Oscar Wilde and a friend gifted the ring to a college classmate. Image: DPA/PA Images Oscar Wilde and a friend gifted the ring to a college classmate. Image: DPA/PA Images A 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.
But 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. It was a present from Wilde and fellow student Reginald Harding to their friend William Ward in 1876 while the Irishman was a student at Magdalen, one of the three dozen colleges that make up Oxford University.
The college at the time offered a £3,500 reward for the ring’s safe return – but after he was caught, the burglar told a court that he had sold the golden band to a scrap dealer for £150.“Rumours started in 2015 in the art underworld that a Victorian ring has surfaced ‘with some Russian writing on it’,” Brand told an AFP correspondent, who saw the ring at an apartment in Amsterdam.
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