A painting that once belonged to the prominent Dutch Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker has been successfully identified and will be returned to his heirs.
The discovery of the painting, depicting the interior of Amsterdam’s Nieuwe Kerk (New Church) and likely by Dutch Golden Age painter Hendrick van der Burgh, has an unusual history, according to De Telegraaf, which first reported the news. The paper’s crime reporter John van den Heuvel worked with art detective Arthur Brand to identify the painting and its history.
Amsterdam resident Robert van der Hoek saw the painting decades ago on the side of the street while driving by, and he pulled over to rescue it from its likely fate. “It was lying among a pile of rubbish, clearly intended to be removed by the city cleaning service,” he told De Telegraaf. “I took it with me because I thought it was a shame, and I put it in the cellar. It stood there for years.”
Van der Hoek reached out to De Telegraaf after reading the paper’s report earlier this year that another painting, Toon Kelder’s Portrait of a Young Girl, once owned by Goudstikker had hung in the home of the descendants of Dutch SS commander Hendrik Seyffardt. “I was absolutely shocked when I read the story in De Telegraaf and immediately realized that the painting had to go back to the descendants of Jacques Goudstikker,” he said.
Van der Hoek recalled that his own painting had a label on the back that said “Collectie Goudstikker” with inventory number of 1,647. He sent in photos of the painting and the label to De Telegraaf, which asked Brand to authenticate them.
Per the paper, Brand “was able to determine with 100 percent certainty that the work was part of the Goudstikker collection.” He checked the images of the painting against a black leather notebook that once belonged to Goudstikker that described more than 1,000 paintings he owned and found a match. Based on the land, Brand believes the painting was acquired around 1925.
In 1940, Goudstikker fled the Netherlands during the country’s invasion by Nazi Germany, leaving behind his collection of some 1,400 paintings, mostly Old Master works. He and his family secured passage on the England-bound SS Bodegraven, the last ship to leave the Netherlands. He died aboard the ship after falling through an uncovered hatch at night.
His collection was soon looted by the Nazis, with Hermann Göring taking several of them. The Allied forces discovered over 200 of them after the war and gave them to the Dutch government with the intention that it would return them to their rightful heirs. The Dutch government only restituted 202 paintings to Goudstikker’s heirs in 2006.
Goudstikker’s black notebook was found with him and has since “a crucial piece of evidence in the battle to reclaim his art,” according to the Jewish Museum, which mounted an exhibition of the dealer’s collection in 2009.
In addition to the van der Burgh and Kelder paintings, another Goudstikker-owned painting also recently made headlines. In 2025, Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad reported that a Nazi-looted painting by Giuseppe Ghislandi (Fra Galgario) from the Baroque period had been identified in a real estate listing in Argentina. Argentine authorities reported they had recovered that painting shortly afterward.
