Lost during the Second World War, the painting ‘Portrait of Adam Stanisław Naruszewicz’ has returned to the collection of the King John III Palace Museum in Wilanów thanks to the restitution efforts of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (MKiDN).

The ceremony of the presentation and handing over of the painting in the White Room of the Wilanów museum was attended by the Secretary of State at the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, General Conservator of Antiquities Bożena Żelazowska. During her speech, she recalled that since the beginning of the 1990s, the Ministry of Culture has been searching for and restoring to its parent collections objects lost during World War II.

“This is a daily, intensive search and research work. Data on the missing works is collected in a database of war losses, which is being developed all the time. At present, there are nearly 70,000 records in it, and this is only a fraction of the losses suffered by Polish collections during the last war”, reported the Deputy Minister.

“The Portrait of Adam Stanisław Naruszewicz was described in two historical inventories of the Wilanów Palace and in W. Czajewski’s 1893 guidebook. Like many objects from the Wilanów collection, it was lost in unknown circumstances during World War II. 

At the end of 2020, the painting was found in a private collection in Germany. As it later turned out, it appeared there in the early 1990s from the Polish antiquarian market. The provenance of the object was indicated by the marking on the back in the form of the number 820 and the stencilled designation ‘Galerya Obrazów w Willanowie’.

Almost 350 objects lost from the Wilanów collection are registered in the database of war losses maintained by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. In recent years, the Wilanów collection has seen the return of a ladies’ desk and a cabinet – 18th-century Chinese-style furniture recovered from the Museum of Decorative Arts in Dresden – and a ‘Lady with a Fan’ – a 19th-century print pasted on canvas, returned by a German couple from Berlin.

Arkadiusz Słomczyński