Painting stolen by Nazis returned to Jewish owner’s heirs
NEW YORK — Some 80 years ago, the Nazis forced prominent German Jewish art gallery owner Max Stern to sell his family’s roughly 400-piece collection before he was exiled from his country.
FBI agents on Wednesday returned one of those works, a 17th-century oil painting by a Dutch master, to representatives of the Dr. and Mrs. Max Stern Foundation during a ceremony at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.
The recovery of Jan Frans Verzijl’s “Young Man As Bacchus” marks the 16th piece of Stern’s collection that investigators have been able to return to the foundation since recovery efforts began in the late 1990s.
While the painting had “survived several generations of exile,” it was seized by agents at a New York City art fair in 2015 after Italian gallery owners unaware of its past consigned it for sale, said Michael McGarrity, who heads the FBI’s New York field office.