BERLIN (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- A Vincent van Gogh painting was stolen early Monday from a small museum in Laren in the Netherlands, just 20 miles southeast of Amsterdam, on what would have been the artist’s 167th birthday.

“I feel enormous anger and sadness,” Jan Rudolph de Lorm, the museum’s director, said. “Because especially in these dark days that we are in, I feel so strongly that art is here to comfort us, to inspire us and to heal us.”

Police were called to the Singer Laren museum at 3:15 a.m. Monday, when an alarm went off. By the time they got there, the thief or thieves were already gone, said a spokeswoman for the Dutch police.

All police found was a shattered glass door and a bare spot on the wall where the painting was displayed. Hours later, authorities announced that the work, “The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring,” was taken.

The heist comes as museums in much of Europe and the United States are closed in attempts to stem the spread of the coronavirus. It also comes eight years after a spectacular breach at a museum in Rotterdam, where thieves made off with seven paintings valued at more than 100 million euros (about $110 million) by forcing an emergency exit, exposing the relatively weak security systems at some art museums.

Coronavirus or not, guards are not usually posted at the museum overnight. The alarm system is linked straight to the local police.

“They knew what they were doing, going straight for the famous master,” de Lorm said. Police agreed that it would have taken minutes from the time of forced entry to leaving the premises.

The painting was on loan from the Gröninger Museum for a special exhibition, “Mirror of the Soul,” which was to run from January to May. “It’s an early picture, before Arles and before Paris, so it is darker and less recognizable as a van Gogh,” said Andreas Blühm, director of the Gröninger.

Because of the coronavirus outbreak, museums in the Netherlands closed March 13, and the Singer Laren had announced it would be closed until at least June 1.

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