Five Lost Rubens Sketches Hang Together in Gotha for the First Time in 80 Years
Five small oil sketches by Peter Paul Rubens, the Flemish painter, are on show together in Gotha, Germany, for the first time in more than 80 years. The Art Newspaper reports that the works will hang in the Ducal Museum, a building put up between 1864 and 1879 at the foot of Friedenstein Castle.
An oil sketch is a preliminary study, a quick version of a painting made before the final work. Rubens painted a group of 22 of them on wood in 1620 and 1621. They were preparation for ceiling paintings for the Jesuit church in Antwerp, Belgium. The Jesuits are a Catholic religious order. Lightning struck that church in 1718 and it burned, so the ceiling paintings no longer exist.
Five of the sketches were kept at Schloss Friedenstein, the castle in Gotha, for generations. Some had been there since at least the early 19th century, and one for three centuries. All five had gone from the castle by the end of the Second World War.
The paths they took were different. Three were taken by representatives of the ducal family, which had not owned them since 1918. They were moved to Coburg and sold on illicitly to the US art market, according to the same report. Two were looted by the Red Army, the Soviet military, and were returned to Gotha in 1959.
Getting the sketches back has taken decades of work. A museum in Buffalo, New York, returned the sketch of St. Gregory of Nazianzus in 2024, with help from the auction house Christie's. Another, The Prophet Elijah in the Golden Chariot, came from a private collection in the United States. It was recovered through a private settlement, an agreement reached outside the courts, mediated by the Paris auction house Cabinet Turquin. The Ernst von Siemens Art Foundation paid for it. The agreed sum is reported as a figure in the low millions, below market price.
Martin Hoernes, secretary general of the Ernst von Siemens Art Foundation, described the previous owners' acquisition as a good-faith purchase. That means they bought the work without knowing it had been taken. The sketch of St. Augustine is different again. It belongs to the Foundation E.G. Bührle Collection, which displays it at Kunsthaus Zurich, and it has been lent to Gotha for the joint show.
The special exhibition is called "Rubens in Gotha," according to the foundation's press invitation, and it is set to run until 9 May 2027. It also marks the 450th anniversary of Rubens' birth. Tobias Pfeifer-Helke, director of the Friedenstein Foundation Gotha, oversees the castle's collections. The Friedenstein Foundation has described its Rubens exhibition as a story of "art crime, loss and return," and says it shows the painter's style and temperament up close.
For a reader far from Germany, the show is a reminder of how a painting's history can be as long as its making. Each sketch carries a paper trail of owners, sales and claims, the documented chain of ownership known as provenance. Five small wooden panels, painted nearly 400 years ago, have now been traced back to one place and put side by side again.
