Photo Gallery Hitler's Hobby
Hitler's taste ran to traditional pieces and Romantic fantasy -- he hated anything critical and modern. Carl Spitzweg, a German romanticist from Munich, has 45 paintings in the collection. "The Butterfly Catcher" dates from 1840.
Marketplace in Pirna, c. 1754 by Bernardo Canaletto. The collection was intended to seed a big "Führermuseum" in Linz, Austria, after World War II.
A full 4,731 pieces in the Linz Collection were photographed and catalogued by the Allies after World War II. This painting shows Christ at the house of Simon the Pharisee, painted in 1516 by Pieter Coecke van Aelst.
Pieces were sent back to their home countries wherever possible. But the Allied catalog didn't include many important details -- sometimes not even the name of the artist. This portrait of Falstaff was painted in 1906 by Eduard Grützner.
Reassembling the catalog and the true provenance of each piece of art has been painstaking work. This portrait of a woman (the artist's wife), is from 1878/1928, by Franz von Stuck.
Many of the paintings now in possession of the German government still have an unknown provenance -- though fewer pieces in Hitler's collection are considered by experts to be stolen than in most Nazi collections. "Gregor and Domitilla," c. 1602, by Peter Paul Rubens.
Researchers at the German Historical Museum hope making the archive public will help them fill in historical gaps. Woman with hat, 1855/1884, by Hans Makart.
