A painting by 19th-century German landscape artist Carl Blechen, stolen during the Nazi era, has been returned to the heir of its original owner.
The painting “The Mill Valley near Amalfi” once belonged to Edgar Moor (1912-1994), the nephew of the brothers Arthur and Eugen Goldschmidt, two Jewish men whose art collection in Berlin was looted by the Nazis.
The Goldschmidt brothers took their own lives following the brutal November 1938 pogroms known as Kristallnacht, while Moor managed to emigrate to South Africa and then eventually on to the United States.
The art collection remained in his uncles’ apartment, where it was confiscated by the Nazi German secret police, the Gestapo, in July 1942.
Carl Blechen (1798-1840), who grew up in the eastern German city of Cottbus and died in Berlin, is considered one of the most important German landscape painters of the 19th century, alongside Caspar David Friedrich.
His painting “The Mill Valley near Amalfi” was last exhibited by the Prince Pückler Museum Foundation in the Branitz Palace in Cottbus while on loan from the German government.
German dictator Adolf Hitler had wanted to exhibit the painting along with other works in a planned “Führer Museum,” which was never actually created.
In 1945, it was presumably stolen from the so-called Führerbau, a Nazi administrative building in Munich, according to the Federal Art Administration.
