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Insurance value of stolen Kuindzhi’s painting estimated at over $180,000

Director of the ministry’s museums department Vladislav Kononov said the stolen painting would be entered into the registry of stolen and missing objects from museum collections

MOSCOW, January 27. /TASS/. Russia’s ministry of culture has estimated the insurance value of Arkhip Kuindzhi’s Ai Petri.Crimea painting that was stolen from Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery on Sunday at 12 million rubles (some $181,860), director of the ministry’s museums department Vladislav Kononov told TASS.

"I think, the painting’s insurance value is 12 million rubles," he said.

In an interview with the Rossiya-24 television channel, Kononov said the stolen painting would be entered into the registry of stolen and missing objects from museum collections. "It is done to rule out its possible taking away from the country," he noted.

Meanwhile, Dmitry Butkevich, an art critic, told TASS the painting’s price might be about $200,000. "A painting of this size approximately costs $200,000. It is a conventional figure, since there have been few auction sales of Kuindzhi in the past 25 years," he said, adding that his paintings were auctioned off from $150,000 to $300,000.

A source in law enforcement agencies told TASS the painting might be put on the Interpol database of works of art. "If the picture is not found, it would be put on Interpol’s special database of stolen works of art," he said, adding that he doesn’t rule out the painting was stolen to be sold abroad. "I can guess that there is a client for this painting," he noted.

An investigation is underway. The building of the Tretyakov Gallery has been cordoned off. Police are studying surveillance cameras.

Arkhip Kuindzhi (1842-1910), an outstanding landscape painter of the second half of the 19th century. He created a special type of romantic landscape based on a realistic perception of the world transformed by the artist’s personal touch.

The exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery offers more than 180 of his paintings from the collections of the Gallery, the Russian Museum, as well as from the collections of 19 regional museums and from museums of the former Soviet republics. The exhibition was opened on October 6, 2017 to be closed on February 17.

The 39x53 cm oil painting "Ai Petri. Crimea" from the collection of St. Petersburg’s State Russian Museum is dated to the 1890s.

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