A member of the canine unit recovered four paintings stolen from South Africa’s Pretoria Art Museum in a private cemetery on Tuesday, November 13. While the paintings still need to be verified, police officials are almost certain they are Maggie Laubser’s Cat and Petunias (1936), JH Pierneef’s Eland and Bird (1961), Irma Stern’s Fishing Boats (1931), and Hugo Naude’s Hottentot Chief, all of which disappeared after an armed robbery took place at the museum on November 11. Gerard Sekoto’s Street Scene (1939) is still missing.
The Pretoria Museum closed after the heist and will re-open on November 20 after officials finish a number of updates to the institution’s security system. The robbers entered the museum as paying visitors on Sunday but there is no surveillance footage as the museum’s security cameras had stopped working earlier in the week.
