The Ruysdael hidden behind the wrong catalogue image

In 1943 Ferenc Chorin put works from his collection into a vault at the Hungarian Commercial Bank of Pest. Among them was Ruysdael’s upright panel of the road to Beverwijk, which he had probably acquired from the estate of Frigyes Glück. After German forces occupied Hungary in 1944, the Jewish industrialist and his family fled. The bank later reported that Chorin’s vault had been emptied in January 1945 during the siege of Budapest.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston bought the painting from a London dealer in 1982 with only a reference to a Swiss collection. A 1988 publication about Hungarian wartime losses included Chorin’s missing Ruysdael with an incorrect image and description. The published entry and the panel in Boston were therefore difficult to connect. The painting’s path between the vault and its appearance on the art market remains incompletely documented.

Scholar Sándor Juhász alerted the museum in 2019 that the panel had belonged to Glück. The MFA posted the new ownership information online, where the Chorin heirs found it in 2021. The museum announced the return agreement in January 2022. By June, Christie’s listed the painting as already restituted before offering it in New York.