Winter: Napoleon’s Retreat from Moscow by Polish painter Alfred Wierusz-Kowalski disappeared after the outbreak of World War II.
Culture Minister Marta Cienkowska described it as "one of the most valuable recovered wartime losses of Polish painting."
The work depicts Napoleon’s disastrous retreat from Moscow in 1812, with the defeated French army making its way through the Russian winter.
Wierusz-Kowalski, a leading representative of the Munich school of Polish painting, was better known for genre scenes, including travelers, horse-drawn sleighs and wolves in winter landscapes.
The painting belonged to Andrzej Rotwand, an engineer and banker whose family assembled one of Poland’s major private art collections in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
It included works by Jan Matejko, Wojciech Gerson and Józef Brandt.
In 1939, the Wierusz-Kowalski painting was among 31 works from the Rotwand collection loaned to an exhibition at Warsaw’s Zachęta art gallery. The exhibition, which opened in June of that year, was still running when Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939.
The works were subsequently moved on German orders to the National Museum in Warsaw. Objects gathered there were confiscated by the occupation authorities, while others were taken to decorate German offices and officials’ residences.
The last known wartime record of the Wierusz-Kowalski painting dates from October 15, 1940. It was then being used to decorate a club for senior SS and police officials in Warsaw's Blank Palace on Senatorska Street.
The painting’s fate after that was unknown until its previous owner, Ewa Tsonis, née Koryzna, began to investigate its history with the help of Mieczysław Węglewicz.
Experts from the National Museum later confirmed that it was the missing work.
Tsonis said her father, Michał Stefan Koryzna, had bought the painting in the 1960s, apparently in the southern Polish city of Kraków, with no knowledge of its wartime history.
"I grew up with this painting," she said. "It was very much appreciated and loved in our family. At some point, the time came for all of Poland to see it."
Tsonis contacted the culture ministry and offered to transfer the painting to a public collection. It survives in very good condition and retains its original frame.
National Museum director Agnieszka Lajus said the historical subject made the work unusual within Wierusz-Kowalski’s output.
The artist, one of the best-known Polish painters of the second half of the 19th century, usually concentrated on scenes of everyday life, travel, conflict and winter landscapes.
Cienkowska presented Tsonis with a culture ministry diploma in recognition of her decision to return the work to public ownership.
More than 920 cultural objects have been returned to Poland through the ministry’s restitution work. It is currently pursuing more than 200 cases in 18 countries.
(rt/gs)
Source: PAP