"We believe the painting is Cezanne's Boy in a Red Waistcoat, and three suspects were detained in connection with that," a police official, who asked not to be named, said yesterday.
"Experts in Serbia and abroad are trying to ascertain whether the painting is the original. The original is worth tens of millions of euros," he said.
Boy in a Red Waistcoat was one of four paintings stolen from a Swiss art gallery in 2008 by three masked armed robbers who burst in just before closing time and told staff to lie on the floor while they took what they wanted.
The heist was the biggest art theft in Swiss history and one of the biggest in the world.
The Emil Georg Buehrle gallery, in Zurich, a private collection, from which the paintings were stolen, could not be reached for comment yesterday.
Two of the stolen canvasses, one by Claude Monet and the other by Vincent van Gogh, were recovered days after the heist. But the Cezanne and a painting by Edgar Degas have been missing for four years.
Boy in a Red Waistcoat is thought to have been painted in about 1888 and depicts a boy in traditional Italian dress, including a red waistcoat, a blue handkerchief and a blue belt. Three other versions of the painting are in museums in the US.
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