Stolen Artworks in Museums

When most people today think of stolen artworks, they usually tend to think of artifacts being stolen from museums. There are many famous cases of this, such as the notorious theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre Museum in 1911, which generated international headlines. Unfortunately, most people are not aware of the fact that many of the artifacts that are currently on display in museums in western Europe and North America were themselves stolen from the peoples of other countries all around the world.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, western Europeans and people of western European descent pillaged countries all over the world, taking their cultural artifacts and putting them in museums back in their home countries, where they could admire them, but the peoples of the countries to whom the artifacts rightfully belonged could not. There are so many stolen artworks on display in museums that it would be impossible for me to cover them all, but today I want to talk about just a few of the more famous examples.

The age-old tradition of stealing other people’s stuff

The tradition of imperialist nations stealing works of art and other cultural artifacts from other cultures as a way of showing dominance over them is probably as old as human race itself. Notably, the Akkadian king Naram-Sin (ruled c. 2254 – c. 2218 BCE) is said to have plundered the Sumerian temple of the god Enlil in the city of Nippur and carried off works of art held in the temple that were already seen as ancient.

Ironically, Naram-Sin’s own monuments would later end up being looted. At some point during his reign, Naram-Sin ordered the carving of his famous Victory Stele to commemorate his victory over the Lullubi, a people who lived in the region of the Zagros Mountains. This stele was erected in the city of Sippar in what is now southern Iraq.

Then, over a thousand years after the stele was carved, in around 1158 BCE, the Elamite king Shutruk-Nakhunte raided the city of Sippar and stole many of the stelae and other works of art from the city, bringing them back to his own capital city of Susa in the land of Elam in what is now southwestern Iran. He added a new inscription to the Victory Stele in the Elamite language, which reads as follows, as translated by Marc van de Mieroop:

“I am Shutruk-Nahhunte, son of Hallutush-Inshushinak, beloved servant of the god Inshushinak, king of Anshan and Susa, who has enlarged the kingdom, who takes care of the lands of Elam, the lord of the land of Elam. When the god Inshusinak gave me the order, I defeated Sippar. I took the stele of Naram-Sin and carried it off, bringing it to the land of Elam. For Inshushinak, my god, I set it as an offering.”

Over three thousand years later, in 1898, when Iran was under Qajar rule, the Victory Stele was excavated by the French archaeologist Jacques de Morgan, who removed it (without asking permission from anyone, as far as I can tell) and brought it back to Paris, where it is now on display in the Louvre Museum.

As a twice-looted ancient artwork commemorating a notorious looter of ancient artworks, the Victory Stele is a unique symbol of just how pervasive and ancient the looting of ancient artworks really is.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Victory Stele of Naram-Sin, now held in the Louvre Museum in Paris

The Elgin Marbles

While the tradition of stealing works of art from subjugated peoples is extremely ancient, the idea of putting stolen artworks in museums and justifying their theft by claiming that this is a legitimate way of promoting the arts and culture is an aspect of modern western European colonialism. The ur-example of this is the notorious case of the Elgin Marbles.

In the fifth century BCE, the ancient Athenians built a large number of monumental buildings on top of the Akropolis in the middle of their city, including the Parthenon (a colossal temple to their patron goddess Athena), the Erechtheion (another temple dedicated to both Athena and the god Poseidon), and the Propylaia (a monumental gateway). All of these buildings were originally decorated with marble sculptures of various kinds.

As I discuss in this article from June 2019, between 1801 and 1812, Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, removed roughly half the sculptures decorating the Parthenon, as well as several other sculptures from the Erechtheion and the Propylaia, and transported them back to Britain to decorate his personal mansion.

In 1816, Lord Elgin was heavily in debt as a result of a divorce settlement, so he sold all the sculptures he had taken from the Akropolis to the British government and used the money to settle his debts. The sculptures were later placed in the British Museum, where they have remained ever since.

ABOVE: Painting from 1819 by Archibald Archer showing the Elgin Marbles on display in a temporary room at the British Museum

Lord Elgin claimed multiple times that he had an official firman from the government of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled Athens at the time, giving him permission to remove the sculptures. Despite this, Lord Elgin himself was never able to produce any kind of documentary evidence to support his claim. One of Lord Elgin’s associates, an Anglican priest named Reverend Philip Hunt, however, brought forth a document that he claimed was an Italian translation of the original Turkish firman given to Lord Elgin.

The document produced by Hunt is clearly not in the correct format of an official firman and no copy of the original Turkish decree has ever been found, despite there being no shortage of surviving Turkish documents from the time period. Consequently, many people suspect that Lord Elgin may not have received a firman at all and that the document Hunt presented may be a complete forgery.

Furthermore, even if the document Hunt produced really is authentic, it says absolutely nothing about removing sculptures and instead only gives Lord Elgin permission to remove “any pieces of stone with old inscriptions or figures thereon.” This makes it sound as though Lord Elgin only had permission to remove stones with writing on them that he might discover during his excavations and that he did not, in fact, have permission to remove marble sculptures from the temples themselves.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of sculptures from the East Pediment of the Parthenon on display in the British Museum

There were English people who decried Lord Elgin’s theft of the Akropolis sculptures at the time. The English poet Lord Byron (lived 1788 – 1824) famously protested the removal in his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which was published between 1812 and 1818. He writes in Canto II, Section 16:

“Dull is the eye that will not weep to see
thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed
by British hands, which it had best behoved
to guard those relics ne’er to be restored.
Curst be the hour when from their isle they roved,
and once again thy hapless bosom gored,
and snatch’d thy shrinking gods to northern climes abhorred!”

The Greek government has repeatedly asked the British Museum to permanently return the Elgin Marbles to Greece so that they can be reunited with the other sculptures from the Akropolis in the newly-built Akropolis Museum in Athens, which stands right next to the Akropolis itself.

The Akropolis Museum displays all the sculptures from the Parthenon that are currently in Greece’s possession and it has space to display the Elgin Marbles as well. If the Elgin Marbles were returned, it would enable visitors to see the Parthenon and nearly all the surviving sculptures from it together in Athens, the very place where they were originally meant to be displayed.

The British Museum says that it is willing to loan the Elgin Marbles to Greece temporarily, but it has adamantly refused to repatriate them permanently. An official statement on the British Museum’s website from the museum’s trustees states that they believe that their museum is the ideal place for the Elgin Marbles to be permanently displayed because it is “a unique resource for the world” and its collection allows “a global public to examine cultural identities and explore the complex network of interconnected human cultures.”

This is obviously colonialist nonsense. The only reason why the British Museum has so much stuff from all over the world is because the British Empire robbed people from all over the world. Moreover, while the British Museum does attract visitors from all over the world, the museum itself is located in London and people who are not from Britain have to travel overseas in order to get there. For all the British Museum’s rhetoric about a “global public,” displaying all these artworks in London inherently advantages people who live in Britain over people who live elsewhere.

ABOVE: Display of sculptures from the West Pediment of the Parthenon in the Akropolis Museum in Athens, mounted in the positions they would have been in originally, with gaps for the missing sculptures

The case of a caryatid from Eleusis

Defenders of Lord Elgin and others like him have often claimed that, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Greek people didn’t care about ancient sculptures and western Europeans were therefore completely within their rights to take them. This is not true. In fact, in at least some cases, Greek people were so attached to their ancient statues that they were literally venerating them.

In ancient times, the site of Eleusis near Athens was the site of the Eleusinian Mysteries, a ritual cult centered around the goddess Demeter, who was believed to control the harvests, and her daughter Persephone, who was said to have been abducted and raped by Hades, the divine ruler of the Underworld. (And, yes, as I discuss in this article from February 2020, the ancient sources unambiguously indicate that Hades raped her.)

In around 1765, the British traveler Richard Chandler visited Eleusis, which was, at the time, a village of poor farmers. In an account of his visit, he mentions that the local Greek people venerated an ancient marble caryatid statue of a woman, which they claimed represented Ἁγία Δήμητρα (Ayía Dḗmētra), which means “Saint Demeter” in Modern Greek. They said that Saint Demeter protected the crops and that she had a daughter who had been abducted by a malicious Turk.

In 1801, another Englishman by the name of Edward Daniel Clarke bribed the local Turkish officials to let him take the statue. The Greek villagers who regarded the statue as sacred tried to stop him from taking it, insisting that great harm would befall them and all their crops would be destroyed if they allowed the statue to leave, but Clarke insisted that everything would be perfectly fine. He loaded the statue onto a ship to take it to England, but the ship sank off the coast of Beachy Head. Fortunately, the statue was rescued and it is now on display in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England.

The next year after Clarke took the statue, the people at Eleusis had a good harvest, which they interpreted as a sign that their statue would be returned to them. When the next few years yielded bad harvests, they interpreted it as a punishment from Saint Demeter for them having allowed Clarke to remove her statue. Some people may laugh at the Eleusinian villagers for being superstitious, but the fact is that Clarke stole a statue that he knew full well was extremely important to them and, frankly, that’s really hard to justify.

Ultimately, in this case, Saint Demeter and the people of Eleusis got the last laugh. The Greek Revolution (fought 1821 – 1829) resulted in Greece gaining its independence from the Ottoman Empire. In the late nineteenth century, when Eleusis was under Greek sovereign authority, it was discovered that the caryatid the villagers had venerated was actually one of two. The identical second caryatid, which had been buried for centuries, was discovered to be in far better condition than the one Clarke had taken. It is now on display in the Archaeological Museum of Eleusis.

ABOVE: Photograph of the Eleusis caryatid stolen by Edward Daniel Clarke in 1801, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge

ABOVE: Photograph of the identical but much better preserved caryatid from Eleusis, now on display in the Archaeological Museum of Eleusis

The Winged Nike of Samothrake

Unfortunately, Greek independence did not stop western Europeans from taking Greek statues, since, throughout the nineteenth century, large portions of the Greek homeland remained under Ottoman rule.

In 1863, the French diplomat Charles Champoiseau travelled to the Greek island of Samothrake, which, at the time, was still under the control of the Ottoman Empire. There, he conducted a small-scale, amateur excavation of the Sanctuary of the Great Gods. During the course of this excavation, Champoiseau’s team uncovered the majestic remains of a Hellenistic marble statue of Nike, the ancient Greek goddess of victory.

Without asking permission from anyone as far as I can tell, Champoiseau had the statue shipped back to France, where, in 1867, the statue was installed in the Louvre Museum. The Winged Nike of Samothrake has since become revered as one of the greatest surviving examples of original Hellenistic Greek sculpture and it remains one of the Louvre’s most popular attractions. Naturally, Greek people—especially inhabitants of the island of Samothrake—have campaigned for the Winged Nike to be returned.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Winged Nike of Samothrake, which the French diplomat Charles Champoiseau took from the Greek island of Samothrake in 1863

Hoa Hakananai’a

Of course, Greek people in general are actually lucky compared to most of the other peoples that western Europeans stole from. Greece gained its independence early enough that the vast majority of major Greek artworks unearthed in the past two hundred years have remained in the country and are now kept in Greek museums.

Furthermore, because Greece is a European country, it enjoys European privilege. Consequently, calls for the repatriation of stolen Greek artworks consistently tend to receive more attention and tend to be taken more seriously than calls for the repatriation of other stolen artifacts. I think it is therefore important to talk about a few of the famous artworks that have been stolen from countries outside Europe.

One famous case comes from the island of Rapa Nui (a.k.a. “Easter Island”), which is located in the Pacific Ocean and is currently part of the country of Chile. The island is famous today for its hundreds of moʻai, colossal monolithic statues of deified ancestors carved by the Native Rapa Nui people between c. 1000 and c. 1600 CE. One of the most significant of these moʻai is Hoa Hakananai’a, which has unusual carvings on the back that distinguish it from other sculptures of its kind.

In November 1868, the crew of the HMS Topaze came to Rapa Nui and stole the statue without getting any kind of permission from the Native islanders. In 1869, the ship’s captain, Commodore Richard Ashmore Powell, gave Hoa Hakananai’a to the British Admiralty, who presented it to Queen Victoria to be put in the British Museum. The statue remains in the British Museum to this day. Native Rapa Nui people have campaigned for the statue’s return, but so far to no avail.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Hoa Hakananai’a on display in the British Museum

The Benin Bronzes

In some cases, western European colonialist nations didn’t just seize cultural artifacts without legal permission; they also used outright violence to take these artifacts. Take the example of the so-called “Benin Bronzes”—over a thousand sculptures and plaques made of various metals that originally decorated the royal palace of the Edo kingdom of Benin in what is now southern Nigeria. For Edo people, these magnificent sculptures have immense cultural and spiritual importance, since these sculptures were part of how they told their history prior to European colonization.

In December 1896, an unauthorized expedition of British officers led by a man named James Robert Phillips set out to depose the king of Benin. Nearly all members of the expedition were slaughtered by Benin strike force. Only two officers managed to escape with their lives. In response to this massacre, in February 1897, the British launched an official punitive invasion force, which sacked and burned the city of Benin, annexed the kingdom’s territory, and looted thousands of works of art, including the Benin Bronzes.

They brought these looted artworks back to Britain, where a substantial number of them remain on display in the British Museum. They sold most of the other artworks off in order to help cover the costs of the invasion. These artworks eventually wound up in other museums across western Europe and North America and in private European and North American collections.

Meanwhile, Edo people suffered under the cruelties of British colonial rule. In many places, the British imposed forced labor ordinances and people could be whipped or imprisoned for disobeying. Nigeria became an independent country in 1960. Since then, multiple Obas of Benin, including the current Oba Ewuare II, have demanded that the Benin Bronzes be returned to Nigeria so they can be displayed in Benin City, where Edo people will be able to see them.

There has actually been some progress on this issue in recent years. The Benin Dialogue Group, founded in 2017, has negotiated for a rotating collection of Benin Bronzes on loan from various European museums to be displayed in the Royal Benin Museum, which is set to open in Benin City in 2021. Hopefully, European museums will eventually agree to repatriate these stolen artifacts permanently.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of some of the metal plaques looted by the British during the 1897 invasion of the kingdom of Benin on display in the British Museum in London

ABOVE: Close-up photograph from Wikimedia Commons of one of the stolen Benin Bronzes on display in the British Museum

The Admonitions Scroll

The Admonitions Scroll is a Chinese silk handscroll painting that is believed to have been originally painted at some point between the fifth and eighth centuries CE. It is one of the oldest known surviving examples of Chinese handscroll painting and was a prized possession of multiple Chinese emperors.

Then, in 1899, the Boxer Rebellion broke out, with the rebels opposing the meddling of foreign nations in Chinese affairs and supporting the Qing government. This led to an invasion of China by the Eight Nation Alliance. The armies of the Eight Nation Alliance arrived in Beijing in August 1900. They defeated the Boxers and the Chinese Imperial Army and ransacked the capital, looting many precious artworks.

Somehow or another, the Admonitions Scroll wound up in the possession of the British officer Captain Clarence A. K. Johnson, who did not realize what the scroll was or how much it was worth. In 1902, he took the scroll to the British Museum, assuming that the scroll itself was worthless but hoping to find out if the jade toggle attached to it was worth something. In 1903, the British Museum purchased the entire scroll from him for the price of only twenty-five pounds sterling.

It was only over the course of the next decade that experts on Chinese art at the British Museum recognized the Admonitions Scroll as a priceless masterpiece of early medieval Chinese painting.

ABOVE: Illustration from the Admonitions Scroll, an early medieval Chinese handscroll painting that was looted in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion and is now in the British Museum

The Nefertiti bust

In 1912, when Egypt was under British military occupation, the German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt discovered a limestone-and-stucco bust of Queen Nefertiti (lived c. 1370 – c. 1330 BCE) at the site of Amarna. When she was alive, Nefertiti was the wife of the pharaoh Akhenaten and she may have also ruled Egypt in her own right for a couple years after his death under the name Neferneferuaten.

Astonished at the beauty of the bust, Borchardt resolved to take it back home to Germany with him and put it in a German museum. Borchardt intentionally misled Egyptian authorities into thinking that the bust was less impressive than it really was by not showing them the actual bust and instead showing them only a poor-quality, black-and-white photograph of it. He also told Egyptian authorities that the bust was of “a princess,” even though he described it in his private diary as a bust of Queen Nefertiti. As a result of all Borchardt’s shenanigans, the authorities allowed him to take the bust back home to Germany.

As soon as the bust was unveiled in Berlin in 1924, the Egyptian government immediately began pressing for it to be returned, insisting that they had been swindled. Germany has consistently rejected all Egypt’s demands for the repatriation of the bust, despite numerous changes in the regimes of both countries, and the bust remains on display in the Neues Museum in Berlin.

In this particular case, the bust is not technically stolen, since the Egyptian authorities did give Borchardt permission to take it, but it is highly unlikely that they would have done so if Borchardt had shown them the actual bust.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the famous bust of Nefertiti in the Neues Museum in Berlin

A continuing problem

As I hope I have demonstrated, stolen artworks in western museums are a huge problem. Unfortunately, this problem is not going away; even today, new stolen artworks are still winding up in museums. Nowadays, though, these works tend to end up in museums not through blatant imperialist looting, but rather through more circuitous routes.

For instance, the Kykladic civilization, which flourished in the Kykladic Islands of the Aegean Sea from around 3300 BCE until around 1100 BCE, produced a large number of abstract marble figures. In the 1960s and 70s, museums and private collectors developed a mad obsession with these figures, leading illegal looters to destroy countless Kykladic archaeological sites, desperately searching for Kykladic figures to sell on the antiquities market.

The vast majority of Kykladic figures currently held in museums around the world have no known provenance and are almost certainly either looted or fake. This persistent looting has resulted in massive amounts of information about the Kykladic civilization being utterly and irreversibly destroyed. Although we know a little bit about where these figures come from thanks to the few examples that have been excavated and documented by archaeologists, we have no information whatsoever about where, how, or in what context the vast majority of these figures were originally found.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a female Kykladic figurine, currently held in the Goulandris Museum of Kykladic Art in Athens