Details of Resolution

In April 2023, Susan and Matthew Weatherbie and the MFA reached an agreement with the heirs of art dealers Paul Graupe and Arthur Goldschmidt, resolving the ownership of Adriaen van Ostade’s painting Customers Conversing in an Interior (1671), which had been sold to Adolf Hitler in the early 1940s. The agreement allows the painting to be retained and exhibited at the MFA, and donated to the Museum at a future date by the Weatherbies.

By 1937, the Ostade panel was part of the stock of Paul Graupe et Cie., a Paris-based gallery run by the Jewish art dealer Paul Graupe. Graupe and his business partner, Arthur Goldschmidt, who was likewise Jewish, had been compelled to leave Nazi Germany for France due to racial persecution. In 1939, Graupe again fled, first to Switzerland, then to Portugal in 1940, and ultimately to the U.S. in 1941. His gallery stock was left behind in occupied Paris. In 1940, after he was sent to an internment camp and conscripted into service, Goldschmidt fled to the south of France, which was then not occupied. Before leaving Europe, Graupe asked for Goldschmidt’s help in saving his gallery stock, including Customers Conversing in an Interior, which he hoped could be sent to Switzerland or the U.S. In February 1941, however, Goldschmidt sold the Ostade to Karl Haberstock, an agent for Hitler. Goldschmidt was able to immigrate to Cuba later that year, making his way to the U.S. in 1946.

Haberstock sold the painting to the Reich Chancellery in April 1941. It was selected for inclusion in the art museum Hitler planned to build in Linz, Austria, the so-called Führermuseum. Customers Conversing in an Interior was recovered by Allied forces after the end of World War II and shipped to France for restitution. It is not known if Graupe ever learned what had happened to it. The painting was not claimed by the end of the 1940s, and as a result the French state auctioned it in 1951. It changed hands several times on the European art market before Susan and Matthew Weatherbie bought it, unaware of its Nazi-era history, in 1992. It is one of 28 Dutch and Flemish paintings the Weatherbies pledged to the MFA in 2017.

Details of Resolution

In 2022, the MFA restituted this Late Imperial marble Portrait of a Man to the Republic of Italy, from where it is believed to have been stolen during World War II.

The head was found in December 1931 at Minturno, Italy, during a series of excavations undertaken by the University of Pennsylvania and the Superintendency of Campania in Naples. The head was published, inventoried and illustrated in a catalogue of sculptures from the excavations in 1938. During World War II, a number of archaeological finds and other works of art stored at Minturno were stolen, probably by German troops, or were otherwise dispersed in the upheaval of war. The Portrait of a Man was almost certainly taken at this time.

The Museum purchased the sculpture from the Swiss gallery Münzen und Medaillen in 1961, with no documentation of its collecting history. In July 2019, Professor Irene Bald Romano of the University of Arizona alerted MFA staff that the head had gone missing from Italy during World War II. This information prompted an investigation of the sculpture’s provenance. After verifying its excavation at Minturno and the loss of artwork there during the war, the Museum wrote in September 2019 to the Italian Ministry of Culture to inform them of the sculpture’s whereabouts. In September 2020, the Ministry affirmed the MFA’s findings and requested that the head be returned.

Details of Resolution

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) reached an agreement with the heirs of Ferenc Chorin to return the painting View of Beverwijk by Salomon van Ruysdael, which was looted during World War II.

The painting belonged to the Jewish collector Ferenc Chorin (1879 – 1964) of Budapest, who deposited it along with other works of art at the Hungarian Commercial Bank of Pest in 1943. Chorin and his family were persecuted by National Socialist forces, fled Hungary in 1944, and settled in New York in 1947. At the end of World War II, the bank reported that the contents of Chorin’s deposit had gone missing in January 1945, during the Siege of Budapest. Despite the family’s efforts to locate the contents of the bank vault in the postwar years, they never recovered the Ruysdael. The painting was included in a 1998 publication on Hungarian war losses, but because it was published with an incorrect image and description, the MFA was not aware that the View of Beverwijk had belonged to Chorin or was considered missing.

The Museum acquired the painting in 1982 from a London dealer with no information about its history other than that it had come from a Swiss collection. The work’s provenance between 1945 and 1982 remains untraced.

In 2019, scholar Sándor Juhász notified the MFA that the View of Beverwijk once belonged to Frigyes Glück of Budapest, in whose collection it had been published in 1924. This new information, posted on the MFA’s website, allowed the Chorin heirs to locate their family’s painting—known to have come from the Glück collection—in 2021