We are so grateful to her for being so straightforward about it.” “We told the daughter that the painting was stolen 50 years ago and she was quite happy that it was simply returned to the museum,” Schwinge says to Artnet News’ Richard Whiddington. Now, with the daughter’s cooperation, the altar panel will soon be back in its gallery home. “We suspect he might have bought it quite innocently in a market or perhaps in another auction or a shop, not realizing what he was buying and that it had this rather more interesting history,” Guy Schwinge, a partner, senior valuer and auctioneer at Duke’s, tells BBC News’ Marcus White. It arrived at Duke’s after a woman inherited it from her father, and neither of the two had known of the panel’s past. Sebald of Nuremberg and the Angel Gabriel. The back of the panel, which dates back to the 15th century, depicts St. Germanus of Paris, and the other shows St. Made by an artist of the Nuremberg School, the work likely dates back to around 1480 and depicts religious figures who held significance for the German city of Nuremberg. It was a pleasure assisting in this case on a pro-bono basis,” Lucy O’Meara, a recoveries specialist at the ALR, tells the Times’ Seren Hughes. “Three members of the ALR team studied at the University of York at one point or another and so we have fond memories of the gallery’s collection and the wider city. After a brief investigation, the ALR determined what the auction house had was the missing panel, and Duke’s pulled the piece from the auction block. When they spotted the similarity, auction house staff reached out to the Art Loss Register (ALR), a private database of stolen art that helps reunite art with its rightful owners. That panel had been donated to the gallery in 1955 as part of a pair, the other half of which was stolen in 1979 and never found. The gold-ground piece was set to go on sale at Duke’s Auctions last November, but researchers noticed its similarities to another altar panel at York Art Gallery. A United Kingdom gallery has recovered a 15th-century altar panel decades after it was stolen, thanks to the eagle-eyed staff at an auction house.
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