(CNN) — A painting by Vincent van Gogh was stolen overnight from a Dutch museum that is closed because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Singer Laren museum, just outside Amsterdam, said van Gogh’s “The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring” was stolen in an overnight raid.
The thieves broke a glass door to enter the museum around 3:15 a.m. An alarm went off, but the culprits were gone before the police arrived. It is believed that the van Gogh was the only work taken.
The 1884 painting is oil on canvas, about 10 inches by 22 inches. It is one of a series that the Dutch master painted while he was living in Nuenen, where his father was a parson.
The painting was on loan from the Groninger Museum, in the Dutch city of Groningen.
“I am shocked and unbelievably pissed off,” Singer Laren museum director Jan Rudolph de Lorm said during a press conference Monday.
“It is very bad for the Groninger Museum. It’s also very bad for Singer,” de Lorm said. “But above all it is horrible for all of us, because art is there to be seen and shared by all of us, for society as a whole, to bring enjoyment, to bring inspiration, and also to bring comfort. Especially in this difficult time,” he added.
The Singer Laren museum was opened in 1956 to display the collection of an American couple, William and Anna Singer.
In 2007, seven bronze statues were stolen from the museum garden by thieves who drove a truck through a gate. One of them, a cast of Rodin’s “The Thinker,” was found several days later badly damaged — it was said to be missing a leg. It was restored and returned to exhibition in 2011.
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