NATURE, TAKE A WALK, LET THE BEAUTY OF NATURE FEED YOUR SOUL.

If they are recovered at all, stolen art masterpieces such as The Scream and Madonna, the two Edvard Munch paintings torn from the walls of a museum in Oslo, Norway, last Sunday, can come to light at unexpected times and in unexpected places.
Sometimes, as with 20 works by Vincent van Gogh stolen from, and soon returned to, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 1991, the works are discarded by the criminals shortly after the theft, like handbags tossed into the rubbish by muggers.
Picasso's Weeping Woman, stolen from the National Gallery of Victoria in 1986, famously turned up in a Spencer Street Station locker about a fortnight later.
Sometimes, as with Titian's long-lost Rest on the Flight into Egypt, recovered in Britain in 2002, works emerge from the underworld years after being stolen, when an investigator gets a good tip or a middleman contacts another middleman who contacts the original owner, sniffing around for a reward.
And sometimes they have never turned up, although investigators continue to follow leads and owners continue to hope. Thousands of stolen masterpieces fit this category, including dozens of works by artists such as Degas, Rembrandt and Picasso.

Perhaps the most notorious case of this kind, and the one that museum officials say they would most like solved, is the 1990 theft of a cache of exquisite works, including a Rembrandt self-portrait and Vermeer's Concert, from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
In this week's Munch theft, police say their main evidence has been an abandoned car found not far from the museum; the paintings' discarded frames, found in a nearby field; interviews with guards and museumgoers who saw two men, one armed with a revolver, enter the museum and wrench the paintings from the walls; and closed-circuit television images.
The men's faces were covered by ski masks, says Jorn-Kristian Jorgensen, of the Oslo Police Department information section.
Thousands of stolen masterpieces have never turned up, including dozens of works by artists such as Degas, Rembrandt and Picasso.
No reward has yet been offered for the paintings' recovery, though such an offer is expected to emerge. Jorgensen says the police have tips from the public but will not elaborate.
"The art world is a special world in itself, and probably it's more psychiatry than crime," he says of the hunt for the thieves. "Why are people stealing art that cannot be sold to anyone? What are these people searching for? Are they searching for money? Are they searching for honour within their own criminal world?"
Investigators specialising in stolen art - many of them based in London, the centre of Europe's art markets - say art thieves in Europe, where most of the high-profile thefts take place, tend to fall into two categories.

Some are low-level criminals who are more likely to bungle the operation and dispose quickly of the works, often for a fraction of their value; others are members of organised gangs who use the paintings as collateral or bartering chips in underworld deals involving drugs, forged documents and weapons. In such cases, recovering the paintings, if they are recovered at all, can take years, even decades.
Tony Russell, formerly of Scotland Yard's art and antiques squad, says a recognisable artwork is almost impossible to unload for its value on the legitimate market, so pieces often end up as millstones for the criminals.
"They try to do deals within the criminal fraternity, to swap them for drugs or forged goods or whatever, and the new people who take them on realise that they can't do anything with them either," says Russell, who now works for Art Recovery Limited, a company that hunts for stolen works.
Unseasoned criminals who steal art to gain underworld prestige often prove to be the architects of their own undoing when they are unable to keep quiet about their triumph, Russell says.
"The problem is that the only way to advance your prestige is to tell your friends how clever you are, and then when the reward comes out, the friends talk. Like any other major crime, as soon as there is a large reward on offer, the worms start coming out of the woodwork. One, they're jealous that someone has this wonderful object and they don't, and two, there is a huge amount of money to be earned."
But investigators such as Russell and Charles Hill, another former Scotland Yard detective who is a private art-crime investigator, say recovery can often be extraordinarily complicated because the works tend to pass from hand to hand over the years, moving farther away from the criminals.
"You may know a man who knows the guy that's done it, and then you start getting closer to someone who can actually help you," Hill says.
"If they've spoken to a guy who's spoken to a guy, it takes a long time to get back to the source. Because they're inveterate liars, you get a vast flood of incorrect information, so you have to winnow it out."
In many instances, works are recovered almost out of the blue, long after investigators have stopped pursuing leads. In the case of the Titian, stolen from grand English country estate Longleat in 1995, Hill had to wait seven years before a breakthrough.
After mentioning the missing painting during a radio interview in 2002, he received a call from a man who claimed he could get it back in exchange for the offered $US150,000 ($A213,000) reward.
Hill then met the man, wired the money to his bank account, and found the painting wrapped in brown paper and stowed in a plastic shopping bag that had been left at a bus stop in west London.
Determining that the man was a "rogue dealer" many degrees of separation from the original thieves, he did not press too hard to discover the source.
In the case of the Munch paintings, Russell says: "There's a 95 per cent chance that they will be returned. The only question is, how long will that be?"
- New York Times