UK gallery to return Nazi-looted painting to heirs of Jewish collector

"Aeneas and his Family Fleeing Burning Troy" was stolen from the home of Samuel Hartveld after he fled Antwerp with his wife in May 1940.

The artwork by English painter Henry Gibbs was one of hundreds of thousands the Nazis plundered from Jewish families during World War II.

Their restitution has been a slow process, often involving legal battles and complex international searches.

The return of the 1654 oil painting will mark the latest triumph for a special panel set up by the UK government to investigate such works that have ended up in Britain's public collections.

The Spoliation Advisory Panel ruled the "Aeneas" painting was "looted as an act of racial persecution" and has arranged for it to be returned to Hartveld's heirs in the coming months, the UK government's culture department said.

A handover date has not yet been confirmed but Hartveld's family said they were "deeply grateful."

"This decision clearly acknowledges the awful Nazi persecution of Samuel Hartveld and that the 'clearly looted' painting belonged to Mr Hartveld, a Jewish Belgian art collector and dealer," the trust representing Hartveld's heirs and relatives said.

The painting depicts the Trojan hero Aeneas trying to rescue his family from the burning city.

It was produced in the wake of the English Civil War, when scenes of devastation and families being split up would have been familiar.

The Tate collection bought the work from the Galerie Jan de Maere in Brussels in 1994, and the trust established by Hartveld's heirs launched a claim in May 2024.
Long recovery process
"It is a profound privilege to help reunite this work with its rightful heirs," said Tate director Maria Balshaw.

"We now look forward to welcoming the family to Tate in the coming months and presenting the painting to them."

Hartveld survived World War II but never recovered the art collection he had to leave behind.

The family trust was started in 1986 by Sonia Klein, who was previously named in a will as the daughter of Hartveld's widow Clara, who died in 1951.

Many artworks stolen by the Nazis were intended to be resold, given to senior officials or displayed in the Fuehrermuseum (Leader's Museum) that Adolf Hitler planned for his hometown of Linz but was never built.

Just before the end of the war, the United States sent teams of museum directors, curators and art experts to Europe to rescue cultural treasures.

Their efforts enabled the swift return of many of the looted works to their owners.

But out of 650,000 stolen pieces, about 100,000 had not been returned by 2009, according to figures released at the Holocaust Era Assets Conference in the Czech Republic that year.

Returns this century have included France's 2018 restitution of Flemish master Joachim Patinir's "Triptych of the Crucifixion" to the descendants of the Bromberg family, who were forced to sell the work when they fled the Nazis.

In the same year, a Berlin museum said it had formally restituted a 15th-century religious wooden sculpture to the heirs of the former owners, a Jewish couple who fled the Nazi regime.

The jewel of gothic art remains in the museum under an accord struck with the heirs.

The UK's Spoliation Advisory Panel said it had received 23 claims in the last 25 years and helped return 14 works to the heirs of their former owners.