Thieves have relieved the Johannesburg Art Gallery of a valuable 19th-century Dutch pre-Impressionist painting — the fourth heist at the institution in the past eight years.
Johann Barthold Jongkind’s A Normandy Beach was painted in 1863 and donated to the gallery by mining magnate Otto Beit.
Removed from its frame last month, its disappearance only came to the Mail & Guardian’s attention this week.
Police sources indicated that an international syndicate was suspected of ”eyemarking” valuable art for theft and underground dealing in South Africa. The South African Police Service’s endangered species desk is working with Interpol on the theft of the Jongkind, which gallery director Clive Kellner valued at about R300 000.
Police spokesperson Superintendent Ronnie Naidoo said the police could not yet ascertain whether a syndicate was responsible. However, Kellner said in a statement that the incident indicated South African museums were being targeted by a ”larger international syndicate of thieves”, who were also behind the
recent theft of Edvard Munch’s The Scream and of up to 20 17th-century Dutch paintings worth $13-million from Holland’s Westfries Museum.
The syndicate was also suspected of targeting Cape silverware and valuable china in South Africa, the police source said.
Unsolved recent art thefts in South Africa include those of Walter Sickert’s Royal Hotel, Dieppe, stolen from the National Gallery in Cape Town in 1998 and the priceless work from El Greco’s studio, Apostle Thomas, stolen from Johannesburg in 2002.
The Johannesburg Art Gallery also lost a bronze by David Brown in 1996. In 2002 a work called Suitcase, by Kendell Geers, went missing, but was later found damaged in Joubert Park.
A gallery press release noted that ”a suspect was filmed by the museum’s security cameras and the South African police are trying to identify this person”.
The gallery said A Normandy Beach was last seen by a security attendant on the morning of December 18 last year. Later ”the gilt frame was found on the floor of the west gallery, but the painting was missing”.
Born in Holland in 1819, Jongkind studied and worked in France. His landscapes of French coastal villages, particularly those in Normandy, are regarded as important precursors of the Impressionist movement.
The teacher of Claude Monet, Jongkind is often referred to as ”the first Impressionist”, while Normandy is called the ”birthplace of Impressionism”.
The painting was donated to the gallery by Beit in 1910. Art dealer Michael Stevenson, author of Art and Aspirations, a book on Johannesburg’s wealthy pioneers and their art collections, notes that Beit gave the gallery a donation of £10 000 to acquire art works.
”The stolen picture is not one that Beit would ever have had in his private collection or would have had a particular affinity for. It was rather a case of Sir Hugh Lane putting together a collection of European and British works that would have been contemporary, and that he would’ve felt would have been representative and appropriate for Johannesburg at that time.”