In May 1940, the Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker fled Amsterdam, along with his wife, Desirée, and their one-year-old son, Edo, just ahead of advancing Nazi troops. They carried nothing but the clothes they were wearing, a few pieces of jewelry, the cash Goudstikker had on hand—and a notebook listing 1,300 inventoried art objects from his celebrated Amsterdam gallery, including 1,113 paintings by such masters as Rembrandt, Rubens, Jan Steen, van Gogh and Titian.

After boarding a ship that was to transport them to safety, Goudstikker died unexpectedly: restless in the crowded hold overnight, he went for a walk on deck, tripped into an uncovered hatch and broke his neck. His family continued their journey, winding up in America. Fortunately, they took his list of paintings with them. When Desirée returned to Amsterdam after the war to claim the artworks and the family’s other possessions, she discovered that everything was gone. Goudstikker’s gallery, and his collection, had been looted by the Nazis. About 300 of the pictures were recovered by the Allies after the war and returned to the Dutch state, which then turned them over to the Netherlands’ major museums.

Desirée’s attempts to retrieve the artworks were stymied by the institutions, which wanted to keep them, and by the courts. Both Desirée and Edo died in 1996. It was the Dutch journalist Pieter den Hollander who, in 1997, contacted Marei von Saher, Edo’s widow, after learning about the Goudstikker story while investigating restitution policies. Von Saher then filed a legal claim seeking the return of the paintings, but it wasn’t until 2006 that the court, under pressure from a new Dutch restitution committee led by the art historian and activist Rudi Ekkert, handed 202 paintings over to her.

The 2006 settlement may have given the family some sense of vindication, but the Goudstikker case has hardly receded from view. Indeed, the paintings are still making headlines as the subject of legal claims, as they crop up at art fairs and at auction and travel to museums. Around 35 important works, loaned by the family and private collectors, are featured in “Reclaimed: Paintings from the Collection of Jacques Goudstikker,” on view through September 7 at the Bruce Museum, in Greenwich, Connecticut. Organized in cooperation with the family, the show will travel in 2009 to the Jewish Museum in New York. “I’m just thrilled that by doing the exhibition we keep Jacques Goudstikker’s legacy alive,” says von Saher.

After the verdict, von Saher and her two daughters selected a number of works they wished to keep for personal reasons and put the rest up for sale at auction and through private dealers. “We had to pay our lawyers’ fees,” explains the 64-year-old von Saher, who lives in Greenwich.

In 2006 the 202 paintings were reportedly worth an estimated €56 million to €84 million ($79 million to $110 million). Sales proceeds so far fall short of those numbers. This is hardly surprising, since the estimate included the pictures retained by the family, potentially the most valuable of the trove, and only a portion of the remainder has been sold.

Last year, Christie’s offered 128 of the works— chosen with the assistance of Nicholas Hall, the international head of the firm’s Old Master and British pictures department—in a series of auctions: one each in New York, London and Amsterdam. Only 87 lots sold, for a combined $20.78 million— just above their low presale estimate of $19.2 million. Hall says the results are “respectable,” since many paintings sold much higher than their estimates.

No other auctions are planned at the moment. The von Sahers, however, are continuing to offer some works privately, mostly through the London Old Masters dealer Simon Dickinson. Dickinson brought Jan Steen’s Sacrifice of Iphigenia, 1671, one of Goudstikker’s most significant paintings, to TEFAF Maastricht this past March. The picture, which had hung in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam after 1945, was a star of the show, where it sold for €8 million ($12 million). “It’s certainly one of the greatest Dutch 17thcentury pictures we have ever handled,” says the dealer.

The Steen is on view in the Bruce show, along with Salomon von Ruysdael’s 1649 River Landscape with a Ferryboat, which also once hung in the Rijksmuseum; Jan van Goyen’s View of Oude Maas near Dordrecht, 1651; and Jan van der Heyden’s undated View of Nyenrode Castle on the Vecht. Also featured is Jan Antonisz van Ravesteyn’s 1623 Portrait of a Lady, the cover image for the Christie’s Goudstikker auction in New York, which sold to the London dealer Johnny van Haeften for $712,000.

Goudstikker’s legacy is that of “ a tastemaker who changed collecting,” says Peter C. Sutton, the director of the Bruce and the show’s organizer. “Prior to Goudstikker, few dealers in Holland offered anything but Dutch and Flemish paintings.”

A man of famed charisma, Goudstikker was a prominent figure in Northern European society. He started as an assistant in his father’s gallery, later founding his own, in a canal house at 458 Herengracht. This was the prewar destination for anyone in the market for Dutch masters and Italian Renaissance paintings. Goudstikker’s clients included the Dutch sugar magnate J. W. Edwin vom Rath and the American financier Andrew Mellon. He organized traveling exhibitions of gallery works to Scandinavia and the U.S. The dealer also sold works directly to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, and even to a museum in Kansas, at a time when few European dealers made such international transactions. He plied his clients with what Sutton characterizes as “the most varied stock of any dealer in Holland at that time, [with] something for everyone’s pocketbook. He collected artists who hadn’t yet caught on but who would subsequently be appreciated and collected widely.”

If his legacy continues today, so does the wrangling over his collection. The 2006 settlement did not please everyone in the Netherlands. Medy van der Laan, then deputy culture minister, said during a press conference that although returning the paintings was “the morally correct outcome,” it was nevertheless “a bloodletting for some of our museums.” It also opened the floodgates. The case, says the restitution committee’s Ekkert “attracted worldwide attention in the press,” resulting “in many more requests of information about claims from all over the world.”

In an unusual twist, one Dutch institution is trying to buy back a work from von Saher. The Dordrecht Museum launched a campaign in March to raise €3.5 million ($5 million) to purchase the van Goyen landscape in the Bruce show, which had become part of its holdings after the war. The museum’s director, Peter Clean, recently told the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad that it would be the most expensive painting the institution has ever purchased but that it has “always been one of the favorites of the public.”

Meanwhile, von Saher is still trying to recover pictures. She believes 500 from the original collection of 1,300 are still missing. “We will continue to look for those paintings,” she says, adding that she assumes some have been lost or destroyed over the years. “We have leads on a few of them. I’m hoping that museums will finally make things a little easier on us and on many other cases. The wrong finally has to be put right.”

Von Saher has also identified some works hanging in major museums. She says that two Lucas Cranach panels in the Norton Simon Museum, in Pasadena, were originally in Goudstikker’s inventory. Last May she filed suit against the institution demanding their return, asserting that the Dutch government incorrectly restituted them to George Stroganoff-Scherbatoff, a Dutch navy commander, who successfully petitioned for the works and then sold them in 1971 to the Norton Simon. Last October, a federal judge dismissed her claim, ruling that the statute of limitations for war restitution cases had expired in California. Von Saher plans to appeal.

In the meantime, debate swirls around where “Reclaimed” might go after the Jewish Museum. There was talk of sending it to Yad Vashem, in Israel, and also to Amsterdam, possibly to be shown at 458 Herengracht. The Yad Vashem plan has apparently been dropped, says Bruce director Sutton, and although Amsterdam is still a possible venue, hard feelings remain there about the recent so-called “bloodletting.” Joël Cahen, the director of Amsterdam’s Jewish Historical Museum, who had offered to help get the exhibition there, says von Saher decided to hold off for now. “It was a brilliant idea to bring the show here, and to do it at the former Goudstikker gallery,” he says. “But they don’t want to step on the sore spots of the Dutch museums that lost some important paintings to the restitution.”

Von Saher confirms that it was she who decided to wait. “The timing is too soon after the restitution. There are still some people who may not agree with it. Anyway, the paintings were in Amsterdam for 60 years, so why not wait a little longer to bring them back?”

"Goudstikker's List" originally appeared in the May 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's May 2008 Table of Contents.