The Mystery of Chopin’s Portraits

Just before the outbreak of war, on August 5, 1939, the treasure was packed into two trunks and placed in the vault of the Bank of National Economy in Warsaw, at the corner of Aleje Jerozolimskie and Nowy Świat. Today, we still do not know under what circumstances it disappeared.

To this day, no one has solved the mystery of the disappearance of the first photographs of Frédéric Chopin. They vanished somewhere between Warsaw, Bucharest, Paris, London, and Canada. Among them were the so-called daguerreotypes taken in 1846 and 1847 in the Paris studio of Louis-Auguste Bisson, just before the composer’s death. The photographs were not retouched. One of them depicted the ailing pianist, seated.

The portraits of Chopin were discovered in the archives of a music publishing house in Leipzig by Tadeusz Brzeziński, then Consul of the Republic of Poland (his son, Zbigniew Brzeziński, later became a close associate and national security adviser to US President Jimmy Carter). In 1937, the Polish State Treasury purchased this extraordinary collection for 100,000 marks. It included not only three daguerreotypes but also Chopin’s manuscripts and several dozen letters. After being displayed at an exhibition in Paris, the collection was deposited at the National Library in Warsaw and secured in a fireproof safe.

Evacuation of the Treasures – Romania, France, the United Kingdom
Just before the war broke out, on August 5, 1939, the collection was packed into two trunks and transferred to the vault of the Bank of National Economy in Warsaw. After the war began, a decision was made to evacuate it to the Polish Embassy in Bucharest.

The route of these trunks was later reconstructed by art historian Dr. Monika Kuhnke, who for many years at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs dealt with the restitution of lost artworks. From Romania, the Chopin collection was sent to France. On November 24, 1939, it was deposited in the Polish Library in Paris. When the German offensive swept across the Seine—on May 21, 1940—art historian Dr. Karol Estreicher collected the trunks, without opening them to check the contents. He transported them to Angers, where the Polish government-in-exile was based, and placed them in a branch of the Bank of France.
But on June 13, with German troops advancing, Estreicher loaded them into a newly purchased car and transported them to Aubusson. He handed them over to Józef Krzywda-Polskowski, who was preparing the evacuation of other national treasures, including those from Wawel Castle. He was supposed to accept the deposit without opening it, but noted that the trunks bore the seals of the Polish Embassy in Bucharest. With him was art historian and Wawel curator Stanisław Świerz-Zaleski.

The treasures were then transported to Bordeaux and loaded onto the ship Chorzów, which sailed to the United Kingdom. Initially, the cargo was sent to the Polish Embassy in London, but there a decision was made that, along with other national treasures, it would be transported to Canada, as London was under threat from German bombings.
The Batory Carries the Treasures to Canada. They were loaded aboard the ocean liner s/s Batory. On July 12, 1940, the ship docked in Halifax, Canada, and the valuable cargo was moved to the Polish Consulate in Ottawa, and later to the building of the Public Archives of Canada.

After the war ended, the communist authorities began demanding the return of treasures evacuated from Poland. Among émigré politicians opposed to this arose the idea of dividing and hiding them in different locations. The trunks containing the Chopin memorabilia were deposited in a bank vault in Ottawa under the names of Świerz-Zaleski and Warsaw Polytechnic professor Franciszek Krzywda-Polkowski. Only they could retrieve the precious deposit.

It was not until late 1958 that a Polish delegation arrived in Ottawa with pianist Witold Małcużyński, who was acceptable to émigré authorities. However, the trunks placed before them were already sealed with stamps from the communist Polish legation in Canada, with no trace of the seals from Bucharest in 1939. The new seals may have been applied in August 1945, when the trunks were opened to create an inventory list of the artifacts inside.

Where Are the Daguerreotypes of Chopin’s Image?
When the trunks were opened in 1958, the priceless daguerreotypes were no longer inside. Their absence was soon announced by Professor Zbigniew Drzewiecki, president of the Fryderyk Chopin Society. The information appeared in the Canadian press.

But representatives of the Polish communist authorities immediately issued a denial, claiming the daguerreotypes had never left Warsaw. All other Chopin memorabilia purchased in Leipzig before the war—except the unique portraits of the master—returned to Warsaw on February 3, 1959, via New York, Copenhagen, and Berlin.

To this day, it remains unclear at what stage of the evacuation they disappeared—whether someone removed them from the trunks at the Polish Embassy in Bucharest, or years later at the Bank of Montreal, when the trunks were opened by communist officials. Perhaps, in fact, they never left the National Library in Warsaw in August 1939 or the Bank of National Economy? But that would mean they fell into the hands of the German occupiers.