The story
A Rembrandt hangs in a moated castle on the Dutch border, in a house the same princely family has lived in for more than 300 years. Diana Bathing with her Nymphs, painted in 1634, fits two stories from the Roman poet Ovid onto one canvas, the hunter Actaeon surprising the goddess at her bath, and the nymph Callisto, whose pregnancy is discovered. Prince Ludwig Carl Otto zu Salm-Salm bought it from a Paris dealer in 1774.
The Salm family settled at Anholt around 1700 and turned the medieval water castle into a baroque residence. Paintings already appear in a castle inventory of 1576, and the museum today shows more than 750 objects, about 260 of them paintings, mostly Dutch and Flemish work of the 16th and 17th centuries by artists such as Gerard ter Borch, Gerard van Honthorst and David Teniers the Younger.
Bombing in March 1945 destroyed about 70 percent of the castle. The collection survived because it had been stored in a mine in the Sauerland, a hill region in Westphalia, and it went back on show once the house was restored.
