Five Rubens sketches reunite in Gotha after more than 80 years

By Grace Kim

Five Peter Paul Rubens oil sketches will reunite at Gotha’s Ducal Museum on 9 November, more than 80 years after disappearing from Schloss Friedenstein.

The museum will show the five studies together for the first time since their wartime disappearance. Two returned through restitution, one through a private settlement, and one remains in Zurich but has been loaned for the exhibition. The exhibition also marks the 450th anniversary of Rubens’ birth next year.

What do the sketches reveal about a lost ceiling?

The five works depicting saints formed part of 22 oil sketches Rubens painted on wood in 1620 and 1621. They prepared him for the ceiling paintings of the Jesuit church in Antwerp, the biggest commission he had received by that time.

The ceiling paintings became famous in the 17th century. They no longer exist: lightning struck the church in 1718, and it burned down. The sketches’ importance lies in that loss, because they show the preparation behind a ceiling that has disappeared.

How did the sketches disappear and return?

Schloss Friedenstein held the sketches among its most valuable works since at least the early 19th century. One had remained there for three centuries. By the end of the Second World War, however, all five had disappeared.

• Three were taken by representatives of the ducal family, which had not owned them since 1918. The representatives returned to the castle as American and Soviet forces closed in on Gotha. According to experts, they removed truckloads of art in the war’s final weeks.
• The three sketches went to Coburg for protection. They were then illicitly sold there and entered the US art market.
• The remaining two were looted by the Red Army. They were restituted to Gotha in 1959.

St. Gregory of Nazianzus returned to Gotha in 2024. A museum in Buffalo, New York, returned it with help from Christie’s, the auction house.

The Prophet Elijah in the Golden Chariot followed from a private US collection. Cabinet Turquin, the Paris auction house, mediated the private settlement. The Ernst von Siemens Art Foundation funded the recovery and frequently acquires art for German museums.

Martin Hoernes, the foundation’s secretary general, said the agreement involved a “figure in the low millions,” 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.”

St. Augustine completes the group. The Foundation E. G. Bührle Collection owns it and displays it at the Kunsthaus Zurich. The foundation has agreed to lend it to Gotha’s Ducal Museum for the exhibition.

What does the reunion change for visitors?

Tobias Pfeifer-Helke, the director of the Friedenstein Foundation Gotha, said in a statement: “It is nothing short of a miracle that Peter Paul Rubens’ five oil studies can now be seen together at the Ducal Museum.” In the same statement, he said: “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.”

For visitors, the practical change is access: five studies tied to the same vanished ceiling can be seen together for the first time in more than 80 years. The exhibition does not bring back the destroyed paintings; it makes Rubens’ preparatory work the focus.

Timed to the 450th anniversary of Rubens’ birth next year, the exhibition gives the five recovered and loaned studies a shared public setting. They document both a ceiling destroyed in 1718 and the dispersal, illicit sale and restitution that separated the works for more than 80 years.