Getty Museum to return 17th century Dutch painting lost in the Holocaust
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The Getty Museum is returning another work of art that has turned out to be stolen goods, this one a Dutch landscape painting that was one of about 1,400 works left behind by Jacques Goudstikker, a noted Dutch-Jewish art dealer who fled the Nazi invasion of 1940.
The 370-year-old oil painting by Pieter Molijn isn’t a masterpiece like some of the prized antiquities the Getty has sent back to Italy. When it was acquired at auction in 1972, ‘Landscape with Cottage and Figures’ was believed to be by Jan van Goyan, but its authorship was later revised.
The Getty says the painting, which it never exhibited, was acquired ‘in good faith’ but is being returned now because cooperative research by its own staff and experts working for Goudstikker’s daughter-in-law, Marei von Saher, showed it was among the pieces the ill-fated Goudstikker had catalogued in a notebook at the time he fled.
Von Saher is after a far more prized work that hangs in Southern California: Lucas Cranach the Elder’s ‘Adam and Eve’ diptych, a highlight of the Norton Simon Museum’s collection that has become the object of a long-running court battle.
Click here for the full story on the Getty’s latest art return.
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-- Mike Boehm
