The Mauritshuis in The Hague is returning a seventeenth-century painting by Jan van Goyen to the heirs of Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker.
The 1651 work, titled Vissers aan de oever van een plas, has been part of the national collection and held by the museum since 1967.
Looted during the occupation
An investigation by the Dutch restitution committee concluded that Goudstikker lost the artwork involuntarily under circumstances directly linked to the Nazi regime.
Goudstikker, a prominent art dealer in Amsterdam, fled the country after the German invasion in 1940 and died in an accident during his escape.
Senior Nazi official Hermann Göring took hundreds of works from Goudstikker’s business against the will of his widow, including the Van Goyen painting.
A decades-long search
Part of the looted collection was recovered after the war from a train Göring used to evacuate art from Berlin.
Following a protracted legal fight, the Dutch state restituted more than 200 paintings to Goudstikker’s daughter-in-law and grandchildren in 2005, but this canvas was not included.
What happened to the painting immediately after the war remains unclear, though it may have been stolen from the train.
It surfaced at a Berlin auction in 1957, and the Dutch government purchased it for 58,000 guilders in 1967 on behalf of the Mauritshuis.
