Jewess with Oranges

Gierymski painted this poor Warsaw street seller around 1880 to 1881, in the years he spent working the two riverside districts of the city and looking hard at the people nobody else painted. An old Jewish woman in a worn cap and shawl carries two baskets of oranges, the rooftops of Warsaw behind her. Then the picture disappeared. It was looted during the German occupation in the Second World War and vanished for decades, one of the many Polish works simply gone. It turned up again in 2010, offered for sale at an antiques market in the small German town of Buxtehude. A Polish journalist went to see it, the identification held, and after a foundation paid compensation to the German owner, the painting came home to the National Museum in Warsaw in July 2011.