The Huntington Ave. facade of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston on March 12, 2020. (David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

(JTA) —The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston will return a 17th-century painting in its collection to the heirs of a Jewish collector to whom the painting was lost during the Holocaust.

The 1646 painting, “View of Beverwijk” by Salomon van Ruysdael, will be auctioned in April and is expected to sell for between $500,000 and $700,000, according to The Boston Globe.

Ferenc Chorin, a Jewish businessman who lived in Hungary, purchased the painting before the war. In 1943, Chorin placed a number of paintings, including the Ruysdael piece, in a bank vault before fleeing the country. He eventually came to New York in 1947.

Forwarding the News

Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.

Terms(Required)

I agree to the Forward's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Email(Required)

According to the Globe, the museum’s curator of provenance Victoria Reed had had concerns about the painting’s origins due to a fragment of a label on the back of the painting that indicated it had been in Hungary for some amount of time.

“Just the fact that it came from Hungary raised a red flag,” Reed said. Hungary’s Jews lost vast amounts of property to the Nazis during World War II.

Chorin’s daughter, Daisy von Strasser, told the Globe that her father, who died in 1964, never searched for the painting but would have been “elated to learn that some form of his former life had been found.” The painting was found by a lawyer hired by the family.

But, she told the Globe, Chorin was less concerned with recovering property than he was relieved that the family made it out of Hungary alive.

“I do not think he would have made a lot of noise about it. He would have looked at this painting and would have thought that regardless of what they may have lost in Hungary, they were the luckiest people in the world because they were all alive,” she said.

Chorin was a wealthy man before the war as the head of a steel factory and a member of Hungary’s Regent’s Privy Council.  According to a history of the family compiled by the attorney for Chorin’s heirs, Chorin was able to exchange his wealth and control of his factory for his family’s freedom from Hungary. When he came to New York, he became an investment broker and died in 1964.

—
The post Boston art museum will return 17th-century painting to heirs of its pre-WWII Jewish owner appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

$90 → $180 $180 → $360

$360 → $720

Other amount