Details of Resolution

In October of 2018, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ Board of Trustees voted to deaccession Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints Nicholas of Tolentino and Sebastian in order to return the work to Marei von Saher, sole heir of noted Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker.

The painting was among a group of more than 1,200 artworks looted in 1940 by Adolf Hitler’s chief deputy, Hermann Göring, commander-in-chief of the German Luftwaffe and one of the most powerful figures in the Nazi party that ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945. Göring seized the Goudstikker gallery holdings within weeks of the dealer’s decision to flee the Netherlands by sea with his family in advance of the German invasion.

Goudstikker died in an accident on board the ship, while his family reached safety, still in possession of the log books cataloging most of the artworks left behind, including Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints Nicholas of Tolentino and Sebastian. After the war, in May 1945, Allied forces found the painting among a group of artworks recovered from Göring’s secret repository in Berchtesgaden, a German town in the Bavarian Alps near the Austrian border. The painting was returned to Dutch authorities in April 1946 with the expectation they would then return it to the Goudstikker family. Instead, the Dutch government sold it to an unknown buyer through Muller & Cie auction house in Amsterdam. It appeared again in another sale at Muller & Cie in 1956 and was purchased by Pieter de Boer and Frederick Mont. It was brought to Newhouse Galleries in New York in 1957 and purchased in good faith by VMFA in 1958.

In 2006, the Dutch government’s Restitutions Committee agreed to return to von Saher all 200 of the Göring-looted artworks still in its possession after the Goudstikker family filed claims for the looted artworks. If Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints Nicholas of Tolentino and Sebastian had still been in the Dutch government’s custody at the time, it would also have been returned to von Saher.

The painting dates from the mid-1510s. Formerly attributed to Lorenzo Costa, it has now been reattributed to the Master of the Risen Magdalen. The work features an enthroned Virgin in robes of red and blue with the Christ child on her lap. Flanking the Virgin and Christ child are Saints Nicholas of Tolentino and Sebastian.

The artwork was returned to Ms. Von Saher in November of 2018 and the transfer of ownership was finalized in January of 2019.

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

Details of Resolution

In June 2011, the Museum of Fine Arts reached a financial settlement with the heirs and the estate of Walter Westfeld for Eglon van der Neer’s Portrait of a Man and Woman in an Interior, allowing the painting to remain at the museum.

Walter Westfeld (b. 1889 – d. after 1942) operated an art gallery in Wuppertal, Germany, during the Nazi period. A 1935 decree from the Reichs Chamber of Fine Arts forbade him from working as a dealer because he was Jewish, and he was ordered to close the gallery in May of 1936. That very month, an exhibition of works of art owned by Westfeld was held at the Galerie Kleucker in the nearby city of Düsseldorf, including a “Company Scene” by Eglon van der Neer. This was almost certainly the MFA painting.

The paper trail ends there, and begins again five years later. The MFA purchased the painting from E. and A. Silberman Galleries, New York, in December, 1941. Silberman probably acquired the painting in the spring of that year, but it has not been ascertained from whom.

It is not known for certain how the MFA’s Portrait of a Man and Woman in an Interior left Westfeld’s possession and made its way to the United States. Without further documentation, its exact provenance may never be known. However, it is difficult to imagine a scenario by which he sold the painting voluntarily in Nazi Germany, receiving proceeds over which he had free disposal.

In November, 1938, Walter Westfeld was arrested for violating Germany’s foreign exchange laws. He spent the remaining years of his life in captivity and on January 23, 1943, was sent to his death at Auschwitz.