A settlement funded by the Ernst von Siemens Art Foundation brings the work back as five Rubens sketches reunite at Gotha’s Ducal Museum for an exhibition opening on 9 November.
The Prophet Elijah in the Golden Chariot, an oil sketch by Peter Paul Rubens that ended up in a private US collection, has been recovered for Gotha, Germany, through a private settlement. The Ernst von Siemens Art Foundation funded the recovery, and Paris auction house Cabinet Turquin mediated the agreement, The Art Newspaper said.
The sketch joins four related works at Gotha’s Ducal Museum for the first time since 1945. The exhibition opens on 9 November, with one of the five works on loan rather than returned to Gotha.
Martin Hoernes, the funding foundation’s secretary general, said the agreed payment was a “figure in the low millions,” below market price. He described the owners’ acquisition as a “good-faith purchase” and said no one wanted to criminalize them.
The fifth sketch, St. Augustine, remains the property of the Foundation E. G. Bührle Collection, which is displayed at Kunsthaus Zurich. The foundation agreed to lend it to Gotha for the exhibition.
Rubens, a Flemish painter, made the five oil sketches on wood in 1620 and 1621 as preparations for ceiling paintings in Antwerp’s Jesuit church. The sketches preserve the designs after a lightning-triggered fire destroyed the ceiling paintings in 1718.
The ducal family had ceased to own the sketches in 1918, but its representatives took three in the final weeks of the Second World War. The works went to Coburg for protection and were then illicitly sold onto the US art market. The Red Army looted the other two, which were returned to Gotha in 1959.
In 2024, a museum in Buffalo, New York, returned one of the three sold works, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, with help from Christie’s. That return was separate from the settlement for Elijah.
The museum’s public viewing period runs from 10 November 2026, through 9 May 2027, in its Dutch Hall. The exhibition also marks the 450th anniversary of Rubens’s birth in 2027.
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