Painting looted by Nazis to be returned to collector’s heir

A 17th-century Italian painting looted from a prominent Jewish Dutch art collector during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands is set to return to the collector’s heir after an Argentine judge approved an agreement on Friday.

Judge Santiago Inchausti approved a deal under which Patricia Kadgien, the daughter of a fugitive Nazi official, gave up her claim to the work rather than face trial. The agreement clears the way for the long-sought return of "Portrait of a Lady" to Maril von Saher, the sole surviving heir of art dealer Jacques Goudstikker.

Goudstikker’s collection of about 1,100 paintings was sold under duress to Nazi officials after Adolf Hitler’s Germany invaded the Netherlands in 1940. The painting resurfaced in August 2025, when the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad recognized it in a photograph of a house for sale in the Argentine seaside resort of Mar del Plata. It was hanging above a green sofa in the living room of Kadgien, whose father, Friedrich Kadgien, had been a financier for the Nazi SS paramilitary organization.

Kadgien and her husband, Juan Carlos Cortegoso, faced charges of aggravated cover-up after authorities said they had hidden the painting despite knowing that Argentine and international investigators were seeking it. Under the agreement, the couple surrendered any claim to the work and consented to its return to von Saher in exchange for avoiding a criminal trial. They will remain under court supervision for two years, make payments to a hospital in Mar del Plata and keep authorities informed of their whereabouts.

For decades, records identified the portrait as a work by Italian Baroque painter Giuseppe Vittore Ghislandi. A court-ordered examination by Argentina’s National Academy of Fine Arts instead attributed it to Giacomo Antonio Melchiorre Ceruti. Experts authenticated it as part of Goudstikker’s collection and estimated its value at about $290,000. Goudstikker died in a shipwreck while fleeing Amsterdam with his family as German forces entered the Netherlands in May 1940.