For decades, the family of Abraham Adelsberger, a Jewish toy manufacturer who fled Germany to escape Nazi persecution, has sought the return of a landscape painting he owned that was attributed by some to Peter Paul Rubens.
But the heirs have encountered two recent setbacks in that effort.
First the private collector whose family has possessed the work since 1937 challenged the claim. And now, an expert has decided that the landscape is not a Rubens after all, but a workshop copy of the original, which is in a Munich museum.
The telltale clue, according to the expert: The original at the museum has 11 cows, including one that is peeing. The workshop copy has only 10 because the urinating cow was painted over — possibly, the expert concluded, to enhance the work’s marketability.
“Such images were considered unsuitable for rooms that were also accessed by women or children,” the expert, Nils Büttner, wrote in a March report. “In keeping with contemporary social conventions, their innocent gazes were to be protected from an excess of naturalness.”
In the 17th century, European painters were not opposed to depicting animals letting nature take its course, said Angela Vanhaelen, a professor of art history at McGill University in Montreal. She pointed to a 1633 Rembrandt etching in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “The Good Samaritan,” which shows a defecating dog.
“It was a fairly common motif,” Vanhaelen said.
Nonetheless, as Büttner noted, some collectors were not fans. Eric Jan Sluijter, a professor of art history in the Netherlands, cited an anecdote written up by Arnold Houbraken, a 17th-century Dutch painter and writer. He recalled how Princess Amalia van Solms rejected a 1650 painting called “The Pissing Cow” by Paulus Potter produced for her palace in The Hague. According to Houbraken, a confidant of the princess reported “that it was too filthy a subject for her highness to look at daily.”
Büttner, a professor at the Stuttgart Art Academy who is widely viewed as a leading authority on Rubens, said that the artist only painted each composition once and that he is convinced the original is held by the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. But other artists in Rubens’s huge and productive studio would often turn out copies for sale. Büttner estimated in an interview that he has examined about 10,000 paintings that “someone at some point thought was by Rubens.”
He examined the work that is the subject of the restitution dispute in February, based on his own interest in the landscape. He said infrared images showed the missing cow under the surface paint. His analysis, he said, indicated that the decision to paint and then paint over the cow, leaving a light-colored meadow in its place, was made as the image was being reproduced.
He reasoned that the Munich work, which displays the 11th cow, could not be a copy because the artist would not have been able to replicate the image of a cow that had already been painted over.
As a painting by Rubens’s workshop, the landscape has an estimated value of as much as $250,000. The original in Munich could fetch more than $50 million if it ever came to market, Büttner said.
To Adelsberger’s descendants, the work remains a part of the family legacy and is worth pursuing. Though the family is looking to recover hundreds of paintings once in the Adelsberger collection, Alfred Fass, Adelsberger’s great-grandson, remembers the so-called Rubens as a work his grandmother, Sophie Isay-Adelsberger, was particularly keen on finding.
“It’s the family Rubens we have been looking for for 80 years,” he said.
Adelsberger bought the painting in about 1925 and wrote in a 1934 letter that it had been authenticated by an expert as “not only genuine, but one of Rubens’s most beautiful landscapes.”
He had built a large collection that was housed in an art gallery in his Nuremberg villa in the 1920s.
But his company encountered financial difficulties and he tried to sell much of his art collection in 1930. He also used several hundred artworks as collateral for loans from a number of different creditors, according to research into the history of the collection conducted by Freie Universität in Berlin.
The cow landscape painting was collateral for a loan that came to be held by the Dresdner Bank in 1932, when the German Reich became its majority owner. Under the terms of these loans, ownership of the artworks was transferred to the bank until the loans were repaid.
After the Nazis seized power in 1933, the state’s antisemitic policies trickled down to the local Nuremberg branch of the bank, where Jewish employees were replaced.
“Adelsberger was confronted with increasing harassment that made it harder for him to pay off his debts,” the Freie Universität report found.
The Dresdner Bank began selling off some of the Adelsberger works to address the debt. But according to the university’s findings, the bank did not properly account for the income it received through these art sales and rental revenue from Adelsberger’s properties. The bank barely reduced his debt and stopped sending him account statements, according to the report.
Adelsberger fled to Amsterdam in 1939 and died there in 1940.
The bank sold the Rubens copy at some point between 1935 and 1937 to Gustav Schickedanz, a member of the Nazi party and the founder of Quelle, which later became Europe’s largest mail-order retail company. The painting is now in the possession of Schickedanz’s grandson, Matthias Bühler.
“My client is willing to seek a just and fair solution with the heirs,” Louis Roensberg, Bühler’s lawyer, said. “This is a complicated case and we do not see an argument for full restitution, because Adelsberger lost ownership of the painting in 1932. He had severe financial problems dating back to the 1920s.”
Roensberg said the Adelsberger’s heirs have yet to agree on a common position in any discussions. “We are willing to negotiate,” he said, “but we need the heirs to work together.”
Seven of Adelsberger’s other paintings that were sold by the bank to address his debt are being returned. They were part of a group of 20 paintings Prussia bought in the 1930s and they remain in the collections of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees Berlin’s state museums. The heirs are still seeking the remaining 13, one of which, like the cow landscape, is in Bühler’s possession.
The foundation has written to the heirs saying it is ready to return the seven, all 18th- and 19th-century paintings, having concluded that Adelsberger lost them because of Nazi persecution.
Birgit Jöbstl, a spokeswoman for the foundation, said it is “in productive correspondence with the heirs with a view to reaching a just and fair solution.”
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