The Raising of the Cross

In February 1941, with Paris under German occupation, this set of three panels was sold in Paris. The seller was the son of the Paris surgeon Théodore Tuffier. The buyer was Maria Dietrich, a Munich art dealer, who took it as a Rubens or perhaps a van Dyck, and a month later she sold it on to the museum Hitler was planning for Linz. After the war it turned up at the Allied collecting point in Munich, travelled back to Paris with the 36th convoy of recovered works, and was placed in the Louvre's care in 1950. It is Rubens's oil sketch for his triptych of 1609 and 1610 for Saint Walburga's church in Antwerp, now in the cathedral there. The Louvre holds it as an MNR, a recovered work kept on behalf of its rightful owners.