dutch Period”, the years he spent in Holland before he moved to France, where he developed other painting styles. The most famous painting from his Dutch years is “The Potato Eaters”, his first masterpiece. It was painted while he lived in Nuenen.
In France he produced a much larger number of paintings, including many of his most famous masterpieces. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam houses hundreds of his paintings. There is also a Van Gogh Documentation Centre in Zundert, but I particularly liked the small village museum in Nuenen. It made me want to learn more about Van Gogh.
Vincent van Gogh’s father was a minister in the Reformed Church and in his early years Vincent himself was also interested in becoming a clergyman. He even worked as an “evangelist” in a mining community in Belgium for a while. He certainly had an interesting and varied life and travelled widely.
Most of my limited knowledge of Vincent van Gogh was obtained from an excellent big book published by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, titled ‘Masterpieces in the Van Gogh Museum”. The museum’s website is: vangoghmuseum.com.
I wonder what Vincent van Gogh would have made of this part of the world if he had had the opportunity of visiting it and walking with us. He never travelled this far, unlike another famous painter, his creative friend Paul Gauguin, who painted Vincent’s portrait and lived in Tahiti. I identify with Gauguin because he too spent time, in his youth, working on ships, sailing around the world.
Walking along the Sandgate waterfront enables us to meet many fascinating people, including musicians, painters, and other art lovers. We do not all have identical interests, but we do have one thing in common, we love walking.
O.P.
P.S. Next Sunday’s story is about Moreton Island and about Pig, a dugong pup, a shipwreck and the Ngugi people.