Boston Museum Gets Ownership of Nazi-Looted Painting as Part of Settlement With Heirs of Jewish Art Dealers

Shiryn Ghermezian

Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Photo: Suicasmo via Wikimedia Commons

An oil-on-panel painting by Dutch artist Adriaen van Ostade that was looted by the Nazis and set to be displayed in Adolf Hitler’s museum will now have a permanent home at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) as the result of an agreement reached with the museum’s patrons and the heirs of two Jewish art dealers, the MFA announced last week.

Conversing in a Tavern from 1671 was part of the inventory of a gallery in Paris run by Jewish art dealer Paul Graupe in the early 20th century. In 1939, Graupe fled Nazi-occupied France to avoid persecution but before leaving he asked his business partner Arthur Goldschmidt, who was also Jewish, to try and save the gallery’s collection, including Conversing in a Tavern, by shipping it out of the country. Goldschmidt instead sold the painting in February 1941 to Karl Haberstock, an art dealer working for Hitler, before he himself left the country and immigrated to the US.

Haberstock sold Conversing in a Tavern in April 1941 to Hitler’s art adviser and curator, Hans Posse. The painting was set to be included in the art museum Hitler planned to build in Linz, Austria, that would be called Führermuseum. However, the Allied forces recovered the painting after the end of World War II and it was sent to France for restitution, according to the MFA.

“The painting was not claimed by the end of the 1940s, and as a result the French state auctioned it in 1951,” the MFA explained. “It changed hands several times on the European art market before Susan and Matthew Weatherbie bought it, unaware of its Nazi-era history, in 1992. It is one of 28 Dutch and Flemish paintings the Weatherbies pledged to the MFA in 2017.”

As part of the new agreement reached last week, the heirs of Goldschmidt and Graupe will receive an undisclosed cash payment for Conversing in a Tavern, according to Artnet News. In return, the MFA will retain ownership of the painting and it will be donated to the museum “at a future date” by the Weatherbies, the museum said, adding that the “just and fair resolution” is consistent with the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art.

“We are happy that these longstanding ownership issues have been resolved so amicably, and we are delighted to display Customers Conversing in a Tavern at the MFA so that it can be shared with the public,” the Weatherbies said in released statement.

Artnet News reported that according to provenance research, Goldschmidt claimed he was forced to sell the Van Ostade artwork and other paintings, and it is believed that Graupe never knew that the work was given to the Nazis. Graupe died in Germany in 1953 and Goldschmidt in Switzerland in 1960.

Customers Conversing has been installed in the MFA’s wing of Dutch and Flemish galleries and is displayed alongside other works by Van Ostade.