6 Famous Artworks That Are Lost Forever

Some famous artworks, including works by Klimt and Rembrandt, are known only as dim memories. Here are six lost artworks you should know.

Feb 28, 2025By Anastasiia Kirpalov, MA Art History & Curatorial Studies

famous artworks forever lost

 

For centuries, humans have considered pieces of art important enough to preserve and cherish despite their seeming impracticality. Still, in spite of our efforts to keep them intact, works of art too often fall victim to tragic accidents. Some pieces remain known only in art history textbooks or archives. And if we are lucky there will be a couple of black and white photographs reflecting their lost glory. Take a look at six famous artworks destroyed by war, weather conditions, or malicious human involvement.

 

1. Famous Artworks Lost in Fire: Gustav Klimt’s Faculty Paintings

klimt medicine photo
Medicine, by Gustav Klimt, 1901. Source: Google Arts & Culture

 

Perhaps the most ambitious project ever done by Gustav Klimt, his series of paintings for the University of Vienna, was a unique and bold experiment that polarized the Viennese elites and found admirers among the most unusual public—the Nazis. The University commissioned three panels that would reflect the spirit of three major disciplines: medicine, jurisprudence, and philosophy. The academics expected to see works glorifying the age of reason and rationality, of humanity dominating the realm of thought. However, Klimt saw it in a different light. His works highlighted the flaws of human perception and the futile egocentrism. In Klimt’s. version, medicine could not defeat death, and jurisprudence was powerless before evil. Offended, the faculty members protested the paintings and demanded Klimt return the government’s investments. One of Klimt’s patrons paid off the debt and kept the paintings in his collection.

 

famous artworks klimt philosophy colorized
Philosophy, by Gustav Klimt, 1900 (colorized with AI tools). Source: Google Arts & Culture

 

Immediately after the Nazis came to power, they launched an unprecedented attack on modern art. One of the artists who posthumously avoided prosecution was Gustav Klimt, who was actually favored by Hitler. Many of Klimt’s paintings, including the Faculty series, were seized from Jewish collectors for the benefit of the state. For protection, in 1943, they were transferred to the Immendorf castle in Austria. However, while retreating in May 1945, the Nazis set fire to the castle. No remains of paintings were ever found in the ruins, with only a small collection of black-and-white photographs left to give us the impression of their scale and details. In late 2021, Google launched an AI-based project that could possibly colorize the images, yet the result was unsatisfactory.

 

2. The Stone Breakers by Gustave Courbet

courbet breakers painting
The Stone Breakers, by Gustave Courbet, 1849. Source: Wikipedia

Get the latest articles delivered to your inbox

Sign up to our Free Weekly Newsletter

 

Gustave Courbet, the famous Realist artist, enjoyed a controversial yet carefully cultivated reputation. Courbet’s work constantly provided material for scandal. Elitist groups of art critics and collectors could not accept the idea of something as low and unappealing as the life of the working class being worthy to appear in a work of art. Politically, Courbet aligned himself with the anarchists and deliberately worked on “low” subjects to illustrate the class difference and the cruelty of the social system. He met the stone breakers on his way to a painting session and was so struck by their poverty and the way their hard labor transformed them, that he arranged a meeting in his studio.

 

Despite the controversy, the painting moved through several private collections before finally finding a home in the Dresden Gallery in 1909. The Stone Breakers was perhaps the most famous victim of the Dresden bombing carried out by the Allies in February 1945. It was destroyed with other 150 works during their urgent transportation from the Gallery to safe storage outside Dresden. The only good news was that Courbet painted two versions of the work. The second one, a smaller reversed image slightly different in tone, survived all historical cataclysms and remains in a museum in Switzerland.

 

3. Five Sunflowers in a Vase by Vincent van Gogh

famous artworks van gogh sunflowers painting
Five Sunflowers in a Vase, by Vincent van Gogh, 1888. Source: Wikipedia

 

Overall, experts on Vincent van Gogh recognize eleven known paintings of sunflowers made by the artist in different periods of his life. However, some believe that at least two of them might have been painted not by Van Gogh, but by Paul Gauguin, or their friend Emile Schuffenecker. Initially, Vincent van Gogh painted sunflowers to decorate the room of Gauguin who came to visit. Later, these flowers became a recurring motif in his work.

 

The particular sunflower composition in question is one of the undoubtedly attributed ones, clearly identifiable through Van Gogh’s notes. In 1920, a Japanese art collector Yamamoto Koyota purchased the painting from France to Japan. During the first public display, the original orange frame, chosen by Van Gogh himself, was accidentally destroyed, and Yamamoto, outraged, refused to exhibit the painting again. He kept it in his home until August 1945. On the same day when the US army destroyed Hiroshima, bombs fell on Osaka as well. Yamamoto’s house caught fire and collapsed with all his possessions inside. Only in 2013, art historians uncovered a rare colored print that showed the painting in its full glory, including the unusual choice of frame color.

 

4. Caravaggio’s Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence 

caravaggio nativity painting
Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence, by Caravaggio, 1609. Source: Wikipedia

 

The traditional Christian subject of Nativity refers to the scene of the birth of Jesus and visits paid to him by wise men and saints. Caravaggio painted this work in Sicily, during the last year of his life. He spent several months there, narrowly escaping yet another threat of prison sentence and possible execution. In 1609, his mental health was at an all-time low. His paranoia reached its peak—he slept fully clothed and armed, destroyed his paintings, and never stayed in one place for too long. Still, he made enough enemies in Sicily as well, so nine months later he had to flee back to Naples.

 

The Nativity painting had a remarkable and dramatic life of its own. In 1969, two Sicilian Mafia members stole the painting from the Oratory of St. Lawrence in Palermo, cutting it from the frame and rolling it into a carpet lying nearby. In the early 2000s, several prominent Mafia members started to speak about the painting’s fate. According to the most popular version, it was stolen for a commissioner who refused to pay after seeing the damage caused by a messy theft. Hidden in a barn for several years, it was damaged by pigs and later burnt.

 

5. The Trench by Otto Dix

dix trench photo
The Trench, by Otto Dix, 1920-23. Source: Reddit

 

For the German painter Otto Dix, service in World War I was an experience that deeply traumatized him and affected his approach to art. Instead of the metaphysical musings of abstraction or the subjectivity of Expressionism, Dix and his colleagues aimed to approach a new radical realism. Calling their movement New Objectivity, these artists focused on reality in its most raw, repulsive, and absurd forms. Their images of war were the opposites of heroic and glorious.

 

By the 1920s, European masses tried hard to forget the recent war, suppressing the traumatic memory of it. Dix decided to do just the opposite. He wanted to keep the remainder of the war present, as gruesome and gut-wrenching as it could be. The Trench showed the chaos of dismembered bodies, torn uniforms, gore, and dirt. Immediately, Otto Dix faced accusations of public indecency and disrespect to German soldiers. After the Nazis came, the situation became worse. Due to the “military sabotage” of the country’s newly acquired war-mongering ideology, Dix’s works were seized, and some of them, including the monumental and horrifying The Trench, were destroyed in the chaos of World War II.

 

6. Rembrandt’s Famous Artwork Christ in The Storm

famous artworks rembrandt christ painting
Christ in The Storm at The Sea of Galilee, by Rembrandt van Rijn, 1633. Source: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

 

The unique and astonishing work was the only known seascape painted by the Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn. It was lost during the most famous case of museum heist in history. In 1990, two unidentified men looted the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, stealing thirteen works, including three made by Rembrandt and one by Johannes Vermeer. These works vanished without a trace.

 

In 1997, the Boston Herald journalist Tom Mashberg allegedly saw Christ in The Storm. It was shown to him by his informant who was a notorious criminal and an art dealer. Mashberg only saw a fragment of it but he was convinced that it was the right Rembrandt, crudely cut from its frame and rolled into a tube. The paint cracked and chipped, damaging the precious work even further. However, after the police raided the dealer’s warehouse, they found nothing there.

 

Although no concrete proof of the work’s destruction has ever been presented by the officials, optimistic expectations still seem unreasonable. Art crime experts are convinced that none of the stolen works have survived the thirty years that have passed since the theft. As with the case of Caravaggio’s Nativity, the conditions for safe storage of such an important and fragile work are too hard to create without attracting extra attention.

Author Image

By Anastasiia KirpalovMA Art History & Curatorial StudiesAnastasiia is an art historian and curator based in Bucharest, Romania. Previously she worked as a museum assistant, caring for a collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. Her main research objectives are early-20th-century art and underrepresented artists of that era. She travels frequently and has lived in 8 different countries for the past 28 years.

Terms & Conditions | Privacy | Copyright © 2025 TheCollector
Page generated less than a minute ago on today at 11:15 AM .