Jacques Goudstikker

Jacques Goudstikker was a Dutch Jewish art dealer and among the wealthiest and most influential art dealers in Europe who specialised in Dutch and Flemish Old Masters. Shortly after the invasion in May 1940, as the German Wehrmacht occupied the Netherlands, Jacques Goudstikker was able to leave the country on one of the last boats along with his wife Desirée (née von Halban) and their young son Eduard. He tragically died en route to England. Shortly after the family’s escape, the gallery and their country estate were aryanised. Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring took approximately 800 works from the gallery’s stock, transported them to Germany and channeled off the very best of them to supplement his own personal collection. Most of these paintings were recovered from the Reichsmarschall’s hiding-places in 1945 by the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (“MFAA”) officers of the United States military. Göring sold the paintings he did not integrate into his own private collection during the war years via various German auction houses. There are still no traces of the current whereabouts of most of these works. The gallery itself and the family country estate were transferred to the Munich banker Alois Miedl, who operated the gallery under the Goudstikker’s internationally renowned name throughout the war. Miedl went on to make a fortune selling art, particularly to Nazi Germany. Parts of the Goudstikker collection were also taken over by Gauleiter Erich Koch. The forced sale and looting of the Goudstikker estate are considered one of the largest single acts of plunder by the Nazis. Only recently his heirs have been able to reclaim from the Dutch government 200 of the approximately 1,400 works of art that Goudstikker was forced to leave behind. For more information, please see: Goudstikker Art Research Project. https://goudstikker.com/. Accessed 1 June 2021. For a listing of artworks looted from Jacques Goudstikker by Hermann Göring, please see: http://www.lostart.de/EN/Verlust/583889. Accessed 1 June 2021. [For additional information on the Goudstikker collection as presented on the Lostart website, see: https://www.lostart.de/Content/04_Datenbank/_Zusatzinformationen/vmel_27400.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=2. Accessed 1 June 2021]