A man in Germany has found two precious 350-year-old oil paintings inside a rubbish bin in a rest house in the central Franken region, and handed them over to police in the western German city of Cologne.
Cologne police announced on Friday that a 64-year-old man had found the plates last Tuesday at a service station on the A7 motorway in the town of Auerbach-Ost.
Investigators said: “According to an expert’s initial assessment, both artworks are likely to be original works,” noting that one of the two paintings, “Portrait of a Boy”, was created by a student of the artist Rembrandt Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678).
The second painting, “Self-Portrait of a Laughing,” was painted by the Italian artist Pietro Belotti (1627-1700) in 1665.
The Cologne police published pictures of the two works, along with the question: “Who knows the two paintings on display, or knows how they got to the trash in the service area?”
#PolizeiNRW #Köln #Leverkusen: Wertvolle Ölgemälde in Müllcontainer an der A7 in Mittelfranken entdeckt/Fotos – Infos unter https://t.co/2pnX3zs6I8 pic.twitter.com/Fblk5wpQTN
— Polizei NRW K (@polizei_nrw_k) June 18, 2021
Source: db a