A 17th-century painting looted by the Nazis in 1940 from a Jewish art collector in Belgium will be returned to his descendants after spending three decades in a London gallery, the British government announced. Samuel Hartveld and his wife left Antwerp to escape Nazi persecution, leaving behind the oil-on-canvas work “Aeneas and his Family Fleeing Burning Troy”.
The 1654 artwork by English painter Henry Gibbs depicts the mythological story of Aeneas, a Trojan hero, escaping with his family after the Greeks invade Troy using the trickery of the Trojan Horse. The painting was bought by London’s Tate Britain gallery in 1994, but will now be returned to Hartveld’s heirs and great-grandchildren following a review by the Spoliation Advisory Panel.
The panel, set up in 2000 to consider claims of lost cultural property during the Nazi era now in British public collections, recommended the painting’s repatriation based on the fact that Hartveld’s property, library, and paintings were looted as an act of racial persecution. A 2009 law allows British institutions to return objects related to the Holocaust and the Nazi era, if the arts minister agrees with the panel’s recommendation.
