BELGRADE/ZURICH (Reuters) - Police in Serbia have recovered a painting by the French artist Paul Cezanne that was stolen at gunpoint from a Swiss museum four years ago, officials said on Thursday.
Cezanne's Boy in a Red Waistcoat, which media said was worth more than $100 million, was one of four paintings stolen from the E. G. Buehrle Collection in Zurich in 2008 by a trio of masked robbers who burst in just before closing time and told staff to lay on the floor while they took what they wanted.
The heist was one of the largest in the world at the time.
Three men were arrested in Belgrade on Wednesday in connection with the theft and the director of the Buehrle collection confirmed the authenticity of the painting, the Zurich state prosecutor's office said.
Boy in a Red Waistcoat, thought to have been painted in 1888, depicts a boy in traditional Italian dress wearing a red waistcoat, a blue handkerchief and a blue belt. Three other versions of the painting are in museums in the United States.
Two of the stolen canvasses, one by Claude Monet and the other by Vincent Van Gogh, were recovered not long after the robbery, abandoned in a car. A work by Edgar Degas is still missing.
The Buehrle collection, one of the most important 20th-century private holdings of European art, was amassed by the industrialist Emil Georg Buehrle, who derived his wealth from producing and selling anti-aircraft guns.
Last October, Serbian police recovered two paintings by Pablo Picasso - Tete de Cheval (Horse's Head) and Verre et Pichet (Glass and Pitcher) - stolen in 2008 from a gallery in the Swiss town of Pfaeffikon, near Zurich.
(Reporting by Aleksandar Vasovic; Additional reporting by Emma Thomasson and Catherine Bosley in Zurich; Editing by Alison Williams)
