Dutch art detective Arthur Brand, often referred to as the "Indiana Jones of the Art World," has added another major recovery to his list: a trove of centuries-old documents stolen from the National Archives in The Hague in 2015. The cache includes rare items from the 15th to 19th centuries, but most notable among them are documents related to the Dutch East India Company. Among the highlights are manuscripts detailing the early operations of the company, including a document from 1602 that details the meeting in which the company's logo was designed.
The NL Times reports Brand was able to return 25 "precious objects" to the National Archives, among them a 12-foot-long letter written by a knight in 1445. "In my career, I have been able to return fantastic stolen art, from Picassos to a Van Gogh... yet this find is one of the highlights of my career," Brand told AFP, per CBS News. He stumbled upon the documents in a fairly low-effort way: Someone found them in an attic while cleaning out a family member's belongings and emailed him about them.
The family member had taken the box as loan collateral from a friend—later identified as a now deceased former employee of the National Archives. Brand worked with Dutch police to confirm that the documents had been stolen from the National Archives a decade ago, and that the main suspect had indeed dropped off the box as collateral. It's unclear how the theft was carried out, and the archives hadn't known all of the documents were even gone. "We knew some of them were missing, but that could have been due to any number of reasons. For example, a document could have been accidentally returned to the wrong place," said a rep.
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She continued, "We manage more than 145 kilometers of archives, over 15 million photographs, and 300,000 maps and drawings. With such numbers, it is impossible to have a complete inventory of all the documents." Brand described sifting through the documents as taking a journey back in time. "I felt like I had stepped into Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island." It's not Brand's only 2025 find. ArtNet in March reported that he helped track down a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Younger that was taken from a Polish museum in 1974. (Brand also tracked down a famous ring.)
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