Stolen Cézanne recovered by Serbian police
CBC News | Posted: April 12, 2012 6:00 PM | Last Updated: April 12, 2012
3 arrested in overnight operation
A painting recovered by Serbian police overnight is indeed a work by Paul Cézanne stolen in a daring 2008 heist, Swiss prosecutors said Thursday.
Art experts at the E.G. Buehrle Foundation confirmed that the painting in question is the French impressionist master's painting The Boy in the Red Waistcoat.
It was stolen along with three other paintings — Claude Monet's Poppy Field Near Vetheuil, Vincent van Gogh's Blooming Chestnut Branches and Edgar Degas' Ludovic Lepic and his Daughter — from the Zurich-based foundation's private collection in February 2008.
Early Thursday, Serbian police revealed that officers had seized a stolen painting and arrested three people in connection with the robbery following raids in Belgrade and the city of Cacak.
Police from several European countries participated in the operation, Serbian officials said.
At the time, the 2008 theft of a quartet of immensely valuable, 19th century oil paintings was described as "a spectacular art robbery."
Three masked and armed men burst into the gated Zurich villa housing late industrialist Emil Buehrle's collection of impressionist and post-impressionist artwork on a Sunday, just a half-hour before the facility was slated to close, and grabbed the first four paintings they saw.
They escaped in a white car and witnesses reported that the suspects spoke German with a Slavic accent.
The robbery — one of the biggest European art thefts at the time and the second that week in Switzerland — was shocking because of the prominence and value of the paintings taken. In total, the canvases were estimated to be worth 180 million Swiss francs (about $163 million Cdn, at the time).
The Monet and van Gogh were recovered, undamaged, in a parked car at a Zurich hospital shortly after the theft.
The Degas remains missing.