Baron Ferenc Hatvany came out of hiding in 1945 to find his Budapest bank vaults emptied, and a British panel recommended a looted Constable be returned to his heirs

Ferenc Hatvany, born in Budapest in 1881, built a collection of French and Hungarian paintings. After Allied bombing began in 1942 he put most of it in Budapest bank vaults. When Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944 he went into hiding on false papers. His family were tortured by the Gestapo to reveal their valuables. His only son was murdered. His sister and her husband died at Auschwitz. His mother-in-law was killed by the Arrow Cross. German trucks emptied his castle. After the Red Army took Budapest in February 1945, soldiers opened the vaults; witnesses said the Germans had opened them first. In March 1945 Hatvany found his vaults empty except for one large Courbet. Between 1946 and 1948 he bought back some works from a Soviet officer. He emigrated after the Communist takeover and sold paintings to live. In 1955 Courbet's L'Origine du monde was sold to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan^†. On 26 March 2014 the UK Spoliation Advisory Panel found that Constable's Beaching a Boat, Brighton, given to the Tate in 1986, was taken by German forces and should be returned. A 1946 export licence delayed the return. On 10 September 2015 the panel confirmed it. The Tate argued the heirs had sold another restituted Courbet at once. The heirs recovered Courbet's Femme nue couchée in 2005 and Baigneuses dans la forêt in 2021^†. In 2026 works from the collection hang in Budapest's Museum of Fine Arts and in Russia^†.