Several master paintings, old and modern, disappeared from Robert Noortman's gallery in 1987 and are now being introduced to the art market for sale. The paintings are being put back on the market in order to try and recover some of the outlays made through insurance claims and recovery costs.
An initial insurance payment was made in 1988 for 2 million pounds, this was for eight paintings that had disappeared after a detective had unfortunately failed to find the missing paintings. The paintings were creations by artists such as Renoir, Pissarro and Willem van de Velde. Noortman had decided to sell his business in 2006 and it was acquired by Sotheby but Noortman subsequently died in 2007.
A year after his death, the detective who was still working on the case, Ben Zuidema, was contacted by someone who presented evidence that Noortman had actually organized the disappearance and destruction of the paintings. One had been destroyed, but the rest were apparently still in one piece and their whereabouts were known. The paintings were finally reunited in two small towns in southern Holland after one of the intermediaries made an absurd attempt to sell the paintings individually to an insurance company for 4,500,000 pounds.
The detective arranged to meet with the informant and also organized a sting operation with the Dutch police to help recover the paintings. Unfortunately, some of them had been damaged by three suspects who were arrested: a 45-year-old German living in Dubai, along with his 62-year-old mother and a 66-year-old man.
The Art Loss Register at this time estimates that if these paintings were for sale they would be worth about 1.6 million pounds and there has already been an ongoing court case, with Christie's being instructed to sell paintings involved in the case. The first painting to be put up for sale is the van Velde piece which was painted in 1675 and will be put up for auction in Amsterdam, where interested parties can bid and buy art online as well as view other paintings that are for sale. This painting is valued at 100,000 pounds.
The rest of the paintings, now that they have been recovered and restored, will be offered in London, and the estimate for these paintings is around 780,000 pounds. This figure does not include the buyers' premium, which is much lower than the figure they were insured for when they were originally acquired more than 25 years ago.
Until his death in 2007, Noortman was seen as a highly influential art dealer and was one of the founders of the European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht and just before he died he was given a city medal for his work and effort he had put in to make art a known passion in the city.