The walls of Arthur Brand’s Amsterdam apartment have been graced with masterpieces by Picasso and Van Gogh. Once, he briefly displayed the blood of Jesus Christ on his counter. And for a little while, his finger donned a ring previously owned by Oscar Wilde.
These treasures come to Brand just for a night or two, as he plays middleman between the world of fine art and Europe’s criminal underbelly. For nearly 15 years, Brand has made his reputation as what he calls an “art detective.” As a self-styled Indiana Jones he retrieves long-lost pieces of cultural heritage and restores them to their rightful owners. This leads to some strange late-night visitors.
Last fall, Brand’s doorbell rang: Outside was a man holding a large blue bag. In it was “The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring,” an 1884 painting by Van Gogh. “An Ikea bag?” Brand said, noting that the bag held a piece estimated to be worth at least $3 million. “Are you going to complain about the bag it’s in?” replied the man. He hadn’t stolen it himself, but had acquired it on behalf of another criminal who’d erroneously hoped to use it to reduce his own prison sentence. Then the man walked away. As a group of waiting police officers came in to celebrate, Brand hung the Van Gogh on his wall.
A year earlier, in the summer of 2022, when Brand answered the doorbell he found a large box and nobody in sight. Inside was one of the most important relics in the Catholic faith, one that allegedly contained the blood of Christ. It had been stolen the previous July from the Holy Trinity Abbey in Normandy, and soon after he’d received an email from a woman who’d seen him on Dutch television. The thief, she said, thought he was stealing gold—and now he was stuck with an unsellable religious relic. The source said it was being stored at the house of a relative who was superstitious and wanted the piece gone. Brand didn’t know if the caller was joking or not, but he agreed that the treasure could be left at his doorstep.
With the blood in his possession, Brand, who’s Catholic, crossed himself and called the police. As it happened, both the French and Dutch police were on vacation—it would take another few weeks for the relic to return home to France. In the meantime, it sat on his counter.
After years on the trail of art thieves, 54-year-old Brand views his compensation as getting to enjoy a little time with the stolen treasure. “I worship them for a night,” he says. “The pleasure is in having a Van Gogh on my couch.”
As a child, Brand was fascinated by stories of both knights and mummies. He spent happy afternoons in history museums with his father. But he was particularly captivated by a story his grandfather told about a boy who’d grown up in their same small town in the Netherlands. He had become one of the most famous art forgers in the world, even selling paintings to Hermann Goring and other top Nazi officials. From there, Brand developed a fascination with forgeries and, eventually, connections to the art world.
As a student in Spain he dug for Roman coins with friends, which sparked an interest in antique coin collecting. Then he read that many were fake; in fact, as much as 30 percent of the art and antiquities market may be inauthentic. Brand’s interest turned to Michel van Rijn, a criminal who spent decades smuggling stolen art across the world. He was a wild, blustery character who embraced the stories that swirled about his criminal past. By the time Brand wrote him an email in the early 2000s, van Rijn had begun to collaborate with Scotland Yard on recovering stolen art.
An invitation to van Rijn’s home in London followed. Shortly after Brand arrived, the doorbell rang and van Rijn asked him to answer it. When Brand returned with a package he found van Rijn covering his ears—the longtime criminal had expected a bomb. He’d made many enemies, he explained.
Soon after, Brand was there when van Rijn took on a historic operation: to recover the only surviving copy of the Gospel of Judas from antiquity. It had surfaced in rural Egypt and traded hands until the mid-2000s, when antiquities dealers tried to sell the fourth-century papyrus on the black market. According to Brand, van Rijn helped negotiate its donation to a Swiss foundation.
The recovery made international headlines. The Vatican put out a press release. It was the height of popularity of the novel The Da Vinci Code, recalls Brand, and he felt like he was living in a Dan Brown novel.
After six years of working with van Rijn he had met criminals and law enforcement and had led the recovery of a trove of pre-Columbian treasures in Peru. Branch decided to branch out on his own, with the recovery of art stolen from a Jewish family during World War II that had ended up in the Royal Dutch Collection and the Louvre.
Today, he collaborates with seven police forces around the world and has helped recover around 120 pieces of stolen art. Many were cold cases in the art world that police had long stopped searching for. Sometimes he’ll put out feelers for a cold case and his contacts will ask around.
There are many reasons someone might turn in an art thief: There are suspicious girlfriends and jealous criminals. There are those who realize they can’t sell the art they’ve stolen, and some whose conscience gets the better of them. Many criminals holding stolen works of art have traded them for other goods, or used them to launder money, and aren’t aware that they’re stolen. Others believe the art might be their ticket out of legal trouble: In some countries, offering a tip on a piece of stolen art might lower a criminal sentence (the Netherlands no longer offers this sort of deal).
Brand likes to remind his contacts that criminals are often caught for their lesser crimes—American gangster Al Capone, he points out, was brought in for tax evasion. If police are on the hunt for a priceless painting, surrendering it could protect the thief’s other, more lucrative criminal enterprises.
As Brand’s reputation grows, leads come via the most unexpected avenues. Once, a tip came from a woman who’d matched with a man on Tinder claiming to have stolen a Picasso in 2012—the biggest art theft Greece had ever suffered. His boast turned out to be true and eventually he was caught.
But Brand’s most successful cases never make the news: Four years ago, a criminal called and told him there would be a raid on an important European museum (Brand declines to name it to protect his source’s identity). The police were able to prevent it—saving hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen goods.
While collaborating with law enforcement, Brand rarely disguises his identity. The criminals who come to him are aware that he will work with the police, and that an exchange of goods will be done with advance permission from a prosecutor. “The line is very clear,” says Brand. “The reason I present myself as the art detective is that when they find out you lied to them they shoot you.”
Only once has he fudged his identity, posing as an intermediary for an imaginary American oil baron interested in buying two iconic symbols of history’s darkest days: a pair of bronze horses that stood outside Hitler’s New Reich Chancellery. Thought to be destroyed during the war, they had actually been smuggled to safety as the battle of Berlin started. Thanks to Brand’s sleuthing, they were found in 2015 on the estate of an elderly businessman in western Germany.
When he started, “art detective wasn’t a real job,” says Brand. Even today, he says he isn’t paid for his sensational recoveries, and makes a living consulting with private collectors, helping recover goods for families seeking art stolen during World War II. He also writes books and lectures, and stars in the Dutch TV series called, yes, “Art Detective.”
He has his work cut out for him: thousands of lost and stolen pieces await recovery. Chief among them, the brazen Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft in 1990, which included a Vermeer, three Rembrandts, and five works by Degas, among other masterpieces. And of course there’s the legendary Amber Room, moved from the Tsar’s palace to a bombed castle in Germany. Rumors of its destruction and survival have swirled since then. But in the meantime, Brand is working on “another big case.” And, he says, “I’m this close to getting it back.”
Nina Strochlic covers stories about migration, conflict, and interesting people across the globe. She was previously a staff writer for National Geographic, Newsweek, and the Daily Beast. She cofounded the Milaya Project, a nonprofit working with South Sudanese refugees in Uganda.
