The story
Early on 30 March 2020, Van Gogh's birthday, with the Netherlands in lockdown and the museum closed, a thief smashed a glass door at Singer Laren and took a small Van Gogh. The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring, painted in 1884 in the village where his father was the pastor, was on loan from the Groninger Museum. It stayed missing until September 2023, when the art detective Arthur Brand helped bring it back.
The museum began as a home. William Henry Singer Jr., son of a Pittsburgh steel magnate, took up painting against his father's wishes, and with his wife Anna, also American, he settled in Laren in the early 1900s, drawn by the artists' colony in this village south-east of Amsterdam. Their villa, De Wilde Zwanen, was extended into a museum with a concert hall and opened to the public in 1956.
The collection runs from about 1880 to 1950, from French Barbizon painters through the artists of the Gooi region to early modernists. Visitors can find Anemones in a Vase, painted by Piet Mondrian in 1908, years before his abstract grids, and a view of the coast at Deauville by Eugène Boudin, the French painter of beaches. The sculpture garden has its own history of loss. In 2007 thieves took seven works from it, including a bronze cast of Rodin's Thinker, which turned up days later, damaged.
