Dutch Government Buys Back Paintings Looted by Nazis

By JOANA QUINTANILHA, Bloomberg News
March 7, 2007

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — The Dutch government paid $3.9 million to buy back four 17th-century pictures returned last year to the heir of art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, a gallery owner who fled the advancing Nazis.

Marei von Saher, Goudstikker's daughter-in-law and the heir, will donate a fifth painting to the government, according to a statement sent by e-mail yesterday from Lawrence Kaye, a lawyer at Herrick, Feinstein LLP in New York who is representing the heirs. The five old masters will return to museums in Gouda, Den Bosch, Utrecht, and Delft, the government said in a statement.

Goudstikker abandoned 1,400 artworks when he escaped the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in 1940. He took with him a black notebook recording over 1,000 of the pictures. Hermann Göring looted the gallery weeks later. The paintings were recovered from Germany after the war and incorporated into the Dutch National Art Collection. In February 2006, the Netherlands restituted 200 paintings looted by the Nazis to Ms. von Saher. Ms. von Saher is donating "Child on Deathbed" by Bartholomeus van der Helst, from about 1645. The four paintings purchased by the Dutch government are "Architectural Fantasy With Figures" (1633) by Dirck van Delen, two portraits by the Utrecht artist Paulus Moreelse, and Daniel Vosmaer's 1665 "View of Delft."

Ms. von Saher said she is "very pleased that we have been able to find a way to convey some important artworks from the Goudstikker Collection to the Dutch government in an amicable fashion."