The story
On a September morning in 2000, a visitor to this museum in western Poland walked up to its most valuable painting, Claude Monet's Beach in Pourville, and cut the canvas from its frame. In its place he slotted a hand-painted copy, good enough that staff did not notice the swap for hours.
The 1882 seascape, one of Monet's views of the Normandy cliffs, is the prize of the National Museum in Poznań, whose galleries hold Polish painting alongside European old masters and a strong run of medieval altarpieces. For ten years the Monet was gone. It surfaced in 2010, folded and damaged, when police arrested a man in the southern town of Olkusz who, it emerged, had painted the copy himself.
The recovered canvas hangs again, restored, and the copyist was sentenced the following year.
