Until very recently, the “Latvian girl”, a painting by one of Latvia’s most prominent artists, Jānis Roberts Tillbergs (1880-1972), was considered lost after it was brought to Germany in 1942. As it turns out, the Schloss Gottorf museum in Schleswig in northern Germany was holding onto it. The “Latvian Girl” was forgotten in the museum’s storage, with its whereabouts undiscovered until now.

The discovery was made by staff at the Purvītis museum in Ogre, a city south-east of Riga, who were on a mission to trace lost artworks by another Latvian painter, Vilhelms Purvītis. The breakthrough came when the Purvītis museum researchers read in a 1945 exile newspaper “Latvju vārds” that a number of  artworks by Latvian artists were once kept in the estate of German Nazi politician Hinrich Lohse, who also served as Reichskommissar in the Baltic states between 1941-44. Some of these works were later transferred to the collection of the Schloss Gottorf.

With the painting finally returning to Latvian soil, the Purvītis museum director Žaneta Grende said that the story dispels two myths in the art world: that searching for lost works is futile and that German institutions are unwilling to return such items.