A Nude Man Reclining, Holding a Club

In 1834 a Polish nobleman, Prince Henryk Lubomirski, listed 30 drawings attributed to Dürer in an inventory of his collection, and this small sheet was among them. A curly-haired young man lies propped on one elbow, turning his head sharply aside, his hand resting on a club laid along the ground. It is drawn in pen and black ink on paper about 17 centimetres wide, with Dürer's monogram below, and the museum dates it to around 1526. In 1869 the collection went to Lviv, then a Habsburg city, as a museum inside the Ossoliński Institute, with the family keeping its rights over it. In July 1941, after German troops captured the city, the Nazi art official Kajetan Mühlmann took the Dürer drawings to Berlin, and Hitler kept them by him at least into September. They were recovered from the salt mine at Alt Aussee in Austria in 1945. In 1950 the United States handed them to the prince's grandson, George Lubomirski, who sold them, and this one reached Boston through the London dealers Colnaghi in 1959. The Ossoliński Institute, now in Wrocław, and the city of Lviv together with Ukraine's Academy of Sciences have challenged that 1950 decision, and the museum lists their claims on the drawing's own record.