BERLIN — A Vincent van Gogh painting was stolen early Monday from a small museum in Laren in the Netherlands, just 20 miles southeast of Amsterdam, on what would have been the artist’s 167th birthday.

“I feel enormous anger and sadness,” Jan Rudolph de Lorm, the museum’s director, said in a telephone interview. “Because especially in these dark days that we are in, I feel so strongly that art is here to comfort us, to inspire us and to heal us.”

The police were called to the museum at 3:15 a.m., when an alarm went off. By the time they got there, the thief or thieves were already gone, said a spokeswoman for the Dutch police.

All the police found was a shattered glass door and a bare spot on the wall where the painting was displayed. Hours later, the authorities announced that the work, “The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring,” was taken.