“More than half a million valuable works of art were missing from Polish public, private and church collections as a result of wartime actions, planned looting carried out by the occupying forces, as well as looting and theft. Restitution efforts by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage in recent years have led to the discovery and recovery of almost 700 individual objects”, said the head of the ministry, Piotr Gli\u0144ski, during the handover ceremony.<\/p>\n
The ‘Lady with a Fan’ print probably dates from the 19th century. It is an oleo-print with hand-painted elements, made on paper and then pasted onto canvas. The graphic was probably taken out of Wilan\u00f3w in the autumn of 1944 during an operation led by the German commissioner Alfred Schellenberg.<\/p>\n
In May 2023, a German couple applied for the return of the artwork, on the back of which the Wilan\u00f3w markings were preserved. The previous owners decided to unconditionally return the ‘Lady with a Fan’ to the King John III Palace Museum in Wilan\u00f3w.<\/p>\n
The lithograph “Royal Steelworks”, dated 1840-1850, is the work of Ernst Wilhelm Knippel (1811-1900), a German draughtsman, printmaker and publisher who created a series of around 80 lithographs depicting Upper Silesian landscapes. ‘The Royal Ironworks’ is one of the lithographs from this series.<\/p>\n
In February 2023, the lithograph was put up for sale at the Mehlis auction house in Saxony, Germany. The previous owner of the object – after reviewing the materials provided by the MKiDN. proving the origin of the work from the pre-war collection of the Silesian Museum in Katowice – decided to voluntarily return the work.<\/p>\n
Arkadsiusz S\u0142omczy\u0144ski<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Polish wartime losses – the graphic “Lady with a fan” from the collection of the King John III Palace Museum in Wilan\u00f3w and the lithograph “Royal Steelworks” by Ernst Wilhelm…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":46588,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture"],"yoast_head":"\n