Adriaen van Ostade’s “Customers Conversing in a Tavern” (1671) is a charmer of a painting from the golden age of Dutch painting, a beautifully rendered, richly hued convivial scene of three men from a rural part of the country socializing over drinks and smoking clay pipes.
In a back corner of the spacious tavern, a woman and man are busy in everyday routines; a wooden pantry displays crockery and glassware, and roosters mill about.
But the lighthearted aura belies the painting’s tumultuous Holocaust-era history, when it was sold to an agent of Adolph Hitler by one of its two German-Jewish owners, art dealers who became business partners in Paris after fleeing Nazi Germany.
In a remarkable turn of events, the painting is now on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, following an announcement earlier this month that the MFA and Susan and Matthew Weatherbie – the painting’s current owners – struck a deal with heirs to the two art dealers, Paul Graupe and Arthur Goldschmidt, who both survived the war.
The resolution allowed the Weatherbies to retain ownership of the painting and paved the way for the MFA to hang it earlier this month, perhaps the first time in a century that it’s been on public display. The van Ostade was among 28 works the art collectors promised to the MFA some six years ago. They were unaware of its Nazi-era past when they bought it at auction in 1992.
A wall panel, “Art with a Past,” provides background.
“The meticulous brushwork, the bright local colors, and the detailed description of figures and the rustic interior, with a doorway and lighted window, also mark this painting as an example of van Ostade’s late style,” Antien Knaap, the MFA’s assistant curator of European art, wrote in an email.
“It’s a lovely painting,” agreed Gary Schwartz, a noted scholar of 17th-century Dutch art and the author of the recent “Rembrandt in a Red Beret: The vanishings and reappearances of a self-portrait.”
“In a picture of this kind, you can call Adriaen van Ostade the poor man’s Vermeer,” Schwartz told the Journal in a conversation from his home in the Netherlands.
“Not a rich, exclusive interior with a lady of leisure and her music teacher, but a tavern where anyone could come, with down-home people enjoying each other’s company. Van Ostade also made his art available to common folk by creating some 50 affordable etchings of scenes in which they could see reflections of their own life,” Schwartz said.
Unearthing the painting’s past is a riveting tale of behind-the-scenes art history detective work by Victoria Reed, the MFA’s dogged senior provenance curator considered one of the leaders in the restitution field. In a stroke of good fortune, she discovered extraordinary documentation of the painting’s Nazi-era history in a U.S. Treasury report.
The Weatherbies and MFA director Matthew Teitelbaum expressed satisfaction with the amicably reached resolution, consistent with the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art established in 1998, the museum said in its press statement.
“The story of this painting reminds us that the work of Holocaust-era restitution is still not complete, and that just and equitable resolutions can be found with willing partners,” Teitelbaum said.
After fleeing Germany for Paris, Graupe and Goldschmidt became business partners and opened a gallery. In 1939, Graupe fled to Switzerland and in 1941 made his way to the U.S., leaving Goldschmidt behind to look after their joint interests. Graupe pressed Goldschmidt, who fled Paris to the unoccupied south of France, to send him the van Ostade and other art from their stock, but that’s not what happened. Instead, Goldschmidt, who was desperate to flee France, sold that painting and one other to Karl Haberstock, an agent for Hitler, without telling Graupe.
The Nazis stored the van Ostade at the Altaussee salt mines in Austria, along with other cultural treasures they confiscated, intending it to become part of Hitler’s planned Führermuseum in Linz, Austria.
After allied forces rescued the mine full of art when the war ended, the painting was returned to France. When no one claimed it, the painting was sold at auction in 1951. Since then, it has been in private hands. At one point, according to the Boston Globe, Graupe filed a claim for it, which he subsequently withdrew. This is among a handful of questions about the history of the painting that remain unanswered.
In her research, Reed became fascinated by the personal and professional histories of Graupe and Goldschmidt, she wrote in an email. “It is not possible to neatly categorize or assess their choices as they sought to flee Nazi-occupied Europe. These shades of gray make it a complicated but important story.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Gary Schwartz is the writer’s brother, who along with his wife, Loekie, have been her lifelong guides to museums and Dutch art and culture.
