The marble Susanna whose owners Berlin had lost

In Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie, Reinhold Begas’s marble Susanna had a display history but no securely identified prewar owner. The museum could trace the sculpture to a postwar return from the Soviet Union, probably in 1956 or 1958, and to its transfer from Leipzig to the Nationalgalerie in 1994. When the gallery reopened in 2001, visitors could see the sculpture among other works by Begas.

The missing name was Felicia Lachmann-Mosse. She had inherited the collection assembled by her parents, the publisher Rudolf Mosse and his wife Emilie. After Felicia and Hans Lachmann-Mosse fled Germany in 1933, their property was placed under state supervision. Auction houses sold the art collection the following year without the family receiving a share. Research by the Mosse Art Restitution Project identified Susanna in the collection through 1933.

The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation returned Susanna to Felicia’s heirs on 1 December 2016. The arrangement initially kept the sculpture in Berlin as a loan. The family’s restitution project subsequently recorded a purchase by the foundation. The figure in the gallery therefore remained familiar to visitors even as its ownership history and the circumstances of the loss were acknowledged.