The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art made international news in 1998 for the restitution of a painting that had disappeared during World War II. The Bath of Bathsheba by sixteenth-century artist Jacopo Zucchi was purchased by the Atheneum in good faith from a Paris art dealer, and lawfully exported from France to the United States in 1965. By 1997, the Atheneum concluded that the painting had been stolen from the Italian Embassy in Berlin. In return for the Zucchi, the Italian government arranged an unprecedented loan to the Atheneum in 1998 of major paintings by Caravaggio and other seventeenth-century Italian artists from the National Gallery of Art in Rome.

In 2002, through a significant gift from the Chase family of Connecticut, the Atheneum began an in-depth provenance research project on its museum's collection of approximately 50,000 objects of art. The Atheneum followed the criteria established by the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), the American Association of Museums (AAM), and the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets (PCHA) in the United States to complete an initial review of the history of 257 European paintings by mid-2003.

The Chase family's gift enabled the Atheneum to hire two part-time research fellows to exclusively assist Eric Zafran, Susan Morse Hilles Curator of European Art on this important project. The gift also allowed for a subscription to the Art Loss Register, the leading international database of lost and stolen art, additional consultants and travel expenses as well as the digital photography costs.

The extensive investigation by the research fellows included attending conferences and trips to other institutions including the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles to access its immense provenance index with 900,000 records. A section in the Atheneum's Web site has been devoted to the provenance project since 2002, and 63 paintings that fall into the mandate of those created before 1946 and acquired after 1932, and possibly underwent a change of ownership between 1932 and 1946 and thought to have been in continental Europe between those dates, were photographed, digitized and submitted to the Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal.

Through research, the Atheneum determined that one painting under scrutiny actually has a clear provenance:

Dosso Dossi and Battista Dossi, Italian c. 1490-c.1542
Battle of Orlando and Rodomonte, c. 1530-1544
Oil and tempera on canvas
32 1/2 x 57 7/16 in.

The history of this early Renaissance painting has now been fully documented: the work, owned by Oscar Bondy of Vienna, was confiscated by the Nazis in 1938 during the occupation of Austria then on deposit at Hitler's Fuhrermuzeum in Linz. Next, it was transferred to the Munich Checkpoint and eventually returned to the Bondy family and bought by the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1949 from Oscar Bondy's wife, Elizabeth A. Bondy, at the Kende Galleries in New York.

Below, please find the partial list of works other works that are in question:

Antwerp Anonymous, attributed to Gillis van Valcenborch
The Trojan Horse, seventeenth century
Oil on panel
20 x 26 3/8 in.
The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1962.446

Didier Barra
Italian, active ca. 1608-after 1652
View of Naples, 1647
Oil on canvas
49 x 69 in.
The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1963.39

Antonio Francisco Bayeu y Subias
Spanish, 1734-1795
Portrait of Don Pedro Arascot, 1786
Oil on canvas
45 1/8 x 31 in.
The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1965.2

Ambrosius Benson
Flemish, c. 1495-1550
Virgin and Child
Oil on panel
9 1/8 x 7 in.
1945.352

Abraham Bloemart
Dutch, 1564-1651
Neptune and Amphitrite
Oil on canvas
40 x 55 in.
Gift of Arthur E. Erlanger, 1964.223

Niccolo di Buonaccorso
Italian, died 1388
The Annunciation, 1378-88
Tempera and oil on panel
15 x 10 in.
The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1951.94

Antonio Canal (Canaletto)
Italian, 1697-1768
View of Venice, Piazza and Piazetta San Marco, c. 1740
Oil on canvas
26 x 40 in.
The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1947.2

Pieter Jacobsz Codde
Dutch, 1599-1678
A Musical Party, 1631
Oil on panel
12 x 17 in.
The Ella Galup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1962.447

Domenico Corvi
Italian, 1721-1803
A Miracle of St. Filippo Neri, mid 1770s or 1780s
Oil on canvas
69 x 87 7/8 in.
The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1981.24

Taddeo di Bartolo
Italian, 1362/3-1422
Madonna and Child, last decade of the forteenth century
Tempera and oil on panel
28 x 18 7/16 in.
Gift of the Robert Lehman Art Foundation, 1962.444

Southern Netherlands Anonymous
Second half of the sixteenth century
Penitent Magdalene
Oil on panel
24 x 19 1/8 in.
1952.449
DEACCESSIONED

Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo
Italian, 1727-1804
Christ Healing the Blind, 1752
Oil on canvas
28 x 40 7/8 in.
The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund and by exchange, 1952.289

Abraham van Dyck
Dutch, 1635-1672
Portrait of an Old Woman
Oil on panel
29 x 21 in.
1957.165

Jan Sanders van Hemessen
Flemish, ca. 1500-1566
Loose company (A Joyous Company), 1543
Oil on panel
33 x 46 in.
The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1941.233

Karel van Mander
Dutch, 1548-1606
The Adoration of the Magi, c. 1590-1595
Oil on panel
13 1/8 x 16 in.
The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1956.28

Philips Wouwerman
Dutch, 1619-1668
Portrait of a Man on Horseback
Oil on panel
13 3/8 x 12 in.
The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1968.13

Paolo da Venezia, called Paolo Veneziano
Italian, active 1333-c. 1362
The Angel of the Annunciation
Tempera on wood with frame
10 3/8 x 2 7/8 in.
The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1941.156

Pair with above
The Virgin Annunciate, c. 1340-1344
Tempera on wood with frame
10 3/8 x 4 in.
The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1941.157