After a stopover in the United States that lasted almost a century, a baroque painting that disappeared during World War II was returned to Germany on Thursday. The FBI handed over the artwork by 18th-century Austrian artist Johann Franz Nepomuk Lauterer to a German museum representative in a brief ceremony at the German consulate in Chicago, where the pastoral piece depicting an Italian countryside was on display.
Art Recovery International, a company focused on locating and recovering stolen and looted art, tracked down the painting after being approached last year by a person in Chicago claiming to possess a “stolen or looted painting” that his uncle brought back to the US. U.S. after serving in the Army during World War II.
The painting has been missing since 1945 and was first reported stolen from the Bavarian State Painting Collections in Munich. It was added to the database of the German Lost Art Foundation in 2012, according to a statement from the art recovery company.
“The crux of our work at Art Recovery International is the investigation and restitution of works of art looted by the Nazis and discovered in public or private collections. "Sometimes we come across cases like this, where Allied soldiers may have taken home items such as souvenirs or war trophies," said company founder Christopher Marinello.
The identity of the Chicago resident who had the painting was not shared. The person initially asked to be paid for the artwork. "I explained our policy of not paying for stolen art and that the request was inappropriate," Marinello said.
"We also know that someone tried to sell the painting on the Chicago art market in 2011 and it disappeared when the museum filed a claim," he added. But with the help of the FBI's Art Crimes Team, attorneys and the museum, Marinello negotiated the unconditional surrender of the artwork.
The painting, titled Landscape of Italian Character, will now be reunited with its counterpart, which shares similar motifs and imagery, according to the museum. The two paintings together form a panoramic scene showing shepherds and travelers with their goats, cows, donkeys and sheep at a river ford.
The pair will soon be exhibited together for the first time since World War II at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, according to Bernd Ebert, the museum's chief curator of Dutch and German baroque paintings.
Recovering a long-lost painting "is actually a very strange moment for us," Ebert said. "It is exciting". The Viennese artist Johann Franz Nepomuk Lauterer lived between 1700 and 1733.
When war broke out in 1939, many Bavarian museum collections were evacuated to safe locations in the region, but Lauterer's painting has been missing since the start of the war.
The Bavarian State Painting Collection began searching for the painting between 1965 and 1973, but clues to its location did not emerge until decades later. Ebert, who flew from Munich to Chicago to retrieve the painting, will carefully bubble wrap the century-old landscape to take it home, where it will be restored after several eventful decades.
