An art heist at gunpoint occurred on February 10, 2008 at the private Zürich gallery run by the Foundation E.G. Bührle in Switzerland. Emil Bührle was a German-born industrialist who sold arms to the Nazis during World War II.  The private museum was established by the Bührle family foundation in order to make the Emil Georg Bührle's collection, of mostly European sculptures and paintings more accessible to the public. The art collection is housed in an elegant Zurich villa adjoining Bührle's former residence.

On the day of the heist, three thieves rushed the gallery shortly before its specified closing time.  Brandishing a handgun, the staff on duty were ordered to lay face-down on the floor, after which the thieves removed four late nineteenth century artworks from the wall.  

The artworks taken were:

Blossoming Chestnut Branches, 1890

by Vincent Van Gogh

Oil on canvas 72.0 x 91.0 cm

Completed in Auvers-sur-Oise

Poppies near Vétheuil, 1879

Signed lower right: Claude Monet
Oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm
Wildenstein 536

Count Lepic and His Daughters, 1871

by Edgar Degas
oil on canvas, 65 x 81 cm
Lemoisne 272

Boy in the Red Waistcoat, 1895

by Paul Cézanne 

oil on canvas: overall: 89.5 x 72.4 cm

On February 18, 2008, eight days after the theft, two of the stolen paintings, Poppies near Vétheuil and Blossoming Chestnut Branches, were found. The artworks were discovered undamaged in the rear seat of the unlocked getaway car  which had been abandoned in the parking area of a nearby Zurich psychiatric hospital a short distance away from the Bührle.

The painting Count Lepic and His Daughters by Edgar Degas, regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism, was recovered four years later in April 2012. Information about its initial recovery was withheld from the public to avoid compromising an ongoing investigation with Swiss and Serbian authorities who were still actively working to recover the final painting by Paul Cézanne.

Cezanne's £68.3 million The Boy in the Red Vest was the last painting to be recovered.  It was located on April 12, 2012 inside a hidden roof car panel inside an automobile belonging to a suspect arrested in Belgrade, Serbia. 

Sometime after 9 pm on April 26, 2003 three works of art estimated to be worth approximately £4 million, were stolen from the Whitworth Art Gallery at The University of Manchester in England. 

The thief or thieves are reported to have entered the Whitworth by applying force to the rear steel-covered doors. The artworks were then quickly removed from the Margaret Pilkington room without anyone noticing. 

The paintings taken were:

The Fortifications of Paris with Houses (The Ramparts of Paris), Summer 1887

by Vincent Van Gogh

Watercolor, gouache, chalk and pencil on paper, 40 x 54 cm

Poverty (Les Misérables), 1903 Barcelona

by Pablo Picasso 

Ink and blue watercolour, 37.5 x 26.7cm

and

Tahitian Landscape, 1891-93

by Paul Gauguin

Watercolour and pencil on paper, 16 x 27 cm

Thanks to an anonymous tipster, possibly the culprit, all three artworks were recovered, located by police on Monday, April 28, 2003.  They were found in a disused public lavatory in Manchester's Whitworth Park, less than a quarter mile away from the museum.  Unfortunately, the artworks had not been treated delicately.   They were retrieved from inside a soggy tube where they had been rolled up carelessly and stuffed indiscriminately inside.

As a result of their manhandling, the paintings had suffered from exposure to humidity.   The Van Gogh watercolour had also suffered a not insignificant tear.

Along with the artwork, Law enforcement discovered a handwritten note that lamented on the poor security at the the Whitworth. The note read "the intention was not to steal. only to highlight the woeful security."

Sometime between the evening of May 13 and the morning of May 15 in 1999 a early Vincent van Gogh painting titled The Willow, 1885 was stolen from the headquarters of F. van Lanschot Bankiers NV in Den Bosch in the Netherlands. s-Hertogenbosch is the official name of the city, but colloquially almost everybody refers to the city as Den Bosch, which translates in English to mean 'the Duke’s Forest'. F. van Lanschot Bankiers NV is the oldest bank in the Netherlands. 

In March 2006 the bank contacted authorities stating that a gentleman had approached them asking about a reward for information leading to the recovery of the stolen work of art.  The bank in turn contacted the authorities. 

Two suspects, the suspected thief, who was at one time a cleaner for the bank and the would-be seller/award seeker were then approached by undercover officers who posed as insurance art loss adjusters interested in buying back the painting. 

Both individuals were arrested and the painting was recovered.  It is now back in the bank's collection.  

By Lynda Albertson

This spectacular theft occurred at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam during the predawn hours of Sunday, April 14, 1991.  It is considered to be the largest art heist in the Netherlands subsequent to World War II, as well as the fastest recovery time for stolen works of art from an important collection.

Twenty paintings by the Dutch master Vincent van Gogh, including one of his iconic Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers (1889) were stolen from the museum by thieves; one who concealed himself in the gallery the previous evening and another, who was let his accomplice into the museum during the theft.

At the time of the robbery, the value of the stolen art was estimated at USD $500 million. 

Listed below are all the artworks taken during the theft, some with photos.

At the time of the robbery, two night watchmen heard sounds coming from inside the museum at approximately 3 AM local time, indicating that there was in intruder in the building.  Upon investigating, they were confronted by a man brandishing a pistol and wearing a balaclava to disguise his face.  This individual then forced the guards to disable the museum's security devices and allowed his accomplice access into the museum.  

Both thieves then reportedly confined the guards before setting about removing the twenty works of art.  In less than an hour they had filled two expandable garment bags to the brim with the Dutch Post-Impressionist artist's works.  The criminals then used one of the guards cars as their getaway vehicle, scrunching all the artworks inside before hopping in with them to make a fast get-away.

At 4:48 am, one minute after the thieves departed, the guards called-in the robbery to Amsterdam authorities. A grey Volkswagen Passat, matching the description of the guard's stolen car was located unlocked and abandoned at the site of the Amstel train station at 5:23 A.M.  A search of the car, revealed that all the paintings were accounted for, all still stuffed into the garment bags the thieves had used when removing them from the museum.

Three paintings, including Wheatfield with Crows, were severely damaged. 

Three months later, on July 18, 1991, authorities announced that they had arrested four Dutchmen for their roles in the botched predawn April robbery. One of the four men charged turned out to be one of the two security guards working inside the museum at the time of the theft.   A second accomplice was a former employee of the museum's security firm.  The two remaining joint principles to the crime were the apparent masterminds, each of whom had made promises to the museum insider and former contractor that they would receive a substantial fee for facilitating the robbery. 

Subsequent to the arrests, police stated the thieves had abandoned the paintings in the guard's car and fled the scene when their second get-away vehicle failed to arrive, apparently due to a flat tire. 

All four perpetrators were sentenced to prison terms.

By: Lynda Albertson

On May 19, 1998 Rome's prestigious Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna was robbed just after the 10 pm closing time. Armed with guns, three thieves entered the museum just before closing time. Moving about the galleries barefoot and having donned gloves and balaclavas to hide their identities, the thieves then stormed the control room.

There they gagged two of the three female guards and forced a third to disable the museum's security system and hand over its accompanying CCTV footage. They then locked all three security staff in a bathroom before proceeding to the Impressionist hall.  

L'Arlésienne, 1889 (one of five versions)

by Vincent Van Gogh  (unsigned)

oil on canvas, 60x50 cm

Completed in  Saint-Rémy

Le Jardinier, October 1889

by Vincent Van Gogh (unsigned)

oil on canvas, 61 x 50 cm

Completed in  Saint-Rémy

and

Cabanon de Jourdan, 1906

by Paul Cézanne

oil on canvas 65 x 81 cm

The last artwork completed by the artist before his death in Aix-en-Provence

From the beginning of their investigation art crime detectives in Italy suspected that there had to be an insider working with the thieves; someone who had firsthand knowledge of who would be working in the museum that evening and possibly familiarity with the museums security apparatus. 

Law enforcement officers with the Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale and the Squadra Mobile di Roma began their investigation by conducting a prolonged examination of all 160 individuals who worked at the museum.  They needed to narrow down who might be inclined to collaborate with criminals or who might benefit from the proceeds to be made from stolen art. 

Tentative suspects were kept under surveillance and as the squad honed in on each of their culprits, phones were tapped.  Police bided their time for more than a month listening and analysing information as they gathered evidence on who and how many people were involved and most importantly, just where the paintings might have been stashed. 

While they waited, they learned that some of the suspects had met one another serving time in a Brussels prison, one of them for a violent robbery of a postal truck. This further helped to paint a clear picture that the group was not beyond the use of violence.  

Proceeding carefully officers were sure that the theft was not merely an opportunistic crime by an impulsive group but a crime carried out by a individuals who knew one another well and who weren't afraid of getting their hands dirty.

As days passed the thieves faced difficulties finding a buyer.  The criminals began to get irritable and at one point started fighting amongst themselves.  In one instance one of the suspects was so sloppy that he openly complained during a tapped phone conversation that he knew the police were on to them. 

As the band of criminals began to fray law enforcement knew they had to move quickly before they completely unravelled and did something desperate.  The investigators' intel also revealed that the paintings had been split up. Van Gogh's Le Jardinier and Cézanne's Cabanon de Jourdan had been brought back to Rome after the purported sale fell through, while L'Arlésienne was left behind in Turin possibly as collateral for the one criminal not originally from Rome.   

But where? 

After 48 days, investigators decided they had sufficient evidence to identify probable locations for the three paintings and the ability to make simultaneous arrests of all accomplices at the same time.  This was done to ensure that no one got away and that no one could shift the artworks to a new hiding spot or destroy them to avoid prosecution. 

On July 5, 1998 officers moved in and arrested 8 suspects, some with a small arsenal of firearms. The motley team was a hodgepodge of run-of-the-mill criminals including a husband and wife team, one of whom was the insider at the museum.  Others in the band seemed the type only Hollywood characters are made of. 

During a raid of one apartment in the periphery of Rome Van Gogh's Le Jardinier and Cézanne's Cabanon de Jourdan were recovered in good condition One painting had been crudely packaged in a cardboard box and hidden under a bed. The other had been wrapped in a blanket and stuffed in a closet.

L'Arlésienne was recovered in an apartment in Turin along with 6 weapons, including a machine gun. 

The criminals convicted and their sentences imposed

Oeneus Ximenes - considered the mastermind of the theft received a sentence of 8 years imprisonment

Roberto Petruzzi - received a sentence of 8 years imprisonment

Stefania Viglongo - the museum insider received a sentence of 8 years imprisonment

Maurizio Possetto - received a sentence of 7 years imprisonment 

Claudio Trevisan - received 6 years and 4months imprisonment 

Anna Rita Sinti (daughter of Alexander Sinti and the suprisingly young partner of Ximenes) - received 4.5 years imprisonment

Alessandro Sinti - (father of Anna Rita Sinti) - received 3 years and 4 months imprisonment.  

Alfonso Di Febio (husband of Viglongo) - received 2 years and 8 months imprisonment.

By Lynda Albertson 

At around 12:30 in the morning on June 28, 1990 three early Van Gogh paintings were stolen from the Het Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch, Netherlands. s-Hertogenbosch is the actual official name of the city, but colloquially almost everybody calls the city Den Bosch, which translates in English to mean 'the Duke’s Forest' .

The artworks taken were: 

Brabant Peasant, seated Study for the Potato Eaters (also known as Farmer's Wife Seated)  Dec 1884 - April 1885

oil on paper on panel 36 X 26.5 cm

Completed in Nuenen

Digging Farmer (also known as Digging Farmer's Wife), 1885-1887

oil on canvas, 37.5 X 25.7 cm

Completed in Nuenen

Wheels of the Mill, Genneper, 1884

oil on canvas,  61.5 x 80.5 cm

Completed in Nuenen

Van Gogh painted about a quarter of his entire body of works, including these three artworks, in Nuenen, less than 20 miles from the Het Noordbrabants Museum.

On the morning of the theft, the culprit(s) profited from a relatively sophisticated, but nonfunctioning, alarm system.  Set to go off when it sensed movement, on the day of the theft the system failed to signal the unauthorised entry and failed to signal a malfunction in the sensors.  The burglar(s) entered the unmanned museum undetected simply by breaking an unalarmed ground floor window which in turn allowed access the museum's collection.

Once inside the criminal(s) quickly absconded with the three early 19th-Century Dutch Impressionist artworks.  At the time of their theft they were estimated to be worth from USD $ 2.7 million to $5.4 million.

The theft marked the third theft of Van Gogh works in just two short years. 

All was not lost however.  One year later, after an anonymous tip-off, The Digging Farmer was found in a safe deposit box rented under a false name in a bank located in Eeklo, a Belgian municipality in the Flemish province of East Flanders .

The other two paintings, Brabant Peasant, seated and Wheels of the Mill, Genneper, were returned in relatively good condition to the museum via a prosecutor, Mr. D. van der Bel Middelburg working in The Hague and a lawyer representing a defendant in a totally unrelated case from Amsterdam. Listed in the judicial records as simply an 'informer' the defendant was not believed to have been one of the original thieves but rather an opportunist who had hoped to influence the outcome of his own case by providing information on other criminal's handiwork.

By: Lynda Albertson

At a time in the late 80s when Van Gogh's paintings were listed on the "Top 10 Prices Paid for Paintings" at two of the world's two premiere auction houses, Christie's and Sotheby's, stealing Vincent's artwork might have seen like a fast way to make money. Van Gogh's touchingly poignant Irises, painted in 1889 during the last year before his death at the asylum at Saint-Rémy had just sold (on November 11, 1987) for $53.9 million, the highest price ever paid for an artwork in an auction at that time. 

Perhaps with this in mind, and perhaps because the Kröller-Müller Museum holds the second-largest collection of the Post-Impressionist master in the world, with almost 90 paintings and over 180 drawings attributed to Vincent Van Gogh, the thieves decided to hit the Otterlo museum on December 12, 1988. TO commit their crime, they entered the museum by breaking one of the windows and then made off with three artworks worth an estimated €113 million euros.

The works stolen included: 

The second of three painted sketches titled 

De aardappeleters, (the potato eaters), April - May 1885

oil on canvas mounted on panel, 73.9 x 95.2 cm

Completed in Nuenen

Loom with Weaver, 1885

oil on canvas, 70 x 85 cm

Completed in Nuenen

and

Four Cut Sunflowers, August-September 1887

oil on canvas,  60.0 x 100.0 cm

Completed in Paris 

Loom with Weaver was returned, possibly as a gesture for negotiation in April 1989.  The two thieves then tried to exact a $2.5 million ransom for the remaining two paintings which led to the police recovering the works on July 13, 1989. 

While no ransom was paid, the artworks did sustain damages.  Two men were sentenced to 3.5 and 5 years respectively for their roles in the crime.

By: Lynda Albertson

In the early morning hours of May 20, 1988, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, located on the Museumplein, was hit with its one and only museum theft to date. The value of the stolen works, which became part of the collection between 1949 and 1951, were estimated by the museum's director Wilhelmus Beeren at the time to be between 25 to 100 million Dutch gilder, the currency of the Netherlands from the 17th century until 2002. 

The Stedelijk was equipped with an electronic alarm system but at the time of the break-in the museum was unmanned.  The alarm went off at five in the morning which prompted the private security service hired by the museum, and who monitored the alarm system from a central office, to contact the Amsterdam police 20 minutes later.

Upon arriving on the scene, law enforcement found a broken window. During an inspection of the museum after the break-in, staff reported that three paintings had been taken from a room close to the entrance of the museum. 

The paintings stolen during the burglary were:

Vase with Carnations, 1886 

by Vincent van Gogh 

oil on canvas, 46.0 x 37.5 cm

Bouteilles et pêches (Bottles and Peaches), 1890

By Paul Cézanne

oil on canvas, 49 x 51 cm

and

La maison du maître Adam Billaud à Nevers (The House of Master Adam Billaud at Nevers) 1874 

By Johan Barthold Jongkind

oil on canvas, 56.5 x 42.5 cm

Interviewed shortly after the theft, Director Beeren stated that the theft could have been done by experts perhaps on a "made to Order" basis.  His hypothosis was based upon the fact that the museum contained many other, more valuable works of art and given the thief also chose to make-off with the paintings' frames. 

Eleven days later, on 31 May 1988, all three paintings were recovered undamaged by police, who had posed as potential buyers interested in Post-Impressionist art when dealing with the criminal. The culprit was then arrested for the burglary and convicted.

By: Lynda Albertson

While the Galleria d'Arte Moderna got its collection returned, by giving in and paying a thief's ransom, they encouraged further robberies.   Just three months later, on May 15, 1975, thieves struck the museum for a second time.

As if to add insult to injury, the second theft made use of the same security vulnerabilities.  Thieves entered the museum via the exact same avenue taken earlier, as if the first theft was a dress rehearsal for the second grand performance.

To break into the museum they came in over the high wall around the museum and then penetrated the building by climbing a ladder and entering through an upper floor window which had not been fitted with a burglar alarm. 

Once inside they reportedly overpowered four night watchmen.  Two were bound and gagged while making rounds and two were subsequently subdued in the Grassi Gallery where the criminals again made off with a substantial cache of paintings.

This time, even more Impressionist and Postimpressionist works of art were stolen, 38 in total. Many of the artworks stolen, including Van Gogh's watercolour Breton Women (after Emile Bernard), were the same ones taken during the previous robbery.

Perhaps because the thieves were banking on a ransom having already been paid?

One month later, on June 17, 1975, police got a break.  During an routine traffic stop, Giuseppe Pennestri was arrested by Italian authorities while driving a Mercedes with New Zealand license plates under an assumed name.  With him was a Yugoslavian also travelling with false identity papers.

Pennestri would turn out to be a truly unsavoury character, with a record that included not only masterminding the theft of the museum, possibly on both occasions, but also a rap sheet that included homicide, drug dealing, facilitating prostitution and apparent ties to organized crime. 

While the Galleria d'Arte Moderna got its collection returned, by giving in and paying a thief's ransom, they encouraged further robberies.   Just three months later, on May 15, 1975, thieves struck the museum for a second time.

As if to add insult to injury, the second theft made use of the same security vulnerabilities.  Thieves entered the museum via the exact same avenue taken earlier, as if the first theft was a dress rehearsal for the second grand performance.

To break into the museum they came in over the high wall around the museum and then penetrated the building by climbing a ladder and entering through an upper floor window which had not been fitted with a burglar alarm. 

Once inside they reportedly overpowered four night watchmen.  Two were bound and gagged while making rounds and two were subsequently subdued in the Grassi Gallery where the criminals again made off with a substantial cache of paintings.

This time, even more Impressionist and Postimpressionist works of art were stolen, 38 in total. Many of the artworks stolen, including Van Gogh's watercolour Breton Women (after Emile Bernard), were the same ones taken during the previous robbery.

Perhaps because the thieves were banking on a ransom having already been paid?

One month later, on June 17, 1975, police got a break.  During an routine traffic stop, Giuseppe Pennestri was arrested by Italian authorities while driving a Mercedes with New Zealand license plates under an assumed name.  With him was a Yugoslavian also travelling with false identity papers.

Pennestri would turn out to be a truly unsavoury character, with a record that included not only masterminding the theft of the museum, possibly on both occasions, but also a rap sheet that included homicide, drug dealing, facilitating prostitution and apparent ties to organized crime.