Loot art City of Winterthur returns a painting to Poland after investigations

The "Self-Portrait at the Age of 72" by Anton Graff no longer hangs in Winterthur's town hall: the city has returned the painting, which disappeared during the Second World War, to Poland, as it announced on Friday.

According to the press release, the city bought the painting by the portrait painter, who was born in Winterthur in 1736 and died in Dresden in 1813, from a Basel art dealer for 16,800 francs in 1986. He had previously acquired it from a Swedish private collection.

In 2019, the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland contacted Winterthur to say that the self-portrait had been lost during the Second World War and should be returned to Poland.

Investigations by the city of Winterthur have now revealed that the "Self-portrait at the age of 72" is in fact a painting that was exhibited in a museum in Wrocław in 1937. However, after being evacuated to a depot in 1939, the artwork "disappeared for reasons that are no longer comprehensible and could no longer be found".

The city of Winterthur therefore decided to restitute the painting, it states in its press release. By returning the painting to Poland, it is also acknowledging the connection to Wroclaw, where Graff's art is also valued.

Anton Graff was a classicist painter. In the late 18th century, he became the "real creator of bourgeois portraits of women and men in Germany and at the same time the preferred portrait painter of poets and thinkers between the Enlightenment, Weimar Classicism and early Romanticism", the city of Winterthur pays tribute to the artist in its press release. It owns numerous other paintings by him.

SDA