Romanian villager sends priceless works of Picasso, Matisse and Monet up in smoke

A development in the case of seven artworks by the likes of Picasso, Matisse and Monet stolen last year from a museum in the Netherlands has art lovers gasping this week at the discovery the paintings might have been incinerated.

A woman from a small Romanian village said she burned the paintings in her wood stove after her son was arrested as a suspect in an elaborate heist at the Kunsthal museum in October.

The New York Times reported that works by Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, Lucian Freud and Meyer de Haan were stolen that night, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars in value.

And now they could be ashes.

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If Olga Dogaru's story is true, she destroyed the precious artworks, perhaps seeing only paper, canvas and evidence against her son rather than pieces of cultural history.

The Associated Press reported scientists analyzing the ashes from Dogaru's fire found canvas, paint and nails, and some of the material dated from before the 20th century.

The thieves couldn't sell the famous works before, but they can't even look at them now.

The director of the National History Museum, Ernest Oberlander-Tarnoveanu, told the New York Times that if she really had burned these paintings, it was "a barbarian crime against humanity."