The story
Early on 14 December 1979, thieves broke into Friedenstein Palace in Gotha, then in East Germany, and left with five Old Master paintings, among them a portrait by Frans Hals and works by Hans Holbein the Elder, Anthony van Dyck, Jan Brueghel the Elder and Ferdinand Bol. Neither the police nor the Stasi, the East German secret police, solved the case. In 2019, after a lawyer approached the town, all five pictures came back, and in 2021 they were shown together here, in the Ducal Museum, which faces the palace across the park.
The building was made for the collections of the dukes of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. The architect Franz von Neumann the Elder designed it in Neo-Renaissance style, and it opened in 1879 after 15 years of work. After 1945 much of the collection was taken to the Soviet Union and returned only in the 1950s, and the museum reopened in its own building in 2013.
Today it shows Egyptian and classical antiquities, Chinese porcelain, 18th-century cork models of ancient buildings and paintings that include Caspar David Friedrich's Cross in the Mountains. Its most famous picture is the Gotha Lovers, from around 1480, by the anonymous Master of the Housebook. A young man and woman stand side by side, with ribbons of text about love and loyalty. The art historian Daniel Hess has identified them as Count Philipp of Hanau-Münzenberg and Margarete Weißkirchner, the woman he lived with after his wife died.
