Vase of Flowers

In January 2019 the wall where this painting belongs held a black and white photograph of it instead, with one word printed underneath in three languages: stolen, rubato, gestohlen. The director of the Uffizi had put it there to ask Germany for the picture back. It had been missing since July 1944. Palazzo Pitti emptied its walls in 1940 and the crates travelled to Poggio a Caiano, then to a villa near Montespertoli, then north with the retreating German army to Castel Giovo in the Passiria valley. There a Wehrmacht lance corporal opened a crate and posted the flower piece home to his wife in Halle. Nothing was heard of it until November 1989, weeks after the Berlin Wall came down, when the family holding it asked the Bavarian state galleries what it was and what it was worth. Germany handed it back on 19 July 2019 in the Sala Bianca of Palazzo Pitti. Grand Duke Leopold II had bought it in 1824 from a Mannheim dealer for the gallery he was then founding, and it hangs again in the Sala dei Putti, signed along the edge of the painted marble slab, Jan Van H.