The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has reached an agreement with the known descendants of David Drake, an artist who was enslaved for the majority of his life, to restitute two of Drake’s large-scale works to them.

The MFA Boston acquired its first work by Drake, a “Poem Jar” from 1857, in 1997 and the second work, a “Signed Jar” also from 1857, in 2011. (The two works were made about a month apart.) Both of these works featured in the acclaimed exhibition “Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina,” which the MFA Boston co-organized with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it debuted in 2022.

The two institutions had first engaged with Drake’s descendants as part of the research for the exhibition. In a press release announcing the restitution of the two works, the MFA Boston said that this process “prompted discussions around the rightful ownership of his works.” The museum likened its decision to resolve the ownership of the vessels to its history of doing so to restoring ownership of works to the heirs of their previous owners that were looted by the Nazis during World War II.

On October 16, the MFA Boston officially deaccessioned the two vessels and then transferred their ownership back to Drake’s descendants, via the Dave the Potter Legacy Trust. Through the agreement, the M...