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Lost for more than 75 years, a painting by French Baroque artist Charles Le Brun (1619–1690) is now returning to the New Palace in Potsdam’s Sanssouci Park. The news was reported first by the German Press Agency (dpa) following a statement by the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg (SPSG).
Court painter to Louis XIV after 1661 and the designer most responsible for the opulent style of the French monarchy, Le Brun created the work, a depiction of a sleeping Christ Child with the Holy Family, around 1655. It was acquired in the 1700s by King Frederick the Great (Frederick II) of Prussia for the New Palace, where it hung in one of the guest apartments.
In 1942, to protect it from Allied bombings, much of the art at the Picture Gallery of Sanssouci and the New Palace, including Le Brun’s painting, was evacuated some 60 miles northwest to Schloss Rheinsberg.
On April 29, 1945, the Red Army entered Rheinsberg. Russian troops occupied the building, and a short time later the majority of the paintings housed in the Schloss Rheinsberg were sent to the Soviet Union. However, according to the SPSG, not all of the works arrived there, with some entering private collections in Rheinsberg under “convoluted circumstances.”
Le Brun’s painting was documented as being at Schloss Rheinsberg until July 30, 1945. After that, according to a spokesperson from the foundation, the painting vanished—until it resurfaced at a Berlin auction house in 2021.
The return was made possible by the support of the Ernst von Siemens Art Foundation and the Friends of the Prussian Palaces Association. On November 18, 2026 at 2:30 p.m., the “Holy Family” will be unveiled in the Upper Red Chambers of the New Palace.