Annunciation

Andrea Solario signed and dated this Annunciation in 1506, at the lower right, and its later life can be followed almost owner by owner. Before 1672 it belonged to the Phélypeaux de La Vrillière family, secretaries of state to the French kings. It went through Paris sales in 1779 and 1782, turned up in a Glasgow collection around 1900, then belonged to the American transit financier Charles Yerkes in New York, and was sold again in Paris in 1914.

In May 1941, in occupied Paris, it came up at the Hôtel Drouot and was bought for the German dealer Karl Haberstock, who sold it early in 1942 to the museum Hitler planned for Linz. At the end of the war it was stored in the salt mine at Altaussee in Austria, passed through the Allied collecting point in Munich and came back to France in 1946.

It belongs to the group known as MNR, works recovered after the war whose rightful owners have not yet been identified, held by the national museums until they are. The Louvre has kept it since 1950, and it hangs in the Grande Galerie.