A gentleman whose family I know once received a surprising letter: It informed him that painting he had purchased at auction some years before had been stolen from a Jewish family by the Nazis, and there was enough documentation to be persuasive. To his credit, he immediately took the painting off his wall and had it sent back to its rightful owners — no questions, no fuss. It wasn’t a lost Rembrandt, but it was a valuable painting. Knowing how these things often go down, the owners were touched and surprised by the immediacy of his response, and they sent him a splendid thank-you note in the form of another work by the same artist, Pierre Bonnard. It hadn’t been a matter of money on either side. It was a matter of undoing what the Nazis had done, to the extent that was possible — and the gentleman who relinquished the painting was a veteran of World War II.
My friend David Pryce-Jones, as National Review readers will know, had a harder time of it with the painting looted from his family, a small work by Johann Gualbert Raffalt that had been hanging in a Vienna museum for decades after the war. (The family home where the painting had hung before the war was seized by the Nazis and used as a training school for officers.) Pryce-Jones writes: “In a masterly display of bureaucratic obstruction, though, the Austrian authorities resorted to one delaying tactic after another, succeeding in spinning out their response to this obligation for eleven years. At times, I felt that since they wanted so badly to keep this picture, we should let them have it. But my cousin Elisabeth, Liliane’s daughter, rightly maintained that in principle theft should not be condoned, however much frustration and indignation this might arouse in us.”
I thought of both of these when I read the story of Laura Young, a Texas antiques dealer at the center of an incredible story involving a Roman bust that made its way from Rome to the castle of King Ludwig I of Bavaria to the United States, eventually ending up in a Goodwill shop in Austin, where Young purchased it for $34.99. She had it appraised, and Bonham’s responded with good news and bad news: It was the real thing, and it was stolen.
“Immediately, I was like, ‘OK, I cannot keep him and I also cannot sell him,’” she told the New York Times. “It was extremely bittersweet, to say the least. But I only have control over what I can control, and art theft, looting during a war, is a war crime. I can’t be a party to it.”
The bust will be on display in San Antonio before being returned to Germany. Young has a 3-D printed model of it at her home. She will miss the money she might have made, I’m sure, but she has a great story to tell and the satisfaction of having done the right thing.