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The Efforts to Retrieve the Kassel Artworks

Elector Wilhelm I, after returning from exile, made winning back his artworks his highest priority. In April 1814 he gave the task of representing his interests in Paris to the director of the Museum Fridericianum Ludwig Völkel, the curator of the Bildergalerie Ernst Friedrich Ferdinand Robert and the privy counselor Baron von Lepel. Already onstage in Paris was the legation secretary of the Electorate of Hesse (Hessen), Jakob Grimm. An administrative marathon began. The art commissioners had to navigate the diplomatic waters with care. Denon was still in power, and in fact it was he who signed their admittance pass to the Louvre. Lepel merely sought to make "a list of paintings belonging to the Elector of Hesse (Hessen) Kassel found in the Museum in Paris". The first treaty of peace protected state property and therefore the museum's collections. Therefore Elector Wilhelm I turned to the French king with a petition in which he emphasized the importance of his paintings for the education of artists at the Kassel Academy (Kassler Akadamie). He specifically emphasized the educational importance of the academy which had been recognized since the 18th century. One can assume that the Elector Wilhelm I recognized in this argument a correspondence to the much praised theories of fine art and public education prevalent in Paris at the time. Even in Hesse (Hessen), one could not seal oneself away from the modern reforms radiating out from the Musée Napoleon. Even the director of the Fridericianum, Völkel, in a paper he wrote shortly after Jérôme's flight from Kassel towards the end of 1813, pointed out the advantages of the Musée Napoléon: "now busy and well paid graphic artists are using the new items in the collection to increase their various engravings... and by this means and the descriptions and criticisms which are often included with the engravings, some unknown or unregarded artworks have attained the necessary repute that is their due".

While the efforts to get back the paintings from the museum at first remained without success in 1814, no difficulties were placed in the way of the delegation from Kassel in tracking down Jérôme's war booty, because these were not considered state property. Jacob Grimm was able to seize numerous packing crates of paintings from Cardinal Fesch, Jérôme's uncle. It was only when the paintings arrived in Kassel, that it was discovered that the 252 paintings were from the Braunschweig collection. The director of the gallery, Weitsch, retrieved them along with the paintings that Jérôme had taken to decorate the palaces in Kassel. Altogether 450 paintings belonging to the collection in Braunschweig were recovered. It was quite a different story for the paintings Jérôme took from Kassel. For example, the painting that Jérôme stole called Pan and Syrinx by Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder did not return to Kassel until 2002.

Access to the holdings of the Musée Napoleon only became possible after the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. The first paintings were retrieved only five days after the arrival of the Prussian army in Paris on July 7, 1815. Nonetheless Denon attempted to do all he could do to impede the inspectors who arrived from Kassel. He argued, that in returning the paintings to Hesse (Hessen) the Louvre "would lose the greatest part of the small paintings from the Dutch school and in fact the best part". But in the end, from the 299 paintings confiscated by Denon, 270 were retrieved; later the loss was reduced to just ten paintings. Don't forget however, all the paintings distributed to provincial museums, those that Napoleon had sent directly to the Empress Josephine at Malmaison and which were now in the possession of the Russian Czar, as well as those paintings which had remained in Kassel and which Jérôme took into his possession. It became the responsibility primarily of Jacob Grimm to find these missing paintings. Meanwhile hiding these works of art that were spread throughout France became an act of almost heroic patriotism. Rubens large painting Abraham and Melchisedek which had been sent to the provincial museum in Caen, was pasted over with paper and disguised as a tabletop. The Triumph of the Victor, which Jacob Grimm had found in Fontainebleau Palace and seized, has ever since remained in Kassel without its companion painting. In December 1815 the older brother Grimm resignedly gave up his efforts. With skillful procrastination the French had succeeded in grinding him down.

The Final Outcome

In the end, 418 pictures were retrieved and return to Kassel, however no fewer than 382 works of art were permanently lost. But these bare numbers tell little of the meaning attached to this loss which if anything has grown with the passage of time. Especially the pictures that were hidden in the Sababurg Castle, the cream of the collection which the Elector had hidden in a failed attempt to save them. Their inaccessibility, through their sale to Russia, certainly played a role in the ever-increasing emotions connected with these paintings. The director of the Museum Fridericianum, Ludwig Völkel, had already written in a report to the Elector in 1814, that the "most exquisite" paintings were still in the Malmaison Palace. The Elector Wilhelm I tried to assuage the pain of his loss, at least with respect to Claude Lorrain's renowned cycle of paintings featuring the times of the day, by having the court painter Johann Martin von Rhoden (1778-1868) paint a new cycle of paintings with the same topic in the 1830's.

The return of these lost art treasures grew throughout the 19th century to a question of national honor. In the same degree that the Kingdom of Westphalia in the canon of national history was labeled as foreign occupation, continuing absence of the looted art treasures came to be seen gaping hole in the national heritage. This interpretation appeared almost immediately in the many lampoons that were published following Jérôme's flight, which conjured up a caricature of the puppet king as fickle and addicted to pleasure. When they referred to the looting of the art treasures, it was as an example of such cultural barbarism that it seemed worse than they ask committed by Jérôme himself. In an anonymous lampoon which appeared in 1813 called the Jeromiade, the French are described as being unable to appreciate the art treasures which they have stolen:

And the art treasures, paintings
and books they took across the Rhine --
can they understand them? Good heavens -- no!
In order to free us from all that
which could be of use to us,
even those antiquities had to go,
which only had to use and value here;...

The verses joke about the "freeing" of the German's on art treasures, that intention born in the French Revolution, to gather together the cultural inheritance of Europe in Paris and there to make it accessible to the public. The author assumes that this "freeing" is regarded by the readers as a theft. And the author pretends, fat the art works -- as if they only spoke German -- will not be understood on the far side of the Rhine, and certainly not better understood, thanks to a more modern and reformed museum concept.

After the outbreak of the First World War the German Empire demanded the pictures back from Russia. At the Peace of Brest-Litowsk it appeared that this wish could be fulfilled: a secret agreement was reached, in which a commission -- which never actually met -- would look into the legality of Czar Alexander's acquisition of the paintings. In September 1918 this news was leaked to the press. The painter Lovis Corinth commented, "... if we should come to really possess these pictures, then we may have won more in this Peace of Brest-Litowsk, then all the land conquered in the border states and all of Siberia together can add up to". In view of such strong feelings it was beside the point whether the artistic taste of the Elector Wilhelm I and his selection of paintings made in 1806, was still valid over 100 years later. At any rate, the paintings stayed in Petrograd. The situation grew even worse for Kassel when the new Soviet Union in 1923 started selling the paintings one by one. The museum director at the time Georg Gronau, tried and failed to purchase them.a

In the autumn of 1815 when the greater part of the artworks stolen by Napoleon were returned to Kassel, a contemporary observer wrote: "it was only now that the more enlightened members of the public understood the advantages resulting from the political restoration in Hessen, which has otherwise been connected with a retrenchment against modern reforms". Faint praise from someone who can be said to represent the educated classes in Kassel, a group of people which on the whole did not heartily welcome the return of the erstwhile German ruler, Elector Wilhelm I (Kurfürst Wilhelm I). Nonetheless the repatriation of the art treasures was a small public relations boon for Elector Wilhelm I (Kürfurst Wilhelm I). In the opinion quoted above, the theft of artworks was the worst crime the deposed Napoleonic puppet king, King Jérôme, and his government could be accused of, an administration which otherwise had stood for the introduction of modern reforms. Yes, the art theft from Kassel was a negative aspect of King Jérôme's rule, however it can be interpreted as another modern reform in the Napoleonic pattern just like the model state that Napoleon was trying to develop in Westphalia itself. However you can also see the chasm between intention and reality in the Kingdom of Westphalia reflected in the story of the art stolen from Kassel.

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