Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden restitute Largillière's "Portrait of a Lady as Pomona"

The paint­ing by Nico­las de Largillière (1656-1746) de­picts a la­dy dressed as a god­dess of tree fruit in a scene from Ovid's Meta­mor­phoses. It was ac­quired in 1928 by Jules Strauss, a col­lec­tor from Frank­furt am Main who lived in Paris. Un­der the pres­sure of per­se­cu­tion by the Ger­man oc­cu­pa­tion forces, Strauss was ap­par­ent­ly forced to sell works of art from his col­lec­tion, in­clud­ing the Largillière paint­ing. The Deutsche Re­ichs­bank bought the paint­ing in 1941 through the in­ter­me­di­ary Mar­got Jans­son in Paris. At the end of the war, it was stored in a vault of the Deutsche Re­ichs­bank in Berlin, and thus lat­er came in­to the ad­min­is­tra­tion of the Min­istry of Fi­nance of the GDR. From there, it was first trans­ferred to the Na­tion­al Gallery in Berlin in 1953, be­fore it found its last res­i­dence for the time be­ing in the Old Mas­ters Pic­ture Gallery of the SKD in 1959.

Since the art­work was sold un­der pres­sure of per­se­cu­tion, the SKD resti­tut­ed the "Por­trait of a La­dy as Pomona" to the de­scen­dants of Jules Strauss. With the sup­port of the French Em­bassy Berlin and the French Com­mis­sion for the Com­pen­sa­tion of Vic­tims of Spo­li­a­tion (CIVS), the work is now re­turn­ing to Paris.