Rubens’ lost oil sketches reunited in Gotha
Five oil sketches by Peter Paul Rubens are on view together at the Ducal Museum in Gotha, Germany, for the first time since they vanished at the end of the Second World War. The display opens on 9 November and brings back a rare preparatory group tied to one of Rubens’ major commissions.
Painted on wood in 1620 and 1621, the five saints were part of a set of 22 sketches made for the ceiling of the Jesuit church in Antwerp, the largest commission Rubens had received at that point. They matter because the celebrated ceiling paintings no longer survive: the church was struck by lightning in 1718 and burned down.
The works had been among the most prized objects in the Schloss Friedenstein collection in Gotha, where they had been kept since at least the early 19th century. By the war’s end, however, all five had disappeared, with two later returned to Gotha in 1959 after looting by the Red Army and three others moving through Coburg and onto the US art market.
One of the missing sketches, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, was returned in 2024 by a museum in Buffalo, with help from Christie’s. Another, The Prophet Elijah in the Golden Chariot, was recovered through a private settlement mediated by the Paris auction house Cabinet Turquin, with funding from the Ernst von Siemens Art Foundation.
The fifth work, St. Augustine, belongs to the E. G. Bührle Collection Foundation and is normally on view at the Kunsthaus Zurich. Its loan makes it possible to see the group together again, offering a close look at Rubens’ working process: the speed of the brush, the placement of figures, and the way a grand ceiling scheme begins on a small wooden panel.
Source : The Art Newspaper