AFP, AMSTERDAMA golden ring once given as a present by the famed Irish writer Oscar Wilde has been recovered by a Dutch “art detective” nearly 20 years after it was stolen from Britain’s Oxford University. The frie ndship ring, a joint gift from Wilde to a fellow student in 1876, was taken during a burglary in 2002 at Magdalen College, where the legendary dandy studied. Yet Arthur Brand, a Dutchman dubbed the “Indiana Jones of the Art World” for recovering a series of high-profile stolen artworks, used his underworld connections to finally find it. “Rumors started in 2015 in the art underworld that a Victorian ring has surfaced ‘with some Russian writing on it,’” Brand told a correspondent, who saw the ring at an apartment in Amsterdam. “I knew that Oscar Wilde’s ring was stolen from Magdalen College at Oxford and that it had a Greek inscription on it.

Source: Taipei Times November 16, 2019 15:56 UTC