Argentine judge orders return of a Nazi-looted Ceruti portrait to Marei von Saher

An Argentine judge on 4 September ordered the repatriation of Giacomo Ceruti's 18th-century Portrait of a Lady to Marei von Saher, daughter-in-law of the Dutch Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker. Nazi authorities looted Goudstikker's collection after the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940. The painting later appeared in Argentina. AFP carried the ruling on Friday.

Ceruti, known in Lombardy as Pitocchetto, painted portraits and scenes of the poor in the first half of the 18th century. A lady in oil from that workshop is a movable object with a paper trail. Goudstikker's inventory, assembled before he fled and died in 1940, has been the base document for decades of claims by von Saher. She has recovered other works from museums and private owners in Europe and the United States. The Argentine order adds a South American jurisdiction to that list.

How the picture moved

Goudstikker left Amsterdam in May 1940. He died in an accident on the ship that carried him toward England. His gallery stock was seized and sold through the occupation art market. Some lots went to German officials. Others passed through dealers who later sold into collections far from the Netherlands. Argentina received European pictures in the postwar decades through private sales that did not always record the 1940 gap in title.

Restitution cases turn on that gap. A claimant has to show the work was in the looted stock, that the present holder cannot prove a clean chain, and that the local court will treat wartime seizure as theft rather than a completed sale. The Argentine judge accepted that chain for this Ceruti. The order is for return, not for a cash settlement.

What the ruling does not do

It does not inventory every European picture now hanging in Argentine private rooms. It does not bind museums in other countries. It does give von Saher's lawyers a judgment they can use when the next Ceruti, or the next Goudstikker lot, is identified in a Latin American collection. Dealers who handle 18th-century Lombard portraits will now treat a Goudstikker stamp, or the absence of a 1939-1945 provenance note, as a problem that can end in a court order rather than a quiet discount.

The painting itself is older than the crime. Ceruti died in 1767. The lady on the canvas had no part in 1940. The legal fact is simpler than the history: a court in Buenos Aires has said the title still sits with the heir of the dealer who lost it.