The State - News from Oct. 27, 1986

A painting by the Baroque artist Pierfrancesco Mola, reported missing from the Elysee Palace 35 years ago, was returned to France by the San Francisco museum where it had been hanging. The painting, “Herminie and Valfrino Nursing the Wounded Tancrede,” was placed in the Louvre Museum in a ceremony Friday. Mola’s painting was bought in 1685 for the collection of King Louis XIV. It was borrowed from the Louvre by the Elysee Palace in 1875, but disappeared sometime before a 1951 inventory at the palace, which is now the residence of France’s president. In 1952, the picture was purchased legally from a Paris dealer by American merchant Samuel Kress, who gave it to the De Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco in 1961.