Summary RC 1.41

Wooded Landscape with Herd near a Pond by J.S. van Ruysdael

An employee of the Holocaust Claims Processing Office in New York found the 17th-century painting Wooded Landscape with Herd near a Pond by Jacob Salomonsz. van Ruysdael (NK 2653) via the Origins Unknown Agency website. She informed the State Secretary that the painting had been part of the collection of Jewish banker and art collector Max Rothstein (1894-1950). In September 2005, Rothstein’s son and daughter filed an application for restitution with the State Secretary, who sent it to the Committee in November 2005. At the time, the painting was on loan at the Dutch embassy in Washington DC.

The application for restitution contained a detailed account of Max Rothstein’s life. Born in Austria-Hungary in 1894, Rothstein was of Jewish origin and lived with his wife and two children in Berlin in the early 1930s. As co-director of Willy Rosenthal Jr. & Co bank, he possessed considerable assets including numerous paintings, tapestries, pieces of antique furniture and works of art. After the Nazis assumed power, he and his family were forced to move and his income plummeted. As the applicants indicated: ‘Over the course of the four years following this relocation, Max Rothstein suffered dramatic reductions in his annual earnings, culminating in December 1937 when he was forced to withdraw from his position as co-proprietor of Willy Rosenthal Jr. & Co.’

    The family escaped to Amsterdam in 1938, where part of the art collection was put into storage – and subsequently confiscated by the occupying forces – and various objects were sold in order to acquire money to live on. In August 1941, the Rothstein family managed to get to the United States. Max Rothstein died there in 1950, and his wife in 1990.

    The provenance of the claimed work by Van Ruysdael was easy to trace. Documents at the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD) show that the painting was put up for auction at the Messrs. Christie, Manson & Woods auction house in 1939, although it was not known who the consigner was. In 2002, at the request of the Origins Unknown Agency, auction house Christie’s said that the painting had remained unsold at the time but that Max Rothstein was the consigner/owner. Rothstein’s name appeared in the auction catalogue, as did the name A. Heppner, a Jewish art dealer and friend, who had acted as representative at the auction. According to a surviving invoice of the transaction, the painting was sold to Alois Miedl for NLG 2,600 by the same Heppner in July 1940. A short while later, it was sold to the Reichskanzlei for the Führer Museum in Linz for NLG 4,800. After the war, it was returned to the Netherlands.

    On the basis of these facts, the Committee was of the opinion that all conditions for restitution had been met. The Committee regarded the version of events as described by the applicants – that Rothstein had sold the painting to Miedl in 1940 and that Heppner had acted as representative – as convincing. In this context, the Committee noted that the Rothstein family was still in the Netherlands in July 1940 and had sold works of art with the assistance of Heppner before. With reference to the third recommendation on private art property by the Ekkart Committee, the Committee concluded that by today’s standards, the sale should be regarded as involuntary.

    In its recommendation of 27 November 2006, the Committee advised the Minister to return the Van Ruysdael painting to Max Rothstein’s heirs. The Minister adopted this recommendation in a decision taken on 24 January 2007.

Read the complete recommendation

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