A Painting By Famous Russian Landscape Artist Arkhip Kuindzhi, Titled Ai-Petri. Crimea, Was Stolen On Sunday From Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery

A painting by famous Russian landscape artist Arkhip Kuindzhi, titled Ai-Petri. Crimea, was stolen on Sunday from Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery

A painting by famous Russian landscape artist Arkhip Kuindzhi, titled Ai-Petri. Crimea, was stolen on Sunday from Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery

MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 29th January, 2019) A painting by famous Russian landscape artist Arkhip Kuindzhi, titled Ai-Petri. Crimea, was stolen on Sunday from Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery.

Moscow police found the stolen painting on Monday and detained a 31-year-old man suspected of committing the crime.

Information on cases of art theft in 2010-2019 is provided below.

On January 27, an unknown person stole the painting of Ai-Petri peak on the Crimean peninsula by Arkhip Kuindzhi from the Tretyakov Gallery. According to the Russian Culture Ministry, its insured value is 12 million rubles (almost $183,000).

On January 11, the 16th century Madonna del Silenzio painting attributed to Italian Renaissance artist, sculptor and architect Michelangelo Buonarroti or one of his students Marcello Venusti, was stolen from the Church of St. Ludgerus in Zele, the north-west of Belgium. The painting depicts the Holy Family with John the Baptist in childhood. The painting was made on a wooden canvas and measures 145 x 99 centimeters (57 x 38.9 inches) without its frame.

On November 26, a painting by French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, with a cost estimated at 160,000 Euros ($182,680), was stolen from the Austrian auction house Dorotheum in Vienna. Presumably, three men walked into the auction house at around 17:15 local time (16:15 GMT). They took the painting "Golfe, mer, falaises vertes" from the frame, left the building through different exits and fled. The security camera caught images of the alleged thieves. The police reported that this was the work of professionals.

On October 27, it was reported that a Moscow art dealer went to the police because of the disappearance of the painting titled "The Last Snow" by the great Russian artist Isaac Levitan. The claimant allegedly received the painting from a businessman for sale, and then handed it over to a middle man who went silent. The insured value of the painting is $30,000.

On June 15, the work of the famous UK street artist Banksy called Trolley Hunters was reported stolen from an exhibition in Canada's Toronto. A video, published by the police, showed how a man in a green sweater and a green camouflage hat entered the room where the exhibition was taking place, covering his face. He came out of the exhibition venue with the print in his hand. Its value is estimated at $45,000 Canadian Dollars ($33,838).

On November 16, unidentified men stole a self-portrait of a famous Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico from a museum in the south of France. According to prosecutors, the guards of the Fine Arts Museum in Beziers saw an empty frame in place of the painting after the museum opening. Presumably, the intruder cut the painting from its frame with a utility knife. The painting named Composition with Self-Portrait dates back to 1926. The work was part of the private collection of Jean Moulin, a Beziers native and a French Resistance hero.

On October 6, it was reported that paintings by famous Russian landscape painter Vasily Polenov and Impressionist painter Konstantin Korovin were stolen from an apartment of an elderly woman. The woman estimated the cost of paintings at 18 million rubles. The investigation suggests that the robber had knowledge of the paintings and had been planning the art heist for a long time, since nothing else of value was stolen.

On September 30, the painting "Portrait d'une jeune fille blonde" (Portrait of a Young Girl with Blond Hair) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir was stolen from an auction house located west of Paris in the city of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. The work was considered the main item of a planned auction. The organizers expected to get about 25,000-30,000 euros for the painting.

In April, two paintings "Holy family" by Renoir and "Girls on the lawn" by Belgian painter Peter Paul Rubens were stolen in the Italian city of Monza. In June 2018, law enforcement officers arrested five suspects of the crime. The art thieves contacted two art dealers, posing as an Israeli businessman and rabbi. The con artists said they were ready to pay 26 million euros for the works. During the meeting, the paintings were placed in the trunk of the car, in which the con artists escaped from the scene. The police recovered both paintings in July, 2018.

In June, five paintings by the famous British expressionist Francis Bacon worth an estimated 30 million euros were stolen from a private house of his friend. This theft was the largest one to take place in Spain in the last several decades. The masterpieces were stolen from a house of their owner, known only by the initials J.C.B., as his full name was disclosed. Hispanic-born, he was a friend of Bacon, who died in Madrid in 1992.

On November 19, a gang of armed criminals robbed the city museum of Castelvecchio in Verona. The stolen works included the priceless canvases of Venetian artist Tintoretto, Rubens, Italian painters Pisanello, Andrea Mantegna, Jacopo Bellini and other famous painters. The three criminals threatened the only guard and a cashier with guns, tied them up and took 15 paintings front the walls of the museum. Among the stolen works are five works of Tintoretto, as well as the famous "Madonna of the Quail" by Pisanello, which is considered to be the earliest among the paintings of this outstanding Renaissance artist.

On September 10, the media reported that nine prints by US artist Andy Warhol worth about $350,000 were stolen in Los Angeles. According to the police, the intruders replaced the original silk screen prints with fakes. The theft was discovered only after two pieces were taken to be reframed, as the frame shop owner discovered that the prints were lacking the signature of the author. The experts were able to establish when exactly the switch happened, they could say only that the crime was committed in the last three years.

In mid-July, paintings by Russian artist Ivan Aivazovsky "Ship at Sea off the Island of Capri," "Head of the Jerusalem Jew" by Vasily Polenov and a painting by an unknown artist was stolen from the Tarusa Art Gallery in the Russian Kaluga Region. The paintings were recovered a month later. Canvases of Aivazovsky and Polenov were seized in Kaluga, and the third work was found by the police in one of the capital's pawnshops.

On September 29, a painting by French impressionist Edgar Dega, Ballerina Adjusting Her Slipper, worth 6 million euros, was stolen in Cyprus' southern city of Limassol. On October 5, Russian citizen Sergei Tyulenev was detained on suspicion of the theft. He was the released since the investigators did not find the evidence of his guilt.

In August, five pictures painted by Russia's landscapist Isaac Levitan were stolen from the painter's museum located in the Russian city of Plyos, the Ivanovo Region. The Russian law enforcement officers have initiated criminal proceedings in connection with "the theft of items of a particular value." The total value of the stolen paintings was estimated at 195 million rubles ($2.9 million). The thieves failed to sell the stolen artwork. In 2016, the paintings were found by the law enforcement officers at the house of one of the thieves. After the necessary expertise, the paintings were returned to the museum, where they are still exhibited.

On December 30, a painting by Russian marine art master Ivan Aivazovsky, Sea Landscape in Crimea, was taken from Kyrgyzstan's national art museum in Bishkek. The painting's value was estimated at over $40,000. The museum's personnel found out that the art piece was stolen the morning after a staff party that was held in the museum lobby.

On August 25, three unidentified individuals took the paintings by Konstantin Korovin, Ivan Shishkin and Stanislav Zhukovsky from a museum in the Russian city of Vyazniki, the Vladimir Region.

On July 16, thieves broke a window and entered the Museum David and Alice van Buuren in the Belgian capital of Brussels. the criminals stole 10 paintings worth about $2 million. Despite the fact that the alarm went off, the thieves managed to flee the scene before the police arrived. Shrimps and Shells, a painting by Belgian painter James Ensor, and The Thinker, a portrait by Dutch artist Kees van Dongen, were the most valuable of the stolen works of art and accounted for about 80 percent of the value of the stolen paintings.

On November 30, a watercolor by French Romantic artist Eugene Delacroix, worth about 650,000 euros, was taken away from an art gallery in Paris. The thief managed to take the painting, whose size was 19 x 11 centimeters (7.4 x 4.3 inches), off the wall and escape with it.

On November 11, thieves tied up the staff of the Pretoria Art Museum gallery in South Africa and grabbed art pieces of particular value for the history of the country's national painting drawn by Maggie Laubser, Hugo Naude, Jacobus Hendrik Pierneef, Gerard Sekoto and Irma Stern. On November 13, the South African police found four of the five grabbed paintings at a private cemetery, where the paintings were hidden under a bench near the memorial wall. Sekoto's Street Scene, the most expensive of the stolen paintings with an estimated value of $800,000, was not among the discovered pictures.

On October 16, robbers turned their attention to the Kunsthal art museum in the Dutch city of Rotterdam. The thieves took seven paintings painted by such outstanding painters as Lucian Freud, Meijer de Haan, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso and together valued at about 100 million euros. Several Romanian citizens were charged with the crime. The investigators then said they believed that some of the stolen paintings might have been burnt.

In mid-June, a painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and 10 drawings by Picasso were stolen from a private collection belonging to a businessman in the Czech city of Olomouc. The robbers penetrated into the 51-year-old businessman's house and forced the man to hand over the keys from the safe, in which the works of art were held.

On June 19, Cartel de Don Juan Tenorio, a painting by Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali, was stolen from a gallery in New York's Manhattan. The cost of the painting was estimated at $150,000. The surveillance cameras recorded a man, wearing a plaid shirt, who entered the gallery carrying a black bag. Soon after that he was in sight again, but already carrying the bag and the painting.

On January 9, three paintings were grabbed from the National Gallery in Athens. The three most expensive canvas were done by Picasso, Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, who was one of the pioneers of abstract painting, and Guglielmo Caccia, also known as il Moncalvo, an artist of the 17th century.

On August 14, a work by Dutch painter Rembrandt, worth approximately $250,000, was taken from the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Southern California. The pre-planned theft took place when the curator of the exhibition that was organized in the hotel got distracted. On August 16, it was reported that the drawing had been found by the police. US experts then argued that Rembrandt's work might have been a fake.

In July, Víctor Manuel Garcia Valdes' Cuban Landscape was snatched from a Cuban small-town cultural heritage center. The robbers tied up the center's guard and broke down the door. During the robbery, the thieves caused damage to the artwork itself. In August, the criminals were detained while attempting to smuggle the painting from Cuba.

On January 13, pictures by Shishkin, Aivazovsky and Repin were taken from the house of Alexander Tarantsev, the owner of Russkoye Zoloto private company in the Moscow Region. The robbers also took diamond jewelry and antiquities kept in the house. The total cost of the stolen items was estimated at nearly $50 million.