3 Van Gogh Paintings Stolen From Netherlands Museum

Three paintings by Vincent van Gogh, including his early masterpiece “The Potato Eaters,” were stolen from a museum Monday night, police reported.

The paintings were taken from the Kroeller-Mueller National Museum in Otterlo near the West German border by thieves who apparently gained entry through a broken window, according to police spokeswoman Bep Lijftogt.

The two other stolen paintings by the 19th-Century Dutch artist were “Dried Sunflowers” and “Weaver’s Interior,” she reported.

Two guards were in the sprawling, single-story building at the time of the theft but didn’t notice anything amiss, police spokesman Dirk Talsma said.

However, the museum’s silent alarm alerted police, who sealed off the 25-acre park in which the museum sits. A helicopter equipped with floodlights and police with dogs searched for suspects in the forested grounds until late Monday. They planned to resume at daybreak.

No official valuations of the paintings were available from the museum, but Harts Nijstad, director of Christie’s auction gallery in Amsterdam, described “The Potato Eaters” as “an enormously important painting.” In a legal, open-market sale, he said, the 1885 work could bring as much as Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers,” which sold at auction for $39.9 million in March, 1987.

“The Potato Eaters” in the Kroeller-Mueller museum was the most complete of several versions of the same subject, according to Nijstad. It shows a farm family seated around a table eating potatoes by lamplight, the hunger evident on their angular faces.