A long-lost painting by French Impressionist master Claude Monet was recently discovered rolled up in a corner of a storage facility at the Louvre Museum in Paris, officials said.
The 1916 oil painting called “Water Lilies: Reflections of a Willow Tree” belonged to Japanese businessman Kojiro Matsukata, a spokesperson for the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo told AFP.
Matsukata, who ran a shipbuilding empire, bought the work directly from Monet at the artist’s studio in 1921. By 1922, the Japanese collector owned 25 paintings by the artist.
Part of his art collection was moved to Paris for safekeeping during World War II and later seized by the French government as enemy property.
French officials returned the majority of Matsukata’s 400 pieces to Japan in 1959 — but not this Monet.
The 13-foot-wide and 6-foot-long work was unearthed at the Louvre in 2016 and returned to the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, museum officials announced on Tuesday.
“The painting was recently returned,” a museum spokeswoman told AFP.
The painting, depicting bright flowers floating on water, was a study for Monet’s famous series “Water Lilies,” but the work is half destroyed and severely damaged.
“The existence of the painting might have been forgotten given the tremendous damage caused by bad storage conditions during the war,” the Tokyo museum said.
“But the remaining painting is still very large. It has the potential to show Monet’s wonderful work if handled with proper care,” it said in a statement.
The value of the work hasn’t been disclosed, but Monet’s art is some of the most expensive in the world. One of his “Water Lilies” works sold for $54 million at a Sotheby’s auction in 2014.
The museum, which was established specifically to exhibit Matsukata’s collection after WWII, plans on showing the painting to the public in June 2019 following restoration work, ArtNet reported.
Matsukata had dreamed of opening a museum himself but was never able to after a financial crisis hit his shipyard and 400 of his works stored in London were destroyed in a fire.
With Post wires