Five oil sketches by Peter Paul Rubens will be shown together at the Ducal Museum in Gotha, Germany, for the first time since they were lost more than 80 years ago.
The five works depicting saints were part of a group of 22 sketches that Rubens painted on wood in 1620 and 1621 as preparation for the ceiling paintings of the Jesuit church in Antwerp, which was the biggest commission he had received by that time. The sketches are particularly important because the ceiling paintings, which were famous in the 17th century, are no longer in existence. The church was hit by a lightning bolt in 1718 and burned down.
The sketches were among the most valuable works in the collections at Schloss Friedenstein in Gotha, where they had been since at least the early 19th century; one had been there for three centuries. But by the end of the Second World War, all five had disappeared.
Three were taken by representatives of the ducal family—which had not been their owners since 1918. They returned to the castle as American and Soviet forces closed in on Gotha and, according to experts, removed truckloads of art in the last weeks of the war. Three sketches were transported to the city of Coburg for protection and from there, they were illicitly sold and ended up on the US art market. The two remaining studies were looted by the Red Army and were restituted to Gotha in 1959.
For many decades the three sold by the ducal family remained lost. Then in 2024, one of them, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, was returned by a museum in Buffalo, New York, with help from Christie’s. Now a fourth, The Prophet Elijah in the Golden Chariot, which ended up in a private US collection, has been recovered in a private settlement mediated by the Paris auction house Cabinet Turquin. The recovery was funded by the Ernst von Siemens Art Foundation, which frequently acquires art for German museums.
Peter Paul Rubens, De heilige Augustinus (Augustine of Hippo, 1620)
© Sammlung Emil Bührle, Dauerleighgabe im Kunsthaus Zurich
Martin Hoernes, the secretary general of the Ernst von Siemens Art Foundation, said a “figure in the low millions” had been agreed, below the market price. “No one wanted to criminalise the current owners,” he said, describing their acquisition of the sketch as a “good-faith purchase”.
The fifth sketch, showing St. Augustine, belongs to the Foundation E. G. Bührle Collection, which is on display in the Kunsthaus Zurich. The Bührle Foundation has agreed to loan it to Gotha’s Ducal Museum so that it can be shown alongside the other four for an exhibition, which opens today (9 November) and marks the 450th anniversary of Rubens’ birth next year.
“It is nothing short of a miracle that Peter Paul Rubens’ five oil studies can now be seen together at the Ducal Museum,” Tobias Pfeifer-Helke, the director of the Friedenstein Foundation Gotha, said in a statement. “They are not only five unique masterpieces by the Flemish painter and the jewels of the Gotha art collection, but also bear witness to European and international history.”