Arthur Brand stands at the front door to his modest flat in east Amsterdam, where a week ago he took an extraordinary delivery: a stolen Vincent van Gogh painting worth up to £5.2m.
He didn’t sign for it. The delivery man, a criminal uninvolved with the theft who had been granted amnesty to return the piece, smiled and fled. Then Brand ran upstairs, where a colleague videoed him removing a pillowcase from a blue Ikea bag. Andreas Blühm, director of the Netherlands’ Groninger Museum, who was waiting at a nearby cafe, rushed over to confirm it was the Van Gogh stolen from the museum three years ago. Within hours, the recovery of The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring was all over the news.
“I have two rules,” says Brand, 54, nursing a black Earl Grey and taking a single bite of his miniature stroopwafel. “I never break the law because I always work with police, and I never give up informants. Otherwise they will shoot you dead. And if you tell people they can know where you live, they trust you.”
For 15 years, Brand has been an art detective. He remembers the face of every person he meets, and often spends Saturdays “sitting on a bench somewhere in the dark with a criminal who has just been released from prison”, and Sundays chatting with police friends about cases.
His consultancy, Artiaz, helps clients establish the authenticity and provenance of pieces. But he is better known as “the Indiana Jones of art”, recovering artefacts like the “Hitler’s horses” bronze statues, a painting by Pablo Picasso and a ring that belonged to Oscar Wilde. He has featured in the television show De Kunstdetective and his book, Hitler’s Horses, has been translated into 15 languages and optioned for film by MGM.
Dressed in a smart blue shirt, he’s charming and loquacious, and would liven up any gathering with anecdotes from a career inspired by a realisation he had been duped by an art forgery. “My father was a history teacher and as a child I had to go to museums,” he recalls. “Of course, you hate it, but you’re promised an ice-cream. But as you get older, you realise how important it is.”
Today, his work is driven by research and the gossip mill of his “enormous” criminal network. “In many cases, [artefacts] go from one hand to the other in the criminal underworld as a bargaining chip or downpayment,” he says. “If there’s no reward, they burn it. That’s why I try to build a personal relationship with these people so when they hear something, they give me a call.”
There are a handful in his field, including former art smuggler turned detective Michel van Rijn, who effectively trained him, and former Scotland Yard detective Dick Ellis, who wrote the epigraph to Brand’s book: “Arthur is a fool, but a smart one.”
But it’s no conventional career. “I work with all police forces in the world, but in the beginning they had to get used to it – I was a citizen,” says Brand. “And informants in the criminal world see me as a yuppie. But police officers are starting to realise you cannot do without the help of citizens. Look at Bellingcat [an investigative journalist group in the Netherlands] – a group of idiots like me who are so determined they discover things that the CIA doesn’t.”
The irony of stolen art is that if it is too high profile it can be hard to sell and it becomes a liability. A thief named by Dutch media as Nils M got eight years in jail and a fine of €8.7m (£7.6m) for stealing the Van Gogh and other works, and anyone found with the paintings risked a penalty. So how did the recovery of The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring happen? Brand says: “This text message came three weeks ago, at six in the evening: ‘Mr Brand, do you have a duty of confidentiality?’ I said: ‘I’m not a priest, but if I give my word, I keep it.’”
“One of the reasons he turned the Van Gogh in was because there was no reward and nobody wanted to touch it. Second, this is cultural heritage. Sometimes bad people do good things.”
Criminals’ motivations range from revenge or rivalry to a kind of penance. “There was once a guy who came forward and he said: ‘My sister, who’s not a criminal, loves your [television] series. She knows I have information and she forced me,’” says Brand. “A quite famous criminal once said: ‘My son has always been bullied because his father was a criminal, and I’m going to help you crack this case to show it to my son and say, your daddy helped this idiot recover a painting.’”
Soon after receiving the Van Gogh, Brand was hit with nausea and sleepless nights. Smoking a cigarette on his way to the cafe, he says he sometimes thinks this adventure should be the last. But then he adds: “The Amber Room, that was called the eighth wonder of the world, is still missing … I’m still hunting that one. There is the Frans Hals stolen by the same guy [as the Van Gogh], the Isabella [Stewart] Gardner Museum huge art heist. But, then again, if the FBI cannot crack a case, who am I?”
He presents himself as a hapless but lucky amateur. He jokes: “All the police forces I work with – the Dutch, the English, the Italians, the Germans – have all said to me: ‘Arthur, we are friends. We have cracked so many cases. But in the end, you are really an idiot.’ And, on the other hand, the informants say: ‘Arthur, you keep your word. But we all agree you are an idiot.’”
He thinks police and criminals have the same sense of humour. “They are living on the edge, you know,” he says. “It’s a very exciting job.”
But he is keen to put himself on the side of the good guys. He says he makes no more than the police officers who cooperate with him, makes money mainly from his books, speeches and advice, and emphasises that seven police forces know everything about him, from his location to his shoe size (a European 43).
So why does he do it? “I love antiquities and history,” he says. “And crime is also quite interesting. But the stories I can tell have a little bit of the Dan Brown or the Indiana Jones about them. You know, the truth, in my field, is stranger than fiction.”
