His collection[1] included paintings by Tintoretto, Cézanne, Renoir, Ingres and Courbet, most notably L'Origine du monde and Femme nue couchée.
During the Second World War, his art collection was placed in a bank vault in Budapest to protect it from the pro-Nazi Hungarian government, and the Hatvany family, which was Jewish, fled the country just before the Nazi takeover of Hungary in March 1944.
The lawyer Hans Deutsch filed a claim on behalf of Ferenc Hatvany against the German government and obtained compensation for him.
In 2014 an agreement was reached with the Tate for John Constable's Beaching A Boat, Brighton [6] In 2021 Courbet's Baigneuses dans la forêt (1862) was restituted to the Hatvany heirs.
[7] The Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art printed the image of one of the missing paintings on a playing card in an effort to relaunch the search.