Duchess Portrait Missing Since World War II Returns to Heir
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An 18th-century oil portrait of a German duchess that was lost in Poland during World War II has returned 70 years later to Weimar, the city where it was first commissioned by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Duchess Anna Amalia of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach was portrayed as a lover of the arts by the artist Angelika Kauffmann in her Rome studio in 1789. The painting went missing from the duchess’s descendants’ palace in World War II, only to resurface in 2011 when a Polish consignor took it to Sotheby’s.