Orléans Museum Launches Hunt for 424 Missing Paintings

The Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Orléans has launched a public appeal to locate 424 paintings missing from its collection, most of which disappeared in June 1940 when the museum's annex, the Musée Paul Fourché, was looted and burned during the German advance. Other works vanished over subsequent decades when they were deposited in government offices, a common practice before France's 2002 museum law. The museum has published a 172-page catalogue with detailed descriptions and photographs of each missing work. Because museum collections are inalienable and imprescriptible, the works remain the legal property of the institution. Four works have already been recovered in recent years: Louis Neillot's "Sous-bois, Bellevue" (1935) spotted at auction; Achille-Etna Michallon's "La Mort de Roland" (1818) spontaneously returned by a German couple; "Le Christ entre saint Paul et Apollos d'Alexandrie" (1546) returned by the Musée de Beauvais; and the head of Armand Le Véel's 1899 sculpture of Joan of Arc, recovered from ruins in 1944 and bequeathed in 2023.