In 1939, the family patriarch Prince Augustyn Józef Czartoryski rescued a number of pieces from the Czartoryski Museum, including Portrait of a Young Man. The portrait shows a confident and well-dressed young man, depicted in an early Mannerist style. While the subject matter is disputed, it is generally regarded to be a self-portrait of Raphael, as the facial features are similar to those depicted in his self-portrait in the fresco The School of Athens. It is often cited as one of the most important missing paintings since World War II. Snatched by the Nazis in Poland, the Portrait of a Young Man is believed to have been created by Raphael around 1513. The panel was replaced in 1945 by Belgian copyist Jef Van der Veken, who applied a layer of wax to the copy to make sure it blended in with the altarpiece. To this day, the location of the painting is still unknown, although it has long been speculated that it was destroyed. On his death bed, the thief claimed that he knew the painting’s location but that he was taking the secret to his grave. Over the following year, a number of random notes and letters were exchanged between the Belgian government and the supposed thief, a flamboyant local politician named Arsène Goedertier.
Furthermore, it was replaced by a note that read ‘Taken from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles,’ which was written in French. Oddly, The Just Judges was the only part of the 12-panel altarpiece that was taken. The panel, which is also believed to have been painted by his brother Hubert van Eyck, is considered to depict several contemporary figures, as well as portraits of Jan and Hubert van Eyck themselves. It was part of The Adoration of the Lamb altarpiece that Jan van Eyck created between 14. Stolen in 1934, Jan van Eyck’s The Just Judges (also known as The Righteous Judges) was one part of a display at Saint Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium. However, this lead proved to be false, and the painting’s location is still unknown. A few hours after the second theft in 2010, Egyptian officials and police believed that they had discovered the painting at the Cairo International Airport when two suspects attempted to board a plane to Italy. Following an extensive search operation, it was found ten years later in Kuwait. The robbery in 2010 wasn’t the first time the painting had been snatched it was stolen from the same museum in June of 1977. With an estimated value of $50 million, it is no surprise that the painting was targeted by thieves. It is believed that Van Gogh painted this work three years before his suicide and that it was created out of Van Gogh’s admiration for Adolphe Monticelli. The painting depicts yellow and red poppy flowers against a dark background and is small in size, measuring just 65 x 54 centimeters. Painted by Vincent Van Gogh, Poppy Flowers (also known as Vase and Flowers) was stolen from the Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum in Cairo in August 2010.
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