Salut James - the great Ensor robbery of 1978
"Bonjour chérie, bientôt en Espagne. Salut, James" (Hi darling, soon in Spain. Cheers, James). At the end of November 1978, a thief of Ensor paintings delivered one final note to the police. After that, he vanished for good. Or did he?
A few months earlier, on the night of 1 April, the thief had pulled off a spectacular break-in at the Municipal Museum on Wapenplein in Ostend. He stole three works by James Ensor: Self-Portrait with Flowered Hat, My Dead Mother, and The Carriage. What followed was a ransom demand and a mad cat-and-mouse game with the police.
During a confrontation in the dunes near De Haan, the thief managed to escape, but the paintings were recovered one by one. Ostend journalist Stefaan Kerger, who as a child often played in the very dunes where one of the stolen paintings was dug up by children, remembers thinking: I wish I had found it! Podcast maker Ronald Verhaegen brings the story to life, with Stefaan, in Salut James.
