Argentine court returns a Nazi-looted portrait to Jacques Goudstikker's heir

An Argentine court has ordered the return of an eighteenth-century portrait stolen in 1940 from the Amsterdam dealer Jacques Goudstikker. Judge Santiago Inchausti recorded the deal in Mar del Plata. Patricia Kadgien and her husband, Juan Carlos Cortegoso, give up all rights to the canvas and donate 4.8 million pesos (about $3,200) to local hospitals. Criminal proceedings against the couple are suspended.

The painting, known as Portrait of a Lady, measures 119.5 by 89 centimetres. It hung above a green sofa in a house that went on the market in the seaside city last year. Peter Schouten of the Dutch paper Algemeen Dagblad recognised it in the estate agent's photographs in August 2025. The house belonged to Patricia Kadgien, daughter of Friedrich Kadgien, an SS financier who worked for Hermann Goring and fled to Argentina after the war.

From Amsterdam to Mar del Plata

Goudstikker listed more than 1,100 works when German forces entered the Netherlands in May 1940. He died in a fall on the ship Bodegraven while fleeing. About 800 pictures from the stock were sold under duress to Goring through the dealer Alois Miedl. Family lawyers say Miedl sold this portrait to Kadgien in 1944. The trail then went cold. For decades catalogues called the sitter Contessa Lucrezia Martinengo-Colleoni and the painter Giuseppe Vittore Ghislandi, known as Fra Galgario.

A court-ordered study by Argentina's National Academy of Fine Arts has since given the work to Giacomo Ceruti (1698-1767), the Brescian painter nicknamed Pitocchetto. Paolo Plebani of the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, which holds the largest Galgario group, had already argued that the old Ghislandi label was wrong. The canvas is still the same object Goudstikker owned. Experts who inspected it for the court put a value near $290,000.

What the heir will do with it

Marei von Saher, Goudstikker's daughter-in-law and sole heir, has spent years tracing the stock. Through lawyers she said she would not accept 86 years of plunder, and that she wanted the picture back rather than damages. Argentine coverage says she plans a temporary loan to the Holocaust Museum of Buenos Aires before the work travels. She and her daughters, Charlene and Chantal, have recovered other Goudstikker pictures from public and private collections in Europe and the United States.

Kadgien and Cortegoso had faced a concealment file after the listing appeared. Under the Mar del Plata agreement they walk away from prosecution in exchange for the canvas and the hospital payment. That is a small sum next to the estimated value. It is the price of closing a criminal file in a country that still holds other objects brought by fugitives in the 1940s and 1950s.

Why the listing mattered

Restitution cases usually start with an archive card, a museum wall or a sale catalogue. This one started with a real-estate photograph. The sofa, the lamp and the frame were enough for a Dutch reporter who already knew the lost-art number. Once the picture was identified, Argentine prosecutors could not treat it as a private decoration. The 2025 listing is now part of the object history, alongside the 1940 seizure and the 1944 sale to Kadgien.

Goudstikker's stock included names far larger than Ceruti. The point of this file is not the painter's rank. It is that a canvas last seen in wartime Switzerland, then lost for eighty years, was hanging in plain sight in a coastal listing, and that a court in the city where it was found has now written the heir's name on it.