Sotheby’s has returned a painting stolen during World War II to the German government. The picture, a little, sentimental portrait of Lady Elizabeth Hervey holding a dove (1778), by Johann Friederich August Tischbein, has been returned to the Weimar Museum, from which it disappeared in 1945.
Richard Oldenburg, chairman of Sotheby’s in North and South America, called the painting’s repatriation “a very happy occasion” and maintained that Sotheby’s had played “a major role in smoothing and facilitating this return.”
The deal also involved a payment “for expenses” to the married couple who consigned the painting. Some $7,000 was paid by the Dresdner Bank to the unidentified couple from St Louis who stated that they had inherited the painting and had no idea that the Tischbein had been war loot (the work was valued at an estimated $10,000-$15,000).
Yet the picture’s origins were no secret. Most accounts assume that the Tischbein was seized from a hiding place in a castle near Weimar by American soldiers in the summer of 1945.
The Dürers were at the centre of a contentious lawsuit seeking their return from an American lawyer and collector who had acquired them. The Weimar Museum regained those pictures in 1982.
Records indicate that the collector and dealer Greta Feigl bought the Tischbein from the E. & A. Silberman Galleries in 1964 for $1700. Feigl sold it to a Munich dealer a year later for $3000. The painting then passed through the hands of Walter Hofer, the ex-Nazi dealer who had represented Hermann Goering. At that point, Weimar Museum officials began trying to recover the work, and the picture was becoming a bit too “hot” for the market.
It then returned to New York, to Feigl, and then to the Silberman Galleries, which closed in 1968. Two years later, Newhouse Galleries advertised the Tischbein with a full-page in Apollo, but the work sold and disappeared before Weimar Museum officials were able to act.
In July 1995, a dealer consigned the work at Sotheby’s, and according to the auction house’s account, Christopher Apostle, a specialist in its Old Masters Department, determined that the picture was the missing Tischbein and notified Sotheby’s officials and the Weimar Museum.
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as 'Weimar gets a painting back'