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.
