The Oyster Meal returned to the Smidt van Gelder family

On 6 November 2017, at the Mansion House in London, the Lord Mayor returned a small Dutch painting to the daughter of the man it had been taken from in 1945. She was Charlotte Bischoff van Heemskerck. Sotheby’s says she recognised the picture from her father’s waiting room. The Art Newspaper gave her age that day as 96; Sotheby’s, writing a year later, gave 97.

The painting is The Oyster Meal, an oil on canvas by Jacob Ochtervelt, 53.5 by 44.5 centimetres, which Sotheby’s dates to about 1664 to 1665. In the 1930s it was bought by Joan Hendrik Smidt van Gelder, a children’s doctor in Arnhem who directed a children’s hospital and collected Old Master paintings. After the German invasion he placed fourteen of his pictures in a vault at the Amsterdam Bank in Arnhem.

Sotheby’s says that between 17 January and 8 February 1945, men led by Helmut Temmler, head of the Gaukommando Düsseldorf, a regional Nazi organisation, broke into the vaults and took more than sixty paintings. Smidt van Gelder’s fourteen were among them. Sotheby’s adds that eight of his pictures were found in the following four years. The Oyster Meal was not one of them, and he never saw it again.

The painting’s later route is recorded in some detail. Sotheby’s provenance follows it to a Düsseldorf dealer in the 1950s, a Zurich gallery in 1965, a collector in Washington, and the London dealer Edward Speelman in 1971. That year Harold Samuel bought it, and he left it to the City of London Corporation in 1987.

The way back began with a family search. A descendant living in the United States found a picture online that matched the description on the 1945 list of stolen paintings. The Commission for Looted Art in Europe, a London organisation that pursues claims for looted art, took up the claim, and in 2015 the daughter went to London and recognised the painting. On 6 November 2017 the Corporation returned it to her.

Sotheby’s then offered it in London on 4 July 2018, in the Old Masters Evening Sale, as lot 48, with an estimate of 1.5 million to 2.5 million pounds. Sotheby’s reports that it fetched 1,930,000 pounds. Its page does not say whether that figure includes the buyer’s premium, and the sources consulted do not name the buyer.