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He's been called the Indiana Jones of the art world, though investigator Arthur Brand insisted he is more like Inspector Clouseau.But surely, I pointed out, the comical anti-hero of the Pink Panther movies is a bumbling idiot?"No," Mr Brand replies.
"Clouseau is always successful in the end, like I am.
But the way to his success is stumbling, following false leads, so I am more like Clouseau.Image:Arthur Brand recovered a Picasso painting"I solve it, but you don't want to see how I do it.
It's clumsy everything happens.
But if people want to think I'm Indiana Jones, that's fine with me."We are sitting in the Dutchman's modest Amsterdam apartment that hardly reflects the vast value of some of the stolen paintings he has tracked down.An art historian by profession, Mr Brand says he is paid a flat fee rather than a percentage of an artwork's worth.He said: "If you are in this game for the money you will fail.
Everybody's in it for the money.
The dealers, the thieves, the forgers, the insurance companies."Of course I earn good money, but it doesn't make me a millionaire.
I'm always the last one to get paid."But he does enjoy an occasional and extraordinary perk, which he experienced after recovering a stolen Picasso painting Buste De Femme earlier this year: before he handed it to insurers, he hung on his own wall."Who can say he has had on this exact wall a Picasso worth £70m for one night? I had it here and I was looking at it all night and money cannot buy that feeling."Image:Arthur Brand next to the Salvador Dali painting Adolescence, which he recoveredImage:Mr Brand said having the painting in his home was pricelessThe painting had been stolen from a sheikh's yacht in the south of France in 1999 and was thought lost or destroyed until two men "with contacts in the underworld" turned up on Mr Brand's doorstep with a large, rectangular package."I have to meet these people," he said.
"If stolen art ended up with the Salvation Army I would end up sitting with the Salvation Army, but I'm not that lucky.
It ends up in the hands of criminals."Some of them are well known, others not.
You have to deal with criminals and when you know one you get to know another and another."There are not many art thieves, but there is a lot of stolen art and the FBI says it's the fourth largest criminal enterprise in the world."Mr Brand explained more about the murky world in which he works, saying: "There are two kinds of art thieves.
Normal criminals who walk past a museum and think why don't we steal a Rembrandt, it's £20m and we are rich, and the next morning they see it on TV and they see me or some other expert telling them they can't sell it, so they destroy it or they start to use it in the underworld for payment, or drugs or arms.
These are the less intelligent.Image:He takes a flat fee for his work"But there is another class of criminal who do this art napping thing.
People like the Mafia, the IRA, the high-end criminals."What they do is, they steal it themselves or buy the stolen painting from the thieves and they keep it stored and then one day, when they get caught for something else, they can use it as a bargaining chip and say, 'Look I have two Van Goghs or Rembrandts, if you lower my sentence you might get them back.'"So it's blackmail."Three years ago Mr Brand recovered two multi-million pound paintings - Salvador Dali's Adolescence and the Polish painter Tamara de Lempicka's La Musicienne - stolen from a Dutch museum.The artworks had been missing for two years before he got involved."Normally, when a museum is raided I don't get involved straight away, it's a police job," he said."But then, after two years they have nothing and the prosecutor says, 'I didn't like these paintings, let's stop searching because we've spent enough money.'"Then I come in and look at the thieves' method how did they did it, what was their way of breaking in? Maybe that gives me a lead and I start asking around the criminal underworld, I start chasing people."A few weeks ago the detective recovered a Victorian gold friendship ring once given to a fellow Oxford student by the playwright Oscar Wilde.
It had been stolen from Magdalen college and was thought to have been melted down many years ago.Mr Brand believes the ring, valued at £35,000, was stolen again during the infamous Hatton Garden safe deposit raid four years ago.He said: "An intermediary gave it to two guys who helped me with this and it was handed over in front of Hatton Garden, exactly the same spot, which is typical English humour."It was in one of those safe deposit boxes."Image:The ring was thought to be stolen in the Hatton Garden raidMr Brand spends most of his time advising clients on the provenance and value of art they are planning to buy and helping them avoid fakes.
He also works with Jewish families trying to recover art stolen by the Nazis.But the criminal world fascinates him.The notorious, late Colombian drug Pablo Escobar is long rumoured to have used his vast wealth to buy art.Is it true?"Yes, he did invest in art.
I saw pictures of his paintings.
It's the biggest museum in the world.
It has everything.
A lot of fakes, too, because some people, art dealers, thought it would be a good idea to trick Pablo Escobar, but I've seen some of them and some are worth tens of millions."They are in the Gulf states, that's all I can say."Did Escobar, who was shot dead by police in 1993, genuinely know his art - or was he simply laundering his drug profits?"Laundering his money," said Mr Brand.
"But one of his biggest friends who later became his biggest enemy was an art dealer."We always think of criminals as people with no interest in art, there are those too, but there are some criminals who know exactly what they are talking about in the art world."
A World
'Indiana Jones of the art world': Meet the man who recovers stolen art
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