'Wanted' Posters Recover First Nazi-Looted Painting for Orléans Museum

A 17th-century painting by Willem Cornelisz Duyster will return to the Orléans Fine Arts Museum in France after an amateur sleuth spotted it at a Swiss auction house last month. It is the first recovery in the museum's campaign to track down nearly 400 works looted during World War II.

"The Drinker," by the Dutch Golden Age painter, had been advertised for sale in Switzerland when the researcher identified it. The auction was stopped. The work will soon be returned to Orléans instead of going under the hammer, the museum's director, Olivia Voisin, confirmed.

How do you find 400 missing paintings?

Voisin, chief of the Orléans Fine Arts Museum, discusses her "cold cases" like a police detective. Her jurisdiction is art missing since the Nazis occupied the city in 1940.

Her method this summer was blunt. The museum printed "Wanted" posters showing the lost works, plastered them in and around Orléans, and flooded the internet with the images. It worked faster than anyone might have expected.

The approach resembles a missing-persons appeal more than standard provenance research (the tracing of an artwork's ownership history). One poster, one sharp-eyed reader, one painting found.

What happened at the auction house?

The Swiss business had listed the Duyster as a preparatory study — an early version made before a final painting. It did not know the canvas was in fact the known-to-be-missing final version.

"The auction house was very cordial," Voisin said of the firm that had advertised the Dutch work. The sale was withdrawn without a fight.

The mislabeling was understandable, if convenient for history's thieves. A "study" attracts less scrutiny than a lost masterpiece. That gap in description is exactly where looted works tend to hide.

Where will the painting hang?

"The Drinker" will eventually hang in a gallery dedicated to the missing works, Voisin said. The museum hopes the room will not stay half-empty — the wish is that other recovered paintings will join it over time.

The campaign does not run in a vacuum. France has recently taken steps to make it easier to repatriate artwork looted in war or during colonization, easing a legal path that was long and narrow.

For the remaining 399 cases, the posters stay up. The first solve came within months. The rest may take decades, or one more sharp-eyed reader in the right auction catalogue.