In cases involving the restitution of works of art looted during the Nazi period, evidence such as records of bank transactions or missing ownership certificates is often expected. Much less to a cow urinating. And yet, it is precisely this iconographic detail which could decide the fate of a painting, which everyone thought was painted by Peter Paul Rubens, reports the New York Times.
The story begins with the family of Abraham Adelsberger, a German Jewish toymaker who had amassed a significant art collection in the 1920s. Among the works was a painting depicting a bucolic landscape, cows by a lake and three people tending to them. Used a few years later as a bank guarantee, the work was finally drawn into the circuits of forced liquidation of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. In 1939, Abraham Adelsberger fled the country and died shortly after in Amsterdam.
Since then, his descendants have been working to make requests for the restitution of the works in his collection. For decades, the heirs sought to recover the Rubens painting, convinced of its authenticity and great value. The family currently holding it has always refused, claiming that it was only a copy. Recently, an expert on the great master of Baroque painting rekindled the debate. According to him, it is indeed not an original.
A problem with no solution
Faced with the dispute surrounding the painting, the private collector whose family owns the work decided to commission an expert, Nils Büttner. After a thorough analysis, the man concluded that the painting had not been painted by the artist himself but by a third person in his workshop. Housed in a museum in Munich, the original work features eleven cows, one of which is shown urinating, while the copy shows only ten.
According to Nils Büttner, this eleventh heifer was repainted in order to increase the selling price of the painting. “Such images were considered inappropriate for rooms to which women or children had access”explains the expert in his report. By the standards of the time, their “innocent gazes had to be protected from an excess of naturalness”.
This iconographic detail changes everything: if the work in the family’s possession is only a workshop copy, its value drops drastically (around 250,000 dollars according to estimates, or approximately 215,000 euros). Conversely, the supposed original could exceed 50 million dollars on the market (approximately 43 million euros).
Nils Büttner claims that the painter only painted each of his paintings once. He also explains having examined around 10,000 paintings that “someone, at one point, thought it was by Rubens”. His expertise does not end the debate, however, but complicates the restitution even further.
The current owner of the work disputes the heirs’ request, relying on the fact that it is a copy, while the latter continue to affirm their historical link with the painting, which they consider to be an emblematic piece of their family heritage.
