he ALR cleared from claim, on at least two occasions, an El Greco painting seized by the Nazis from its war-time owner Julius Priester. Portrait of a Gentleman (1570) was one of numerous works taken by the Gestapo from the collection of the Viennese industrialist, who fled the Third Reich in 1938.

It was recently returned to Priester’s heirs after the Commission for Looted Art in Europe (CLAE) spotted the work on a New York dealer’s website and filed a claim. Working with Art Recovery International, the firm representing the dealer who owned the painting, a settlement was made.

The Art Newspaper has obtained a copy of the claim document filed by the CLAE. This describes the extensive efforts that were made to locate the work by Priester, who died in 1955, and then his former employee, Henriette Geiringer, between the late 1940s and the early 1970s. Efforts resumed again after the 1998 Washington Conference on Nazi Confiscated Assets. In 2000, a new heir was appointed to Priester’s collection, Kurt Schindler, who, according to the claim document, “contacted the Art Loss Register, the Holocaust Claims Processing Office, Sotheby’s and many other organisations, lawyers and researchers providing them with details of the missing works of art”.

Anne Webber, the director of the CLAE, says she has evidence of “extensive correspondence consisting of letters, emails and faxes” between the ALR and the heirs dating back to 2001, including a “comprehensive section on the El Greco, with images of the painting”. She says that, in 2004, the ALR told the heirs that the El Greco had been included in an exhibition in Crete in 1990. The heirs then found out that a London dealer had sent the painting to the exhibition, and that it had been returned to him afterwards. The heirs “conveyed this information to the ALR”, Webber says.

We asked the ALR about the extent of its correspondence with the heirs. The organisation initially said that its “first recorded contact” was in “August 2005… seeking clarification as to who the heirs were—the number and identification of the heirs appears to have been an issue at times”, Ratcliffe said. This contact concerned the Priester collection as a whole, not the El Greco painting specifically.

The ALR has since revised its statement. “We have been looking further at the Priester case,” Ratcliffe says. “With the extra time available we have now tracked down some earlier correspondence... going back to 2001.”

The ALR says it initially registered four works from the Priester collection on its database that year. These did not include the El Greco painting because relevant information, such as the title, date or dimensions of the work, was not provided, Ratcliffe says. In 2006, he says, the ALR offered to register the works free of charge, and told the heirs that more information was needed in order to do so. “They did not in fact take us up on the offer or provide the further information requested,” he says. In around 2010, the ALR added another 12 works from the Priester collection to its database, but “the El Greco was not amongst these”, he says.

The CLAE is “puzzled by the ALR’s statement about the registration”, Webber says. “The ALR was provided with details and individual photographs of the missing paintings in 2001.”