An alleged trickster was arrested in Brazil after a painting by one of Brazil’s most celebrated artists – the pioneering modernist Tarsila do Amaral – was found under his bed. The painting went missing after an art heist and according to the police records, it was replaced by a fake one. The art was valued at around £48m and it went missing from the house of the widow of an art collector.
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Along with the trickster, three other people were arrested including the art collector’s daughter who was accused of stealing 16 more paintings. While she maintained that she is innocent, the police estimated the total worth of the stolen paintings to be somewhere around £114m.
According to a video posted online, the paintings were found by the senior services division at a beachside apartment in Ipanema. Among the ones found, the most valuable one was Sol Poente (Setting Sun) which is an old painting which was commissioned somewhere around 1929.
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“Well, well, well – look what we have here!” one female officer says in the video according to The Guardian. The other paintings found in the building were – Mascarada by Di Cavalcanti and two other Amaral paintings: Pont-Neuf and O Sono. All of them were valued at above $10 million.
The police said that the theft started sometime around January 2020 when the art collector’s daughter hired a number of people to cheat her mother and steal the air pieces. They were looking to sell the pieces to other art collectors over time.
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