The British dealer, Adam Williams, age 48, formerly head of sales and acquisitions at Newhouse Galleries, New York, has gone on trial in Paris for trying to sell a stolen work of art, having previously been acquitted of the charge. He is being tried on an appeal by the Schloss family, who are Jews, with attempting illegally to sell Frans Hals’s “Portrait of the pastor, Adrianus Tegularius”, a work looted by the Nazis from the Schloss Collection and described by Seymour Slive in his Frans Hals catalogue raisonné (1970) as being stolen (The Art Newspaper, No.72, July-August 1997, p.7, and No.97, November 1999, p.5). The collection was begun in 1910 by Adolph Schloss who amassed more than 300 16th- and 17th-century Dutch works of art. At the outbreak of World War II, the works were hidden in southwestern France where they were discovered in 1943 by the Nazis who divided the collection between the Louvre and Hermann Goering. About 140 pictures have been restored to the family. Mr Williams acquired the portrait for Newhouse Galleries from Christie’s London in 1989 for £110,000 ($180,000). He put it up for sale in Paris the following year and it came to the attention of the family who filed suit and had it impounded. Mr Williams claims he bought it in good faith and blames Christie’s, whose catalogue cited the Schloss provenance but made no mention that it had been looted, for its failure adequately to check the painting’s legal status. If convicted, Mr Williams faces a sentence of up to five years in prison and a fine of £684,000 ($416,700). The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not publish a catalogue of the missing Schloss paintings until 1998. The portrait is being held by the French police.
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as 'Dealer on trial for selling Nazi war loot'