Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) is widely considered the greatest Dutch artist after Rembrandt.<\/p>\n
Seascape at Scheveningen was one of only two seascapes he painted while he lived in the Netherlands.<\/p>\n
It shows a foaming, stormy sea and thundery sky, and was painted in 1882 while he was staying in The Hague.<\/p>\n
Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church at Nuenen (1884) was painted for Van Gogh’s mother, but also partly for his father, who had become a pastor at the church in 1882. When his father died in 1884, Van Gogh added churchgoers including a few women wearing shawls used for mourning.<\/p>\n
Van Gogh committed suicide in France in 1890.<\/p>\n
Recovering stolen masterpieces<\/strong><\/p>\n The 2002 Van Gogh museum raid was one of a series of thefts that shocked the art world.<\/p>\n Two years later, two Edvard Munch masterpieces, The Scream and Madonna, were seized by armed men who raided the Munch museum in Oslo.<\/p>\n Several men were jailed and the paintings later recovered after painstaking detective work in 2006.<\/p>\n Another version of The Scream was stolen from the National Art Museum in Oslo in 1994 and that too was later recovered in a sting operation by UK detectives.<\/p>\n Earlier this year, four paintings out of a haul of 24 stolen from a Dutch gallery in 2005 were recovered in Ukraine.<\/p>\n –<\/p>\n Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Italian police have recovered two Van Gogh paintings stolen during a dramatic raid on an Amsterdam museum in 2002. The works were recovered from the Naples mafia, they said. The Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam said the works were found during a “massive, continuing investigation” by Italian prosecutors and organised crime officials. The paintings were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":253676,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[107],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"The](\"http:\/\/ichef.bbci.co.uk\/news\/624\/cpsprodpb\/15801\/production\/_91456088_gettyimages-71998818.jpg\")