Van Gogh’s stormy View of the Sea at Scheveningen foreshadowed the rocky times ahead for this painting.

It was dawn on December 7, 2002 and one of the world’s most infamous art heists was about to go down at the Van Gogh Museum. Two burglars used a ladder to climb onto the museum’s roof; broke a window with a sledgehammer; grabbed two Van Gogh paintings (one of which was View of the Sea at Scheveningen); slid down a rope and escaped into the morning.

The theft was on the FBI’s list of Top 10 art crimes for years. Finally, 14 years later, police in Naples, Italy recovered the paintings. Their investigation, which they called “Vincent” (super creative codename, guys), led them to uncover the artwork in an Italian mobster’s country home. Of course. The paintings were found wrapped in sheets and hidden inside a wall. C’mon, what’s the point of buying stolen art if you’re not even going to look at it?! Luckily, the paintings suffered very little damage and were able to return to their rightful home on the museum’s walls.

Painted in 1882 while Van Gogh was living in The Hague, View of the Sea at Scheveningen was one of his earliest works, and one of his first oil paintings. Luckily for us, Van Gogh wrote about this painting in a letter to his brother Theo, so we have all the juicy details about Vinny’s trip to the seaside to paint the storm. “But it was a nasty little storm — all the nastier — and all the more impressive the longer you looked, because it made so little noise,” he wrote in his letter. So nasty in fact that sand apparently kept blowing into the paint: “There’s already a lot of sand in the one, but with the second, when there really was a storm and the sea came very close to the dunes, I had to scrape everything off twice because of the thick layer of sand completely covering it.” To beat the storm, Van Gogh worked super quickly, even squeezing the paint directly out of the tube to make the crests of the waves. Of course, after all of that Van Gogh caught a cold. Poor Vinny. Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to paint outside during a storm?!