The Tate Gallery is expected to be the first UK national museum to acknowledge that it holds a picture once owned by a Nazi victim. Later this month it will issue a further statement on Jan Griffier’s “View of Hampton Court Palace” of around 1710, which almost certainly belonged to a Jewish banker in the 1930s. The painting is now worth an estimated £120,000-200,000 and the family, who live in the London area, may well be offered financial compensation. This will be an important test case in Britain, establishing how national museums deal with the delicate issue of war losses. The Düsseldorf banker who owned “View of Hampton Court Palace” was shot by the Nazis in 1937. His children emigrated to safety in England, but his widow fled to Brussels in 1940 with much of his art collection and went into hiding. In order to survive, she sold pictures, and the Griffier is believed to have gone to a gallery on the avenue Louise for what she later described as “an apple and an egg”. The widow was sent to a concentration camp near Mechelen in 1944, and after liberation she joined her family in England, dying in 1968. Legal rights to the picture are now being claimed by her two sons and her daughter, who are being advised by the Holocaust Educational Trust. “View of Hampton Court Palace” was presented to the Tate Gallery in 1961 by the Friends of the Tate, who acquired it for £400 from London dealer Roland, Browse and Delbanco. They, in turn, had bought it from the Cologne auction house Kunsthaus Lempertz on 24 November 1955. Before that it had been in a private collection in southern Germany. In considering the present claim, the crux will be in what way the sale in Brussels was “forced”: the widow had to sell the picture in order to make enough money to eat, at a time when art market prices were very low, not because the sale was required by the Nazi authorities. In any event, the Tate Gallery is taking the claim seriously. Director Nicholas Serota explained, “We have every sympathy for the family. We shall be dealing with this matter immediately and consulting with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport”
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as 'War loot in the Tate?'