Two Goering pictures restituted

February 2 2012

Picture: Bloomberg/Dutch Restitutions Committee.

Catherine Hickley of Bloomberg reports that the Dutch government is to restitute two paintings once owned by Goering to the heirs of a Jewish antiques dealer. Paris-based Edouard Leon Jonas shipped the two works - an anonymous 16th Century Portrait of a Man with a Dog [above] and a landscape by Theobald Michau - to Bordeaux for safekeeping when Germany invaded France in 1940. But the pictures were intercepted and seized for Goering's enormous collection of looted art. They ended up in the hands of the Dutch government after Goering swapped them for Han van Meegeren's fake Vermeer, Christ and the Adulteress.

I love the fact that the consequences of van Meegeren's forgeries are still being felt today. 

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