In Argentina, the federal court in Mar del Plata ordered the return of a *Portrait of a Lady* by Giacomo Ceruti after it was discovered that the work had been looted in the Netherlands by the Nazi regime: The work is to be returned to Marei von Saher, the daughter-in-law and sole heir of Dutch gallery owner Jacques Goudstikker, whose collection was looted during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The ruling was issued as part of legal proceedings initiated after the painting was discovered in the Argentine city in 2025.
The decision was formalized during a hearing presided over by Federal Judge Santiago Inchausti, during which the conditions for the painting’s restitution were established and a probationary agreement was approved for Patricia Kadgien and Juan Carlos Cortegoso, the two defendants charged with aiding and abetting who were in possession of the painting. The case was handled by the Argentine Committee for the Fight Against Illicit Trafficking in Cultural Property, an agency under the National Secretariat of Culture, which is responsible for protecting cultural heritage and preventing the illegal circulation of cultural property. As part of the agreement, the defendants expressly and irrevocably waived any right, action, or claim to the artwork, undertaking not to contest its return. This has set in motion the process that will allow for the handover of Ceruti’s Portrait of a Lady to Goudstikker’s heir, who resides in the United States. The suspension of the trial also requires compliance with rules of conduct for a period of 24 months and a financial contribution to the Mar del Plata Maternity and Children’s Hospital.
Marei von Saher’s attorneys have communicated the heir’s intention to leave the artwork temporarily in Argentina: the heir plans to exhibit it to the public, with the aim of raising awareness about the looting of cultural property during the Nazi regime. The painting is currently in the custody of the Supreme Court of Justice of Argentina in Buenos Aires, where it was placed in September 2025 at the request of Judge Inchausti, pending a decision on its final destination. On that occasion, the judge had emphasized the need to ensure special security and conservation measures for an object of great historical and cultural value, which was the subject of a legal proceeding involving aspects of both Argentine and international law.
Ceruti’s *Portrait of a Lady* was identified in Mar del Plata in August 2025, after a journalistic investigation conducted in the Netherlands led to the recognition of the painting in a photograph published in a real estate listing. According to a report by Agence France-Presse, the Dutch daily AD was the first to recognize the work; it published images of a house for sale in the seaside resort of Mar del Plata: The painting hung above a green sofa in the living room of the home of Patricia Kadgien, daughter of Friedrich Kadgien, a Nazi regime official tasked with overseeing the confiscation of property in occupied countries. After the war, like other high-ranking officials of the regime, he fled to Argentina. The image showed the painting inside a home in the Parque Luro neighborhood, and its characteristics were compared with the records of cultural property claimed by the Netherlands Cultural Heritage Agency.
This report led to the intervention of the federal court in Mar del Plata, which ordered the necessary measures to locate and preserve the artwork; the painting was subsequently handed over to the Federal Prosecutor’s Office and placed under judicial custody. The investigation also included assessments aimed at establishing the painting’s authenticity, artist, and provenance: experts from Argentina’s National Academy of Fine Arts determined that it is a work by Giacomo Ceruti and not by the portrait painter Giuseppe Ghislandi, as initially hypothesized. The studies also made it possible to trace the work back to the collection of Jacques Goudstikker.
The Dutch gallery owner had assembled a significant collection of artworks in Amsterdam, which was looted following the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in 1940; according to a report by Agence France-Presse, the collection included over a thousand works, which were dispersed by high-ranking German officials after Goudstikker fled the country just a few days after the invasion. At the end of the war, the Dutch government managed to recover about three hundred works from the collection, most of which were subsequently returned to the gallery owner’s heirs, while many others remain missing in various parts of the world. The Portrait of a Lady had remained missing for eight decades until its discovery in Mar del Plata.
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| Argentina will return a painting stolen by the Nazis, which was discovered through a real estate listing |
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