The Mystery Behind a Masterpiece

 From Crime Reads:

Against all odds, Lady with an Ermine endured a five-century passage through Europe, making its way across borders while nations and governments fell, while fortunes were built and squandered, while battles were won and lost, while begrudging political collaborations were agreed to and then often ignored, and while plagues and pandemics ravished. Exiled during the Poland-Soviet war to Paris’ Ile St. Louis, one of the few people who might have seen it hanging in the Hôtel Lambert was Fredrick Chopin. Returning to Poland, it was bricked up in a hidden cellar in advance of the German invasion and then discovered by the Gestapo on Hitler’s orders. Rescued after the war from a depot in Munich and deemed bourgeois under Stalin’s Communist reign, it was shut away in a warehouse until the the end of the Cold War when it seen for the first time in the West. It traveled—perhaps too much—until it came to a rest in the darkened museum room in Krakow.

While I had remained in one geographical location for two years, the five-century journey of a portrait that measures little more than 21” x 15” provided me with rich mental life. A young woman and her white ermine continued to prove their steadfast relationship with time by holding my imagination. (Read more.)