The Daily Populous Wednesday August 27th, 2025 morning edition
Authored by theguardian.com and submitted by quantotius

More than 80 years after it was looted by the Nazis from a Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam, a portrait by an Italian master has been spotted on the website of an estate agent advertising a house for sale in Argentina.

A photo shows the painting, Portrait of a Lady (Contessa Colleoni) by the late-baroque portraitist Giuseppe Ghislandi, also known as Fra’ Galgario, hanging above a sofa in the living room of the property, in a seaside town near Buenos Aires.

The Dutch newspaper AD said it had traced the work, which features in a database of lost art and is listed by the Dutch culture ministry as “unreturned” after the second world war, after a long investigation – and with the unwitting help of the estate agent.

Portrait of a Lady belonged to Jacques Goudstikker, a leading Dutch art dealer who fled the Netherlands in mid-May 1940 to escape the invading Nazis but died after falling in the hold of the vessel carrying him to safety and breaking his neck.

Within weeks, Goudstikker’s entire collection of more than 1,100 artworks, including numerous paintings catalogued as old masters, had been bought up, in a forced sale and for a small fraction of its true value, by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring.

View image in fullscreen Hermann Göring in a prison cell in 1945 during the Nuremberg trials. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

After the second world war, some works were recovered in Germany and displayed as part of the Dutch national collection in the Rijkmuseum, before 202 were restored to the dealer’s sole surviving heir, his daughter-in-law Marei von Saher, in 2006.

Portrait of a Lady was not among them. AD said it had uncovered wartime documents suggesting the painting was one of two in the possession of Friedrich Kadgien, a Nazi official, SS officer and senior aide to Göring, who fled to Switzerland in 1945.

Kadgien – described by US interrogators as “not a true Nazi” but “a snake of the lowest sort” – subsequently left Switzerland for Brazil then Argentina, the paper said, where he started a company and a family and died in 1978, aged 71.

The paper said it had made attempts over several years to speak to the late Nazi’s two daughters in Buenos Aires about their father and the missing artworks, but had been consistently rebuffed. Eventually, a reporter was dispatched to knock on doors.

“There was certainly someone at home, we saw a shadow moving in the corridor, but no one opened,” the journalist, Peter Schouten, reported back. “By the way, the house is for sale,” he added, attaching a link to the agency, Robles Casas & Campos.

The AD reporter Cyril Rosman said: “As I opened the link the next morning, I started scrolling through the interior photos of the property. Was there anything that said more about Kadgien’s past? Then I saw it. That painting, above the sofa – photo five …”

The paper said art historians believed the painting had every appearance of being the missing work by Ghislandi, one of Italy’s most important late-17th and early-18th-century portraitists, whose works are on display in several museums around the world.

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Bram de Klerck of Radboud University in Nijmegen said the composition was “identical” and the dimensions and colours appeared to match earlier black-and-white photographs, but warned he could not say more based on a photo.

Two researchers at the Dutch government’s cultural heritage service, Annelies Kool and Perry Schrier, also told AD there was “no reason to imagine” it was a copy, adding that only an examination of the painting itself could provide confirmation.

In addition, Kool and Schrier said they believed they had uncovered a photo of a second missing work known to have been in Kadgien’s possession, a still life by the 17th-century Dutch artist Abraham Mignon, in a social media post by one of his daughters.

AD said all attempts to speak to the sisters since the discovery of the photo had failed, with one reportedly telling the paper: “I don’t know what information you want from me and I don’t know what painting you are talking about.”

A US lawyer for the Goudstikker estate told the paper the dealer’s heirs would make every effort to recover the work, and von Saher, 81, said she would not give up her search for the artworks owned by her late father-in-law, which began in the 1990s.

“My family aims to bring back every single artwork robbed from Jacques’ collection, and to restore his legacy,” von Saher said.

Stonius123 on August 27th, 2025 at 00:45 UTC »

Seller has some explaining to do

Ronaldis on August 26th, 2025 at 23:25 UTC »

This makes for a great movie plot.

civex on August 26th, 2025 at 23:04 UTC »

Argentina is the 1st place to look for Nazi loot.