Taken. Sold on. Hidden. Found. Fought over. Sometimes returned.
51 works in the archive were stolen, looted or confiscated: by armies, by the Nazi state, from tombs, from houses and museums. Some came back; some are still missing. Each record tells what happened next, step by step, with its sources.
Each status is the one the record documents on the date shown. It is not a statement about anyone who holds a work today beyond what the cited sources say.
Resurfaced or rediscovered after it was taken. Where ownership is contested the record says who claims it.
1886-1887 · Gold
Private collection, owner not named
Recorded among the confiscated Imperial treasures moved to the Moscow Kremlin Armoury in September 1917, Wartski states, the egg then went unrecorded for forty years and reached a private collector through the firm in 2014, an identification a rival museum has since disputed in print.
c. 1668 · Type IIb boron-bearing diamond
Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian records that the French Blue was stolen in a week-long looting of the crown jewels in September 1792, and that strong evidence indicates the recut French Blue is the stone known today as the Hope Diamond.
c. 1495-1505 · Wool warp with wool
The Met Cloisters, New York, Gallery 17
The Metropolitan Museum records that the tapestries were looted during the French Revolution and recovered in the 1850s, and its provenance line says the chateau at Verteuil is said to have been looted in 1793; the family sold the set in 1923 and it has been at The Cloisters since 1937.
1916-1917 · Oil on canvas
Galleria d'Arte Moderna Ricci Oddi, Piacenza
Taken from the Ricci Oddi on 22 February 1997 by means the gallery says were never established, and found in the gallery's own outside wall on 10 December 2019.
One artwork and its story every Tuesday, with the picture: who owned it, what it made, and what closes soon in the exhibition calendar. No promotion, and nothing we cannot cite.
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