Napoleon’s Loot: When the World Decided Stolen Art Should Go Back

June 30, 2024 9:48 AM

As museums encounter increasing claims on their collections, experts say much of the debate hearkens back to 1815, when the Louvre was forced to surrender the spoils of war. “In September 1815, Karl von Müffling, the Prussian governor of Paris, presented himself at the doors of the Louvre and ordered its French guards to step aside. Belgian and Dutch officials, backed by Prussian and British troops, had arrived to reclaim art treasures plundered by the French during the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. This moment is recognized by many scholars as a sea change in political attitudes toward the spoils of war and is seen as the birth of repatriation, the concept of returning cultural goods taken in times of conflict to the countries from which they were stolen.” Nina Siegel for the NYT.

Dutch museum looted by Napoleon does not seek restitution
An exhibition at the Mauritshuis in The Hague has revealed that the Dutch are still missing 67 paintings looted by the French in Napoleonic times (Senay Boztas for The Art Newspaper 2023).

repatriation previously.

posted by bq (3 comments total)

related: Museum of Looted Antiquities
bq, thank you for this: the fact that the French looted the artwork was terrible, an act of war, but it sparked this public education campaign, both in France but also in other countries
love the Louvre [art&object]
with Bey & Jay
posted by HearHere at 11:23 AM on June 30 [2 favorites]

Haul of shame – the ‘trophy art’ taken from Germany by the Red Army

By the end of the Second World War, an estimated 20 per cent of all the art in Europe was in Nazi possession. Some works were later recovered, but millions of paintings and sculptures, as well as books and archives, were not. Three-quarters of a century on, fallout from this era still drifts across continents. An occasional lawsuit will revive debate about cultural patrimony on the opinion pages; a Sotheby’s lot at an auction might surface an Old Master painting found in a Bavarian basement. Most of these cases involve the descendants of private collectors forced to sell or hand over works. These are windows on to specific personal histories, yet they are only a part of a much larger story. More than 60 years after the war, more than a million artworks taken from Germany by the Red Army at the end of the war are still being held in Moscow and St Petersburg.

posted by pracowity at 12:19 PM on June 30 [1 favorite]

The British Museum is the largest active crime scene in the world.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 1:20 PM on June 30 [1 favorite]