Art dealer Richard Feigen yesterday returned a painting attributed to Lodovico Carracci to the estate of the late Jewish art dealer Max Stern, who was forced to sell the contents of his gallery in 1937 before fleeing Nazi Germany.

The picture of St. Jerome in the wilderness was bought by Feigen in 2000 at German auction house Kunsthaus Lempertz, the same house that auctioned Stern's objects before World War II. Feigen paid 100,000 deutsche marks, which translates to roughly $685,000 at current rates, according to Bloomberg.

He said he began to question the provenance of the painting, which was first listed with the Art Loss Register in 2004, when he read reports several weeks ago about U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials seizing a Dutch Old Master portrait sold in the same 2000 auction from Lawrence Steigrad Fine Arts. The New York dealer then established that his work had come from the same 1937 forced sale, and he contacted Stern's estate.

"We are grateful for the cooperation of art dealer Richard Feigen in the return of the Carracci and hope that his leadership will encourage his peers in the trade to also take a good look at their own works," said Peter Smith, special agent in charge of I.C.E. investigations in New York, in a statement released by the Max Stern estate.

Feigen told Bloomberg he was surprised that Lempertz "had been the auctioneer in the forced sale in 1937 and then resold it to me in 2000," adding that he hadn't yet broached the subject of compensation from the auction house. Henrik Hanstein, manager of Lempertz, said that under German law, Feigen is not entitled to compensation for a sale that took place nine years ago.

Stern's estate is managed by Concordia and McGill universities in Montreal and Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The three launched a campaign in 2002 to recover his lost art; so far, five out of 228 paintings sold under duress have been restituted.