Wanted Posters Work: Orléans Museum Recovers a Duyster Painting Lost in 1940
A “Wanted” poster has brought a stolen painting home. Un Buveur (A Drinker), a small seventeenth-century panel by the Amsterdam painter Willem Cornelisz Duyster that disappeared from the Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans in 1940, has turned up at a Swiss auction house, and its owner has agreed to give it back to the French museum at no cost.
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What: Willem Cornelisz Duyster, Un Buveur (A Drinker), 17th century, oil on wood, 44 × 32 cm (inv. PE.1416)
Where: Found at the Gloggner auction house, Lucerne; returning to the Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans, France
When: Lost in 1940; spotted in the catalogue of a 17 October 2026 sale; return announced in early November 2026
Who: The museum, its director Olivia Voisin, and an Orléans resident who answered the “Wanted” campaign
Section: Law & Restitution
What happened
According to ARTnews, an Orléans resident who had seen the museum’s “Wanted” posters began searching online sale catalogues in his spare time. He found the panel in the catalogue of a 17 October sale at Gloggner in Lucerne, where it was estimated at about $3,400 and described as a possible study. The museum contacted the auction house, which cooperated, and showed the owner an image of the lost painting laid over a photograph of his panel: the two matched. The owner, who had bought it at a London auction in the 1990s, offered to return it at once. “He felt that he had been able to enjoy it for 35 years,” the director told ARTnews. The painting is now waiting at French customs.
The work had belonged to the collector Paul Fourché (1840–1922), who gave it to the museum in 1907, according to the Musées d’Orléans online catalogue, which until now listed it as “lost during World War II”. ARTnews reports that about 350 works were plundered from the Musée Paul Fourché, an annex of the museum, after the city was attacked in June 1940, and that people on both sides of the conflict are believed to have taken part. The panel is damaged by layers of overpainting and old cleaning; in good condition, the director estimates it would be worth €25,000–30,000.
Why it matters
The museum still counts 424 missing paintings, including works attributed to Manet, Holbein, Van Dyck and Lorenzo Costa. In July 2026, as CODART reported, it published a full list of them with a series of black-and-white posters in Wild West style, asking the public to help. Duyster’s Drinker is the fourth painting recovered since the online catalogue went live about two years ago. The story shows how a simple, shareable list, and an auction house willing to cooperate, can do what decades of archive work could not.
The painting behind the story
Duyster (1599–1635) belonged to the generation of Dutch painters who turned soldiers, card players and drinkers into small, lively pictures. ARTnews describes the lost panel as a seated man in the dress of his time, holding out an empty glass and raising his other arm, as if caught in the middle of a sentence. The most famous picture of that kind is Frans Hals’s The Merry Drinker, painted in Haarlem around 1628–30 and now one of the best-loved works in the Rijksmuseum: a laughing man in a tilted hat who seems to talk straight to us, his glass in one hand and the other hand raised, all done with Hals’s fast, open brushwork. For another restitution story, see Stolen Renoirs Found Behind a Wall.
Hang Frans Hals’s Merry Drinker — the tilted hat, the raised glass and a gold frame of vines and grapes — as a vintage art poster from the Sapiens Verbum print shop.
Choose your size and frame →See the vintage poster collection →License this image →
Prefer the original? Hang Frans Hals’s Merry Drinker — the tilted hat, the raised glass and the laugh of the Dutch Golden Age — as a print, canvas or framed print from the Sapiens Verbum print shop.
Choose your size and frame →Judith Leyster’s Jolly Drinker (1629) →Printed and shipped by Fine Art America · 30-day money-back guarantee
💬 Over to you: Would you scroll through old auction catalogues to bring a lost painting home? And where in the world are you reading from? Tell us in the comments.
Sources
- ARTnews: French Museum’s ‘Wanted’ Poster Campaign for Stolen Art Leads to Return of Missing 17th-Century Dutch Painting (3 November 2026)
- Musées d’Orléans: Willem Cornelisz Duyster, A drinker (inv. PE.1416)
- CODART: Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans launches initiative to recover missing paintings (22 July 2026)
- Wikipedia: The Merry Drinker
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