Sculpture Stolen 33 Years Ago Returns to France: ‘Faune Chasseur’ Found at a U.S. Auction

A 19th-century French sculpture that had vanished without a trace for more than three decades has finally come home. “Faune Chasseur” (The Hunting Faun), the work of sculptor Alfred Lepère, is once again on public display at the Musée de Picardie in Amiens, having arrived there in early September 2026.

The work, weighing 140 kilograms and 2.4 meters tall, depicts a naked bearded hunter holding up a dead hare. It was created in 1863 on a French state commission for the newly opened Musée de Picardie in Amiens. In the 1950s the sculpture was moved to the city’s zoo, where one night in July 1993 it was stolen — and its whereabouts remained unknown for over 30 years.

The breakthrough came in July 2025, when an unidentified American auction house identified the work during routine pre-sale verification procedures. The auction house checked the sculpture against the Art Loss Register, the London-based private database for stolen artworks, and it turned out to be registered as stolen — the sale was immediately cancelled.

The Art Loss Register cooperated with the French government and the Centre National des Arts Plastiques for the work’s return, while the current owner agreed to surrender the sculpture entirely free of charge.

The case comes at a time when museums are facing a wave of art thefts: recently, jewelry worth $5 million was stolen from the Musée Lalique, paintings from Sicily and the Musée Renoir, a 3,000-year-old gold treasure from the Villena Museum, and the royal jewels from the Louvre last autumn.

Source: Smithsonian Magazine