Five oil sketches by Peter Paul Rubens go back on show together at the Ducal Museum in Gotha on Monday, for the first time in more than 80 years. The small panels, painted on wood in 1620 and 1621, were studies for the ceiling of the Jesuit church in Antwerp, the largest commission of the artist's career to that point. The ceiling itself is gone: the church was struck by lightning in 1718 and burned down, leaving the preparatory sketches as the closest surviving record of the scheme.

The five panels were among the most prized works at Schloss Friedenstein, where some had hung since the early 19th century. All five vanished in the final weeks of the Second World War. Three were carried off by members of the ducal family, who had not owned the collection since 1918; moved to Coburg for safekeeping, they were sold on illicitly and surfaced on the American art market. The other two were taken by the Red Army and handed back to Gotha in 1959.

Recovery has been slow. One of the three, showing St Gregory of Nazianzus, came back in 2024 from a museum in Buffalo, New York, with help from Christie's. Now a fourth, The Prophet Elijah in the Golden Chariot, has been recovered from a private American collection through a private settlement arranged by the Paris auction house Cabinet Turquin. The Ernst von Siemens Art Foundation paid for the return, agreeing what its secretary general Martin Hoernes described as a sum in the low millions, below market value, because nobody wanted to treat the present owners as criminals over what he called a good-faith purchase.

The fifth sketch, St Augustine, belongs to the Foundation E. G. Bührle Collection in Zurich, which has lent it for the reunion. The director of the Friedenstein Foundation, Tobias Pfeifer-Helke, called the gathering little short of miraculous. The display opens as Gotha prepares to mark the 450th anniversary of Rubens's birth next year.