THE ARCHIVE BY COUNTRY
Published reports from our archive, newest first.
A country may refer to the theft, recovery, return or legal proceedings. A case can be linked to more than one country.
10 reports
The culture ministry reported recovering several wartime losses, including a Torah scroll and two paintings. It confirmed that stained-glass panels had already returned to Malbork Castle and carvings to the National Museum in Gdańsk.
Specialists at the National Museum in Kraków, assisted by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, examined the pigments and ground of Country Huts among Trees and confirmed its attribution to Vincent van Gogh. The 1883 landscape went on display following conservation at the Museum of John Paul II and Primate Wyszyński in Warsaw.
The Museo de Pontevedra handed Mater Dolorosa and Ecce Homo over to Poland. The panels had belonged to the Czartoryski collection at Gołuchów and were listed as missing after World War II. Polish researchers identified them in the Spanish museum’s collection in 2019. The photo shows both panels.
Jean-Antoine Houdon, Bust of Diana, Royal Łazienki Museum, Warsaw. Photo: Аимаина хикари / Wikimedia Commons · CC0. Image source ↗
A Polish Ministry of Culture exhibition traced the bust from the royal collection through wartime removal to its identification at a Vienna auction. It returned to the Łazienki collection in November 2015.
The National Museum in Warsaw received Melchior Geldorp’s seventeenth-century Portrait of a Lady, lost from its collection during World War II. U.S. Homeland Security Investigations located and secured the painting in Los Angeles in 2016. The photograph shows the painting at the Warsaw ceremony.
Poland’s Ministry of Culture handed Izaak van den Blocke’s Descent of the Holy Spirit to the National Museum in Gdańsk. The painting, made around 1610 for the high altar of St Bridget’s Church, disappeared after 1945 and surfaced in 2007. The photograph shows the work at the museum.
The German Foreign Office announced a 31 March handover of Francesco Guardi’s painting, removed from Warsaw’s National Museum during the Second World War. Image: Wikimedia Commons.
Johann Conrad Seekatz, St. Philip Baptizing a Servant of Queen Kandaki. Image source ↗
US authorities announced the return of St. Philip Baptizing a Servant of Queen Kandaki to Poland. Looted from Warsaw’s museum during the Nazi occupation, it was identified at a London gallery, which cooperated with its recovery.
Gustave Courbet, Landscape near Ornans · Wikimedia Commons Image source ↗
Confiscated from the Herzog family’s bank deposit in 1944, Courbet’s landscape entered the National Museum in Warsaw and was returned to the family’s heirs in 2011.
Claude Monet, Beach in Pourville. Image published by Polish police. Image source ↗
Polish police announced the recovery on 12 January 2010 of Claude Monet’s Beach in Pourville. The painting had been stolen from Poznań’s National Museum in 2000 and replaced with a copy. A suspect was arrested; this report does not establish a conviction.
