World War II Provenance Research

Overview | Related Publications

Select an image to view complete ownership history.

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Provenance Research Overview

From its inception, the National Gallery of Art has conducted extensive research into the provenance, or history of ownership, of objects in its collection, with particular attention over the past several years to the World War II era. In the course of this research it was discovered that the objects displayed on this page had in fact been looted during the war. Archival research uncovered documentation indicating that each of these works of art had been returned to its rightful owner after the war. These objects are displayed on this page with links to their ownership history. Wartime histories, including extensive archival references, are documented in their provenance footnotes. (See information on how to read Gallery provenance texts.) Another painting, Frans Snyders' Still Life with Fruit and Game, was determined to have been looted from a French collection and not subsequently restituted.

Several of these objects had been confiscated by the Nazi Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) from private French collections and stored at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. Captured German records, now at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, have been used to trace the confiscation and subsequent dispersal from the Jeu de Paume. Most of the Gallery objects confiscated in this manner were discovered in salt mines in southern Germany and Austria by the Allies in the last days of the war, and were removed to the Munich Central Collecting Point. Records from the Munich Central Collecting Point document the restitution of the objects to their countries of origin, where prewar owners or heirs claimed them. Other objects now in the National Gallery were recovered after the war and returned to owners in Liechtenstein, Austria, and Holland.

The National Gallery of Art provides known provenance information on this Web site for all paintings and sculpture in the collection. This research is an ongoing project, and the Gallery welcomes any information that would augment or clarify the ownership history of objects in its collection.

Related Publications

Captions

1	Camille Pissarro, Place du Carrousel, Paris, 1900
2	Gustave Courbet, La Bretonnerie in the Department of Indre, 1856
3	Henri Fantin-Latour, Self-Portrait, 1861
4	Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Madame Stumpf and Her Daughter, 1872
5	David Teniers II, Peasants Celebrating Twelfth Night, 1635
6	Henri Matisse, Pianist and Checker Players, 1924
7	Attributed to Hans Holbein, the Younger, Portrait of a Young Man, c. 1520/1530
8	Sir Peter Paul Rubens, Tiberius and Agrippina, c. 1614
9	Luca Signorelli, The Marriage of the Virgin, c. 1491
10	Henri Matisse, Still Life with Sleeping Woman, 1940
11	Lucas Cranach, the Elder, Portrait of a Man, 1522
12	Lucas Cranach, the Elder, Portrait of a Woman, 1522
13	Henri Matisse, Woman Seated in an Armchair, 1940
14	Matthys Cock, The Martyrdom of Saint Catherine, c. 1540
15	Master of the Death of Saint Nicholas of Münster, Calvary, c. 1470/1480
16	Alessandro Algardi, A Flagellator of Christ, c. 1630s
17	Jean-Antoine Houdon, Giuseppe Balsamo, Comte di Cagliostro, 1786
18	Eugène Boudin, On the Jetty, c. 1869/1870
19	Desiderio da Settignano, Ciborium for the Sacrament, c. 1455