The Van Goghs taken from Amsterdam in 2002

In the early hours of Saturday 7 December 2002, two men put a ladder against the roof of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. They broke a window with hammers, took two paintings from the main exhibition hall and left by rope. The Guardian reports that a guard saw them but was not allowed to use force. Neither painting was insured. Both belonged to the Dutch State and hung in the museum on loan.

The paintings were View of the Sea at Scheveningen, made in 1882 in The Hague, and Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen. Van Gogh began the second in January 1884 as a gift for his ill mother and reworked it in autumn 1885, after his father died. The museum says the seascape is its only work from his Hague period. In the theft, a piece about 7 by 2 centimetres was torn from its bottom left corner. The Nuenen painting was barely damaged.

Police arrested two Dutch men in 2003. On 26 July 2004 the Amsterdam District Court sentenced Octave Durham to four and a half years in prison and Henk Bieslijn to four years. Both denied taking part. The court relied on DNA from a cap and a hat found at the scene, video images and witnesses. The court and the BBC named the second man only as “Henk B.”; the New York Times and the Guardian print his full name. On 8 April 2005 the Amsterdam Court of Appeal cut the sentences to three and a half years for Durham and three years and two months for Bieslijn. It rejected the claim that the DNA items had been planted. Both men were ordered to pay 350,000 euros in damages to the Dutch ministry that acts for the State as owner. The Guardian reports that Durham served about 25 months. The paintings were not recovered. In a Dutch documentary shown in March 2017, Durham said the break-in took about three minutes and forty seconds, according to the BBC.

The Guardian and The Art Newspaper report that the paintings were sold on in March 2003 to Raffaele Imperiale, a drug trafficker from Naples, for about 350,000 euros. Imperiale was arrested in Dubai in August 2021 and extradited to Italy in March 2022. AGI, an Italian news agency, reports that he was already serving 8 years and 4 months for drug trafficking. No source consulted shows a conviction of Imperiale for the paintings.

On 30 September 2016, Italian financial police and Naples prosecutors announced that they had found both works in a house at Castellammare di Stabia, near Naples. The find came during the seizure of about 20 million euros of assets that investigators linked to the Camorra, the Naples mafia. Reports differ on the hiding place. The BBC and Reuters describe a safe. The Art Newspaper describes a cavity in a wall of the home of Imperiale’s parents. AP describes a box behind a wall in a toilet. A curator from the Van Gogh Museum inspected the works, and the museum’s director was present at the press conference in Naples. Both paintings were shown at the Capodimonte museum in Naples from 7 to 26 February 2017. They went on show in Amsterdam on 21 March 2017.

Conservators then treated both works. For the seascape, they rebuilt the lost corner with a 3D-printed fill made from scans and photographs taken before the theft. The paintings went back on permanent display on 17 April 2019. Since mid-September 2019 they hang in their usual place with Van Gogh’s other early work at the Van Gogh Museum.