A De Heem returned to the heirs of Jacob Lierens

In October 1941 the Amsterdam businessman and collector Jacob Lierens, who was Jewish, put a large still life up for auction at Frederik Muller. It was Jan Davidsz. de Heem’s A banquet still life, an oil on canvas of 139.2 by 115.1 centimetres. It sold on 14 October for 34,000 guilders. A Dutch panel, the Restitutions Committee, later described the sale as forced. Selling art by a Jewish private owner during the German occupation counts as a forced sale, the Committee said, and it found no facts to show otherwise.

The buyer was acting for Hans Posse. Christie’s describes Posse as the man assembling pictures for Hitler’s planned museum at Linz, and the Committee says the painting was bought through an intermediary for his Special Mission Linz. The Committee found it highly likely that Lierens owned the painting at the time of the sale.

The Committee also records what happened to the family. Lierens and his wife were interned at Westerbork in 1943, released that August and went into hiding. They survived. Their daughter Branca and her husband, Emanuel Roselaar, were murdered at Auschwitz in September 1942. Lierens died in Amsterdam on 30 May 1949.

The painting was recovered. Christie’s says the Monuments Men, the Allied officers who traced looted art, took it to the Munich Central Collecting Point in July 1945. It returned to the Netherlands in 1946 and entered the Netherlands Art Property Collection, known as the NK collection, the state’s holding of recovered works. The Committee lists it there as NK 2711. From 1948 to 2019 it hung on long-term loan at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht. Christie’s, following the scholar Fred Meijer, dates it to the mid-1660s.

The Committee advised in April 2019 that the painting be restituted to the heirs of Jacob Lierens, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The Minister of Education, Culture and Science accepted the advice, announced on 24 May 2019. The same advice covered a second picture, a banquet scene by Dirck Hals and Dirck van Delen, which is a separate work. The heirs offered the De Heem at Christie’s in London as lot 21 of the Old Masters Evening Sale in July 2021. The sources consulted give no price and do not name the buyer.