By: Fern Sidman

In a decision hailed by historians, restitution experts, and Jewish heritage advocates as a milestone for moral accountability, the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) — Australia’s oldest and most prestigious art institution — has formally returned a 17th-century Dutch masterpiece looted during the Nazi era to the heirs of its rightful Jewish owners. The painting, Lady With a Fan by Gerard ter Borch, was seized or sold under duress by Nazi authorities in Germany in the late 1930s, as Jewish families were systematically stripped of their property, livelihoods, and basic rights.

According to a detailed report that appeared on Thursday in The Algemeiner, the heirs of Dr. Henry and Bertha Bromberg, a Jewish couple forced to flee Nazi Germany, fought for more than two decades to reclaim the artwork from the NGV, which had held it in its collection for 80 years. The gallery announced this week that after a comprehensive provenance review and the emergence of new documentary evidence, it determined beyond doubt that the Bromberg family were the painting’s original owners — and that their loss of the piece had been the direct result of Nazi persecution.

“After thoroughly assessing the painting’s background and origins, the NGV determined that the work had been owned by Dr. Henry Bromberg and was subject to a forced sale in the late 1930s,” the gallery said in a statement cited in The Algemeiner report. “The heirs of Dr. Bromberg are the rightful owners of the painting. The work was deaccessioned from the NGV collection in 2025 and returned to the Bromberg family.”

The restitution of Lady With a Fan marks only the second time in Australian history that a museum has returned a Nazi-looted artwork — an extraordinary rarity in a country where large-scale restitution efforts have been limited compared to Europe or North America. The first such case came in 2014, when the NGV returned Head of a Man to the heirs of its dispossessed Jewish owner.

According to research detailed in The Algemeiner report, Lady With a Fan — a luminous portrait by Dutch Golden Age master Gerard ter Borch — passed through the hands of two related Jewish collectors before it vanished into the maelstrom of the 1930s. It was first owned by Max Emden, a Hamburg-born department store magnate and art collector who fled Germany for Switzerland after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. The painting later entered the collection of Emden’s cousin, Dr. Henry Bromberg, a judge in Hamburg’s magistrate court.

The Brombergs, who lived in Hamburg with their two children, were stripped of their professional status and assets under the Nazi regime’s antisemitic laws. In 1938, as conditions for Jews in Germany deteriorated into open terror, Henry and his wife Bertha fled Europe for the United States. In the process, the Nazis forced them to liquidate or “sell” their art collection — in reality, confiscating works that would later be traded, auctioned, or appropriated by Nazi officials.

The Algemeiner noted that the painting’s precise wartime trajectory remains murky, as is common with artworks looted during the Holocaust era. However, it was eventually acquired by the NGV in 1945, just months after World War II ended, likely through an intermediary dealer. For eight decades, Lady With a Fan was prominently displayed in the gallery’s European art collection and appeared in exhibition catalogues, until questions about its provenance began to surface in the early 2000s.

“The painting’s absence of a clear ownership record between 1935 and 1945 was a red flag,” a restitution expert told The Algemeiner. “This was precisely the period when Nazi art seizures were rampant across Europe, and when thousands of Jewish collections were dispersed through coerced sales or direct confiscation.”

The Bromberg heirs first filed a formal claim for restitution in the early 2000s, providing evidence that Lady With a Fan had been part of their family’s prewar collection. For years, however, their claim stalled amid conflicting records, incomplete documentation, and what they described as “institutional hesitation.”

According to the information provided in The Algemeiner report, new archival material discovered in recent years proved decisive. Though the NGV has not disclosed the specific evidence, it is believed to include newly unearthed sales ledgers, personal correspondence, and photographic documentation linking the painting directly to Dr. Bromberg’s Hamburg collection.

Upon verification, the NGV moved swiftly to act. The painting has now been removed from its online catalogue, where it once appeared among the gallery’s prized Dutch works, and is instead listed on the German Lost Art Foundation’s “Lost Art” database, a global registry of artworks displaced through Nazi persecution.

“The NGV’s decision is a remarkable gesture of moral responsibility,” said one legal expert quoted in The Algemeiner report. “Restitution cases are often slow and contested, but here we see an institution acknowledging history’s weight and acting decisively once the evidence was clear.”

The Algemeiner contextualized the case within the broader story of Nazi looting — one of the most systematic art theft campaigns in history. Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi regime confiscated or forcibly sold hundreds of thousands of works owned by Jewish collectors. Hitler’s personal ambition to establish a “Führermuseum” in Linz, Austria, and the greed of Nazi officials combined to strip Jewish families of artistic and cultural treasures that had been accumulated over generations.

The Bromberg and Emden families were among thousands targeted by this policy. Both families’ collections were well known in prewar Europe, containing masterworks from the Dutch, Flemish, and Italian Renaissance schools.

As The Algemeiner report detailed, the French government previously returned four 16th-century paintings to the Bromberg heirs between 2016 and 2018. A Pennsylvania museum also restituted another work to the family in 2024, marking a growing recognition of the family’s long struggle to reclaim its cultural legacy.

The Emden descendants, meanwhile, have successfully recovered two 18th-century paintings once seized for Hitler’s personal collection — an outcome The Algemeiner report described as “a testament to both persistence and the evolving moral landscape of the art world.”

For Holocaust historians, the NGV’s decision represents not only a legal victory but also a symbolic one. “Each restitution is an act of historical restoration,” The Algemeiner wrote in an editorial on the case. “It reminds the world that cultural property stolen in the Holocaust was not just art — it was family, identity, and memory.”

The NGV’s directorate issued a statement acknowledging the ethical gravity of the decision. “We understand that artworks can carry profound personal and historical meaning,” the gallery said. “Our responsibility is not only to preserve culture but to ensure that justice is done, even when it arrives decades late.”

Internationally, the case may also influence restitution standards across the Asia-Pacific region, where many museums have yet to conduct comprehensive provenance research on European acquisitions made after World War II. As The Algemeiner report pointed out, “Australia, like many nations outside Europe, inherited cultural legacies without fully grappling with their histories. Each restitution forces a reckoning not just with the past, but with the ethics of collecting itself.”

The return of Lady With a Fan reflects a growing global consensus on the moral imperative of restitution, a movement reinvigorated by the Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art (1998) and the Terezin Declaration (2009). Both frameworks urge governments and institutions to identify and return property looted during the Holocaust to its rightful owners or heirs.

In this context, The Algemeiner report emphasized that provenance research — once considered an academic niche — has become a pillar of ethical museum stewardship. “The Bromberg case demonstrates the evolving standards of accountability,” the paper wrote. “Museums can no longer claim neutrality when faced with evidence of injustice.”

The NGV’s restitution, though long overdue, has been widely praised by Jewish organizations and human rights advocates. A spokesperson for the World Jewish Restitution Organization told The Algemeiner that the decision “sends a message that justice delayed need not be justice denied.”

As for Lady With a Fan, its journey has at last come full circle. The painting, whose quiet elegance belies its violent history, will now rejoin the Bromberg family’s private collection — a symbolic restoration of both heritage and dignity.

For the family’s descendants, the return marks the end of an 80-year exile. “This painting represents not only beauty but memory,” one family member told The Algemeiner. “It reminds us of what was lost — and what can still be reclaimed.”

In a world still grappling with the aftershocks of the Holocaust, The Algemeiner report observed that such restitutions stand as “small but luminous acts of justice — proof that history’s moral debts can, at least in part, be repaid.”