Paintings by Picasso, Van Gogh and Gauguin stolen in £1m raid on gallery
Captain Compassion
gallery
UK Independent ^ | April 27, 2003 | Cahal Milmo
Three paintings by Picasso, Van Gogh and Gauguin worth a total of £1m
were stolen from a Manchester art gallery over the weekend in a "well
planned" theft by professional art thieves, police said.
Staff at the Whitworth Gallery only discovered the three works were
missing when they turned up for work at about midday yesterday.
The paintings are believed to have been in the same room at the
museum, which has a world-renowned collection of 40,000 works by
artists ranging from Lucian Freud to Toulouse Lautrec. Detectives said
the thieves had broken into the building at some point after 9pm on
Saturday to steal the works, probably to order.
A Greater Manchester Police spokesman said: "This was a well-planned
theft. We have launched a major inquiry and are now trying to piece
together what happened." Neither detectives nor the museum, which is
owned by the University of Manchester, were willing to say where or
how the thieves had gained entry but a police source added: "It was a
professional job. They clearly knew what they were after."
The stolen works, the largest of which measured 39cm by 53cm, are well
known and would be unsellable on the open market. Experts said it was
unclear why the three watercolours were stolen from among far more
valuable works in the same building. The art historian Andrew
Graham-Dixon said: "They could have been stolen by naive thieves who
will probably destroy them when they see them on every newspaper front
page."
The most valuable were thought to be the work by Picasso, a drawing of
three skeletal figures entitled Poverty (1903), and the coloured
drawing by Van Gogh, Fortifications of Paris with Houses (1878),
completed when the artist was 25. The Gauguin, Tahitian Landscape
(1891), is a watercolour sketch which, unusually, has been painted on
both sides of the paper and also features a sketch of a man's head.
The gallery refused to comment on why it had taken so long for the
theft to be discovered.
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