Wilhelm Trübner, “Student Michaelis With a Roll of Paper”

In 1998, as part of the Washington Conference Principles, forty-four countries committed to thoroughly investigate the provenance of artworks looted from Jewish owners during the anti-Semitic persecutions and the confiscation of Jewish property in Nazi Germany. Two and a half decades after the signing of this document, provenance research and the restitution of looted artworks are far from concluded. A sadly representative example of this is the art collection created by Jewish collectors in Breslau, one of which was established by Carl Sachs.

Judging by the number of works Sachs owned by Wilhelm Trübner, he was a favorite of Sach’s. Trübner was a German realist painter, but his works also show the influence of Impressionism. He drew inspiration from the paintings of Gustave Courbet and Wilhelm Leibl and was part of a group of artists who founded the so-called “Leibl Circle” in the seventh decade of the 19th century.

Carl Sachs owned at least four works by Trübner: “Belgian Woman,” “A Walk in the Forest,” “Girl in the Garden,” and the portrait presented here, “Student Michaelis with a Rolled-up Paper.” The first of these was returned as part of the restitution of looted artworks to the collector’s rightful descendants in 2001. The artwork was transferred from the Kulturhistorisches museum in Görlitz, along with three sculptures by Georg Kolbe. The latter painting was returned to the heirs more than two decades later.

When Carl Sachs left Breslau with his wife in 1939, he took the portrait “Student Michaelis with a Rolled-up Paper” with him. The couple fled to Switzerland, where they sold their paintings to sustain themselves. In 1940, Sachs’s wife passed away, followed by Sachs himself in 1943. Half a year before his death, the collector sold Trübner’s painting.

In 1989, the canvas was purchased by the state of Baden-Württemberg and later deposited at the Kurpfälzisches Museum in Heidelberg. In July 2022, the artwork was returned to the rightful heirs. Local authorities and institutions had gained some experience in the restitution of artworks because, in 2021, the Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe returned a looted landscape depicting the Black Forest, painted by Hans Thoma, to its rightful owners. The process of returning artworks from the former Breslau collections amassed by Jewish art connoisseurs is not yet complete.

Painting Information:

oil on canvas, dimensions 44 × 30 cm.

Literature: Karl Scheffler, Breslauer Kunstleben, „Kunst und Künstler“, 21 (1923), s. 119.