Arthur Brand: Art Detective
I thought, since we talk so much on here about heists and missing artworks, it was time to talk about the people that work to recover these pieces safe and sound, mostly. Let’s delve into the interesting history of one such person who is sometimes called the Indiana Jones of the art world.
Arthur Brand
Pretty much getting right to it today. Brand was born in 1969 in the Netherlands. There’s not a ton I can find out about his early life but his interest in art crime and finding stolen pieces was sparked when he was an exchange student living in Spain. He and some Romani people he met there went on a treasure hunt that resulted in them finding three silver Roman coins. He enjoyed that experience so much that he began to search newspapers for reports of art thefts and investigate and research them in his own time.
So began a very interesting career as a private art detective. He says that in the beginning it was hard, he had no connections either in criminal circles or with the police and both sides thought he was a yuppie. But over time he realized that in order to solve these kinds of cases, the police need the help of civilians, especially those like him who are educated and knowledgeable about art and art history.
The process usually goes like this: the police in the area of the theft will be called in to investigate first. They conduct their investigation which can take a number of years before they realize they’re stuck and need outside help and this is where Brand comes in. One single case can take him up to eight or ten years to crack. “It's a very hard job, a lot of blood, sweat and tears. Nobody pays you but at the end you can write books about it, which are translated into seven or eight languages” (BBC, 2020). For the most part he isn’t even expecting to make any money from these cases and typically takes them on at his own expense. Once he was hired by a museum directly and in that case, once the item was returned, he made $3,000 in reward money. So clearly he’s not in it for the riches.
Over the years of doing this job and solving more and more cases, Brand estimates that he’s brought over 200 pieces of art back to their rightful homes worth over $307 million in total, he’s built up a network of contacts in the criminal world as well as a reputation as someone that an informant or a thief can return a piece through and won’t be turned into the police. Brand says he never reveals his sources because he would have serious concerns for his life if he did. Which….fair. He also says that people will call him at all hours of the day or night with information and he can never tell them it’s an inconvenient time; “because if you give them too much time to rethink it, they’ll never call back” (BBC, 2020). Therefore it’s like he’s always on call, even sometimes for cases he hasn’t been officially contracted to assist on.
These phone calls are usually the first important breadcrumb of the trail that Brand will follow during the course of the investigation. For example, any long time readers of this blog might remember the van Gogh painting The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring that was stolen and then returned in a pillowcase and IKEA bag. That was all orchestrated by, and through, Brand. And that’s how I learned about him in the first place.
Speaking of the phone calls in the middle of the night, Brand has no qualms at all about working with people who have criminal connections. He says “you always have to work with someone who’s trusted by the other side” (BBC, 2020) and since he isn’t fully on one side or the other he uses this criminal network to his advantage. Once, he discovered a couple of paintings that a serious criminal organization were given ten years after they were originally stolen as part of a payment plan for a drug deal. Brand actually approached this group and told them that if they were to try and sell these paintings now they would be selling stolen property and get in serious trouble. Normally, for people to get immunity when working with the police they would have to name names but not with Brand so this connection benefits both sides. Eventually Brand convinced them to trust that he would never reveal them to the police and they handed the paintings over, to this day he has never named them. They were so grateful that he kept his word that they called him and told him about a theft they knew was going to happen soon at a European museum and he was actually able to stop it.
Currently, Brand is working on a number of different projects including the Isabella Stewart Gardiner heist, the theft of Georges Braque's La Nappe Blanche from a Swedish museum in 1993, and The Amber Room. Every time he thinks of slowing down he just finds more mysteries that drive him to investigate. I don’t want to scoop too many cases that Brand has been involved in because they’re all so interesting to expect to see him popping up a lot more in these articles.
Works Cited
Boztas, Senay. “Arthur Brand: I Never Give Up Informants - They Will Shoot you Dead”. The Guardian. 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/sep/25/arthur-brand-i-never-give-up-informants-they-will-shoot-you-dead
“Meet the World’s Greatest Art Detective”. BBC. 2020. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200406-meet-the-worlds-greatest-art-detective