The Madonna a Polish investigator spotted in Tokyo

An 1823 inventory placed this Madonna and Child in the Lubomirski palace in Przeworsk and named the Polish collector Stanisław Kostka Potocki as a prior owner. During the occupation, German authorities seized the work and recorded it as entry 145 in an inventory of 521 objects. After it was taken to Germany, the trail went cold for decades.

A late-1990s sale in New York offered the work as a painting by Alessandro Turchi, an attribution that has not been confirmed. In January 2022 a Polish restitution official noticed a matching work at a Tokyo auction. Specialists examined it, and Poland submitted a claim documenting its identity and wartime history to Mainichi Auction.

The auction house and the possessor agreed to a return without payment. The painting was formally handed over at the Polish Embassy in Tokyo on 31 May 2023. In July it was delivered to the Lubomirski Princes Museum, part of the Ossolineum in Wrocław. Poland’s culture ministry described it as the country’s first wartime art loss recovered from Japan.