Fifteen years of talks and negotiations between the North Rhine-Westphalian city of Hagen and the heirs of the Jewish banker Jakob Goldschmidt (1882-1955) have now led to a mutual agreement: Pierre-Auguste Renoir's View of the Sea from Haut-Cagnes from 1910 will continue to be on display at the Osthaus Museum in Hagen. The city had restituted the painting to Goldschmidt's heirs but was able to buy it back from them. This was made possible by the financial support of the Kulturstiftung der Länder, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
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"The heirs of Jakob Goldschmidt are happy to have reached a satisfactory agreement for both sides in this matter after more than 15 years of intensive discussions," explains Dr Sabine Rudolph, the lawyer for Jakob Goldschmidt's heirs, in a press release from the City of Hagen. "The restitution of the painting is a recognition of the fact that their grandfather suffered great wrongs under the Nazi regime, including huge financial losses, and the willingness of the City of Hagen to redress this injustice within the scope of its possibilities, even though it did not directly benefit from it itself, means a lot to them."
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Executed in 1910, the painting was acquired by the Paris art dealer Bernheim-Jeune, presumably from the estate of Renoir, who died in 1919. It was brokered to Jakob Goldschmidt via the Matthiesen Gallery in Berlin before 1930. Goldschmidt, one of the most important bankers of the Weimar Republic, was forced to flee Germany in 1933 because he was Jewish. He reached the United States via Switzerland, but his art collection remained behind in Berlin and was confiscated. It was then auctioned off in 1941, when Goldschmidt was stripped of his German citizenship. In later times, it came under the possession the Nathan Gallery in Zurich and the collection of Fritz Berg, first president of the Federation of German Industries, before it got to the Osthaus Museum in Hagen as a donation in 1989, together with the entire Berg collection.
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View of the Sea from Haut-Cagnes will be exhibited in the future with mention to its special provenance.
