Wandering Windows

After 135 years of wandering, six stained-glass panels were on their way home last week to the town hall of Sempach, Switzerland (pop. 1,200) for which they had been made. The panels, illustrating early Swiss history, were the gift of Manhattan Industrialist H. C. Honegger, who values them at $100,000. Their return reversed the usual flow of European art into U.S. collections, was bound to warm Sempachian hearts.

The Sempach burghers themselves had ordered the windows removed in 1814 to let more light into their hall. Afterward they were sold to a composer for a handful of pocket change and their travels began. One of the Rothschilds bought them in 1853. Duveen Bros., the London art dealers, got hold of them in 1897 and offered them to the Swiss National Museum for $1,250 apiece. While the Swiss deliberated, the elder J. P. Morgan snapped them up. In 1942, Honegger bought them at an auction of part of the Morgan Collection, had them fitted into window frames in his New York City home.

Meanwhile, though modern Swiss experts had lost track of the panels, they had not given up mourning their loss. A recent article by one of them, Curator Gottfried Boesch of the Lucerne museum, was passed along to Honegger by friends. Reflected Honegger: "I was fortunate enough to find them. What more appropriate than that I should return them?" He sent word to Curator Boesch that the panels were safe. Then he took them out of his own window frames and turned them over to the Swiss to be crated and sent home.

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