Category: Modern(ish)

Van Gogh painting stolen in 2020 returned

Modern(ish), Museums

The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring, an 1884 oil-on-paper-on-panel painting by Vincent van Gogh, has been returned to the Groninger Museum three-and-a-half years after it was stolen the Singer Laren museum where it was on loan for an exhibition. It was recovered by private detective Arthur Brand who specializes in recovering stolen and lost art works and has extensive contacts in the criminal underworld.

The work was one of several painted when Vincent lived in the vicarage at the church where his father was pastor. It was stolen in a brazen smash-and-grab around 3:15AM on March 30th, 2020, when the museum was closed during COVID lockdown. Two months later, Arthur Brand was sent a “proof of life” photograph of the painting next to a newspaper dated May 30th.

In August 2020, the Frans Hals painting Two Laughing Boys with a Mug of Beer was stolen from the Museum Hofje van Mevrouw van Aerden in Leerdam in a smash-and-grab with the same modus operandi. DNA evidence collected from both crime scenes pointed to a suspect dubbed Nils M. In April 2021, Nils was arrested. He was in possession of firearms and drugs at the time, but the painting was not found and he denied involvement in the thefts. Nils was convicted in 2021 and sentenced to eight years in prison and a fine he’ll never pay of €8.7 million ($9.3 million).

Nils had already sold the painting when he was nabbed. The buyer was transportation company entrepreneur and secret drug kingpin Peter Roy K, who apparently thought he could use the painting as a trade for securing a lighter sentence for his drug trafficking charges.

By 2023, however, his clever plan had failed and the painting, unsaleable due the notoriety of the theft, was an albatross around his neck. He reached out to Arthur Brand and arranged to hand over .

“We knew that the painting would go from one hand to another hand in the criminal world, but that nobody really wanted to touch it because it wasn’t worth anything,” said Brand, who is known for retrieving stolen artworks. “You could only get in trouble. So it was a little bit cursed.” […]

“Eventually, I got contacted by somebody who said: ‘Mr Brand, I could turn in the Van Gogh, but I don’t want to get into trouble.’ I had to gain his confidence, and when I had, yesterday, he decided to deliver it to my home.”

So on Monday night, an early Van Gogh worth €3-€6 million ($3.2-$6.4m) was delivered to Brand’s Amsterdam apartment wrapped in bubble wrap and stuffed into a big blue Ikea bag. The label on the back matched the one from the “proof of life” photo and Andreas Blühm, the director of the Groninger Museum who was waiting in the corner bar, confirmed its authenticity.

The painting was not treated with kid gloves during its three-year ordeal. Even in the “proof of life” pictures you could see scratches on the surface. It is now at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam where expert conservators are examining it to determine a course of treatment. There is no estimated time frame for the necessary measures. It could be weeks or months until it is back on display as the jewel in the crown of the Groninger Museum.

 

Letter by literary giant Samuel Johnson found in cupboard

Modern(ish)

A lost letter by Dr. Samuel Johnson, illustrious author, literary critic and compiler of the seminal Dictionary of the English Language, has been discovered in a cupboard in a country house in Gloucestershire. The letter was known from his correspondence catalogue, but it was listed as “present location unknown” for decades.

It was discovered by a Chorley’s auction expert who had been called in by the homeowner for a routine valuation of some books and rugs. In a cupboard in the library, he found some historic records of the household expenditures, diaries and a volume of more than 100 letters that the family didn’t even realize was there. Manuscript specialists examined the volume, and found the lost letter by Dr. Johnson.

The letter was written on July 24, 1783, a year and a half before Johnson’s death.

He penned the missing letter to a Sophia Thrale (1771-1824), the daughter of Hester Lynch Thrale (1741-1821, later Mrs Piozzi), a British author and patron of the arts, who Johnson corresponded with so regularly and in so much detail, that her letters later became historically important published resources into 18th century society and the great mind of Dr Johnson. The two became acquainted when Hester, who came from one of the most illustrious Welsh land-owning dynasties; the Salusbury family, married the brewer Henry Thrale in 1763 and moved to London. It was at this time that she met leading literary figures, such as Dr Johnson, who became close friends with her and her children.

The current letter to a twelve-year-old Sophia Thrale, the sixth daughter of Hester Lynch Thrale, is the only known letter between them to survive, although there are several references to others in Johnson’s published letters. In the letter the elderly Johnson chides Sophia for not thinking of herself as his favourite; ‘my favour will, I’m afraid never be worth much, but its value more or less, you are never likely to lose it.’ He also praised her arithmetical ability; ‘Never think, my Sweet, that you have arithmetick enough, when you have exhausted your master, buy books, nothing amuses more harmlessly than computation’, and pointing her to a ‘curious calculation’ relating to the capacity of Noah’s Ark in Wilkins’s Real Character, he says; ‘an essay towards a real character and a philosophical language’ (1668 by John Wilkins).

Johnson ended his correspondence with the Thrales shortly after he wrote this letter. The widowed Hester remarried a broke Italian music tutor of whom the esteemed lexicographer did not approve, but they made up before his death in December 1784. Hester Thrale published a book based on their correspondence in 1786.

Sophia would go on to marry the banker Merrick Hoare, and 30 letters written between mother and daughter after the marriage were also discovered at the Gloucestershire estate. Another volume, Laws of London, signed by Robert Hoare (also a banker and the former Mayor of London) was found in the same cupboard as the volume of letters. This suggests Dr. Johnson’s long-lost letter made its way through the Hoare family to the Gloucestershire family, although what the specific connection was is unknown.

The letter from Samuel Johnson to Sophia Thrale will be going under the hammer at Chorley’s September 19th The Library: Printed Books & Manuscripts auction. The pre-sale estimate is £8,000-£12,000 ($10,000-$15,000).

8-year-old finds 1,800-year-old silver denarius in school sandbox

Ancient, Modern(ish)

An eight-year-old boy playing in a sandbox in Bremen discovered an 1,800-year-old Roman coin that is one of only three such finds ever made in the city.

Young Bjarne came upon the small silver disc in his elementary school sandbox in August of last year. He didn’t know what it was, but it was round and shiny so he did what anyone would do and brought it home with him. He and his family later contacted the Bremen state archaeologist, sending pictures of his treasure. The object was hard to make out from the photos, so Bjarne brough the coin in person to the Bremen state archaeologist, Prof. Dr. Uta Halle.

She was able to identify it as a silver denarius from the reign of Emperor Marcus Aurelius (r. 161-160 A.D.). The denarius is heavily worn and weighs 2.4 grams, evidence that it was minted during a time of currency debasement when the silver content plummeted with rising inflation.

Firmly east of the Rhine boundary line, the state of Bremen was never part of the Roman Empire. The city of Bremen dates to the 7th century at the earliest. That area of northwestern Germany was inhabited by the Chauci tribe. They had dealings with Rome (providing troops for auxiliary regiments), but often joined with other Germanic tribes to oppose Rome on the battlefield. Any Roman coins that made their way that far north likely reached the area via barter, washed up in the River Weser, or as a souvenir carried by an auxiliary or other world traveler.

According to the Bremen Monument Protection Act, the coin is an archaeological object that belongs to the state, but its status is still subject of conversation between officials and Bjarne’s family. Meanwhile, it has been cleaned and conserved. Prof. Halle hopes it will soon be put on display at the Focke Museum, the Bremen State Museum for Art and Cultural History.

DNA extracted from 2,900-year-old clay brick

Ancient, Modern(ish)

In a scientific first, researchers at the University of Oxford have successfully extracted ancient DNA from a 2,900-year-old clay brick. Ancient DNA is difficult to extract even from sturdier bones and teeth because it fragments over time and is easily contaminated. It has never before been successfully extracted from clay. Protected from contamination in the middle of the brick’s mass, the DNA survived in sufficient concentrations to reveal the presence of 34 different kinds of plants.

The brick was recovered from the North-West Palace of Neo-Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BCE) in the ancient city of Kalhu, modern-day Nimrud, northern Iraq. A cuneiform inscription in Akkadian labels it “The property of the palace of Ashurnasirpal, king of Assyria,” which narrows down the date of the brick to between 879 and 869 B.C.

It was discovered during the archaeological excavations at Nimrud in 1949 by British archaeologist Max Mallowan and his wife, mystery writer Agatha Christie. (I read Murder in Mesopotamia on a plane when I was a kid and not to state the obvious, it had a very deep impact on me.) The brick was donated to the National Museum of Denmark in 1958.

The brick was made from mud collected on the banks of the Tigris river. It was then mixed with plant-based materials (for example straw) and animal dung and shaped into a brick for sun-drying. Because they’re dried in the sun, not fired in the high heat of a kiln, mud bricks are hard and strong enough to build towering walls out of, they are also inherently fragile. When the brick arrived at the museum it was broken horizontally in two pieces. It broke again in 2020, a vertical split in the bottom half, which gave researchers the unique opportunity to take samples of the brick’s uncontaminated inner core.

The presented study uses a modified protocol that has previously been applied to materials such as bone, considering that clay samples are porous with high affinity towards nucleic acids. This required a gentle approach to extract the aDNA without degrading it further by applying harsh treatments. The applied method was successful in extracting plant DNA from the samples of a clay brick.

Geneticists worked with Assyriologists, archaeologists and biologists to compare the DNA findings with botanical data from Iraq and from descriptions of plants in ancient Assyrian sources.

Through extraction and sequencing of aDNA from the clay brick and the following data analysis, we were able to detect 34 unique taxonomic groups of plants representing the order Laurales as well as seven distinct families from other orders: Apiaceae (subfamily Apioideae, tribe Selineae), Betulaceae, Brassicaceae (including the genus Brassica), Ericaceae (including the subfamilies Ericoidae and Vaccinioideae), Poaceae (tribe Poeae and Triticeae), Fagaceae (genus Quercus), and Salicaceae. […]

The most abundant sequences of plants were from the families Brassicaceae (cabbage) and Ericaceae (heather). Furthermore, contributions were observed from the families Betulaceae (birch), Lauraceae (laurels), Selineae (umbellifiers) and Triticeae (cultivated grasses).

The study has been published in Nature Scientific Reports and can be read in its entirety here.

Swedish National Museum acquires iconic portrait of Count Fersen

Modern(ish), Museums

The National Museum of Sweden has acquired an iconic portrait miniature of the 28-year-old Count Hans Axel von Fersen (1755–1810), Swedish diplomat and lover of Queen Marie-Antoinette of France. Long held by descendants of the Fersen family, it went under the hammer in June and sold for 8,376 EUR ($9,112), three times its pre-sale estimate. As with the gold box with a portrait of King Gustavus III, the museum was able to acquire the miniature thanks to a donation from the Anna and Hjalmar Wicander Foundation.

The portrait is a bust from the left with Fersen’s face turned towards the viewer. He wears a grey coat with a striped red waistcoat peeking out of the lapels. It is a gouache watercolor painted on ivory and mounted in a brass frame. Mounted in its frame, it is a rectangle two inches long and 1.7 inches wide.

Unknown British artist, Portrait of Axel von Fersen, 1778. Photo courtesy Stockholms Auktionsverk. Back of the portrait with erroneous attribution. Photo courtesy Stockholms Auktionsverk.

The painter in unknown. A handwritten note on the back attributes the portrait to Peter Adolf Hall, a Swedish-French miniaturist who painted several members of the royal families of France, both before and after the Revolution. The National Museum, however, notes that it was painted in London, not Paris, when Fersen was in England in the summer of 1778. The distinctive combination of lines and pointillistic shading in brown shades is characteristic of English portraiture of the period, not French. There are very few portraits of Swedes done in England by English artists in the second half of the 18th century, and none where the sitter is so famous.

Why did the young Fersen commission this portrait of himself during his time in London? Did it have something to do with his intended marriage to Catharina, the daughter of Henrik Leijel (Henry Lyell), a wealthy Swedish-British merchant? Nothing came of this prospective marriage of convenience. Instead, Fersen returned to Paris and embarked on a military career. Two years later, he travelled to North America as aide-de-camp to the head of the French expeditionary force, General Count de Rochambeau. Fersen’s knowledge of English proved very useful in this role, since General George Washington did not speak French. For three years, Fersen acted as interpreter between the allies in their war against the British colonial power. […]

Magnus Olausson, emeritus director of collections at Nationalmuseum, said:

“The portrait of the young Axel von Fersen represents a rare interlude in 18th-century Swedish-British relations. As far as we know, few Swedes were immortalised by British artists in those days.

This iconic portrait of Fersen is an unusually fine work by an unknown British miniaturist, in a style somewhat reminiscent of stipple engraving, which was the great innovation of the time.”