When we returned to the mine, we found Steve and Shrady in conversation. They were planning an excursion and asked us to join them. We expressed pious disapproval of letting up on the job the minute George’s back was turned. Steve’s answer was, “That’s a crock. I haven’t taken a day off in two weeks. You can do as you like, me lads; I’m off to see the wizard.” The two of them climbed into the sporty Mercedes-Benz convertible which Shrady had recently acquired, and drove off down the mountain.
“I have an idea,” said Lamont. “They can have their fun today. We’ll have ours tomorrow, while they pick up the Altdorfer panels at Bad Ischl.”
Lamont turned to the loading of trucks, while I went down to the Kammergrafen with Sieber. In the course of the morning I selected approximately two hundred pictures. We concentrated on those of small size, which were stored on the top racks, and the work went rapidly. Among the paintings we chose was one which had a typewritten label on the back. I read the words “Von dem Führer noch nicht entschieden”—not yet decided upon by the Führer. I asked Sieber what this signified. He explained that every picture intended for the Linz Museum—and this was one of them—had to be personally approved by Hitler before it could be officially included in the prospective collection. I could easily understand that the Führer would have wanted to examine the more important acquisitions, but that each canvas had to receive his personal approval struck me as preposterous. Hitler had entrusted the formation of his collections first to Dr. Hans Posse, a noted scholar, and, after his death, to Dr. Hermann Voss, director of the Dresden Gallery. This meticulous procedure, involving the submission of all pictures to the Führer in Munich, must have been trying to those two luminaries of the German art world.
When I came up from the mine for lunch I found that Lamont had completed the loading of two trucks. As the stock of pictures in the packing room at the mine entrance was almost exhausted, he said that he would join Sieber and me in making further selections. We returned to the Kammergrafen and continued with the smaller pictures.
On one of the top shelves we found a cardboard carton bearing the name of Dr. Helmut von Hümmel, who had been connected with the formation of the Linz collections. The label indicated that the contents had been destined for the museum. On the carton appeared the word “Sittenbilder.” Lamont and I knew the word “Bilder” meant pictures, but the other two syllables conveyed nothing. Sieber knew very little English but tried to explain. He thought perhaps the word meant “customs,” or something like that. I thought that I understood him. He probably meant that they were little scenes from everyday life.
We opened the carton. On top were three small watercolors, with beautiful gray-blue mounts and carved, gilt frames. If they were not by François Boucher, they were by a close pupil. The workmanship was exquisite and they were highly pornographic. So these were “Sittenbilder.” In our limited German we tried to tell Sieber that they might be called “scenes from life,” but hardly everyday life.
The rest of the things in the carton were of the same order, some of them contemporary, all of them licentious. None approached the first three watercolors in sheer virtuosity of technique. We wondered just which department of the Linz Museum would have harbored them.
Later we showed them to Steve. When he looked at the three watercolors he asked, “Who did those?”
“They look very much like Boucher,” I said without thinking.