Two Baroque paintings are reunited

After more than 70 years, the painting Landschaft italienischen Charakters [Landscape of an Italian character] by Austrian artist Johann Franz Nepomuk Lauterer (1700-1733, Inv. No. 5258) has returned from the USA to the Bavarian State Painting Collections. Reported as a wartime loss after the Second World War and registered in the German Lost Art Foundation’s Lost Art database since 2012, the painting has been reunited with its counterpart (BStGS, Inv. No. 5259).

Featuring complementary motifs, the paintings were originally held at Neustift Monastery near Freising and were exhibited at external locations from the 19th century onwards – at Schaezlerpalais in Augsburg in the early 20th century and at the gallery in Bayreuth Palace from 1924.

When the war broke out in 1939, the museums and branch galleries of the Bavarian State Painting Collections were closed and all paintings were moved to various salvage points in order to protect them from bombing, some being transferred for safekeeping to historical buildings such as Neuschwanstein Castle and Herrenchiemsee. These relocations were carried out according to priority lists, with restorative support and security being provided in order to ensure the works of art were carefully preserved. Documentation of the new storage locations was also carefully maintained and has been preserved in the form of numerous meticulously compiled lists. Nevertheless, there is no evidence that the missing painting was removed from Bayreuth and its whereabouts have been unknown since the beginning of the war. It may possibly have fallen victim to looting.

The first search requests issued by the Bavarian State Painting Collections were made in inventories published in 1965 and 1973, but no clues emerged as to the painting’s whereabouts as a result. Having disappeared without trace, the painting then turned up in the US art trade for the first time in 2011. At that time it was offered to the Bavarian State Painting Collections for purchase. Negotiations with the descendants of a US occupation soldier failed, however, and all trace of the painting vanished once again. From 2012 onwards, the painting was listed in the Lost Art Database along with almost 700 other search requests entered by the Bavarian State Painting Collections.

Then in 2022 the missing painting turned up in the USA once again: it was identified as Lauterer’s lost landscape by Christopher A. Marinello, founder of Art Recovery International, New York, in collaboration with German lawyers Mara Wantuch-Thole and Ewald Volhard.

The repatriation of the painting was organised with the support of the Federal Foreign Office and the German Consulate General in Chicago, and it was reunited with its counterpart in the holdings of the Bavarian State Painting Collections in Munich at the end of October 2023.

The painter and his work

Johann Franz Nepomuk Adam Lauterer (1700-1733) worked as an artist in his home city of Vienna from about 1715 to 1733, having been trained by the landscape painter Josef Orient (1677-1747). Lauterer’s Italianate landscapes are inspired by those of the Dutch painter Nicolaes Berchem (1621/22-1683), who worked mainly in Haarlem and Amsterdam. The painting Landschaft italienischen Charakters [Landscape of an Italian character] is a counterpart to a wooden panel of the same size (17.8 x 25.9 cm) showing a landscape of travellers and shepherds at a ford in the river (BStGS, Inv. No. 5258). The two motifs complement each other, forming a broad panoramic landscape when placed together. In addition to these two paintings, the Bavarian State Painting Collections possess four other canvas paintings by the artist that came to Munich from the gallery in Zweibrücken in 1799.