National Gallery of Victoria returns painting to Jewish family after 20-year battle

A work of art held in the National Gallery of Victoria collection for 80 years has been returned to the family of a Jewish couple who were forced to sell the painting before fleeing Nazi Germany in the late 1930s.

The 17th century painting, Lady With a Fan, by Gerard ter Borch has been returned to the heirs of Henry and Herta Bromberg.

The ownership of the painting has been contested since 2004, when Juan Carlos Emden, grandson of Jewish retail magnate Max Emden, approached the NGV with claims that Lady With a Fan had been looted. In 2022, The Australian reported that Emden had revived the claim to Lady With a Fan.

The Lost Art Database has been updated with an entry saying that the painting has been restituted to Brombergs’ heirs as of 2025. It is unclear whether the claims by the Emden heirs and the Bromberg heirs were separate or joint.

In a statement to this masthead, the Bromberg family said: “We are pleased that another artwork from our grandparents’ collection was identified. We are satisfied that the National Gallery of Victoria carefully checked the provenance of the painting Lady with a Fan by Gerard ter Borch and the circumstances under which Henry and Herta Bromberg had to part with it during the Nazi period which led to the painting’s return to our family.”

Lady With a Fan was one work of a larger collection owned by the Brombergs and reportedly sold to art dealer Allen Loebl in 1938, with the works then being scattered across the world.

During the Nazi regime, many Jewish families were forced to sell businesses and belongings below market value due to a series of discriminatory policies and practices, including both voluntary and forced “aryanisation” and the Reichsfluchtsteuer, an aggressive “flight tax” implemented by the Nazis on individuals leaving Germany.

The NGV confirmed the return of the painting in a statement to this masthead on Thursday afternoon.

“The National Gallery of Victoria received a request to consider the provenance of the painting Lady With a Fan (c. 1660-1663) by Dutch artist Gerard ter Borch, which was acquired by the NGV in 1945.

“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, and that the heirs of Dr Bromberg were the rightful owners of the painting. The painting was subsequently de-accessioned from the NGV Collection in 2025 and returned to the Bromberg family.”

The NGV did not answer direct questions from this masthead about the details of the restitution and the estimated value of the painting.

The current valuation of Lady With a Fan is unknown. In 2007, its value was estimated to be anywhere between $100,000 and $1 million. Other works by ter Borch have been sold for widely varying prices ranging from tens of thousands of dollars through to £1,273,250 ($2,633,360) for The Glass of Lemonade sold through Christie’s in 2012.

Jason Schulman, a 2025 Fulbright Scholar to Australia who has conducted research on potentially Nazi-looted art in Australian museums, has a particular interest in this work. “There have been claims for Lady With a Fan for 20 years, so it was a painting that I spent a lot of time researching,” he says. “In early September this year, I went to check something about Lady With a Fan on the NGV website and noticed it had been removed.”

The return of Lady With a Fan marks Australia’s second known successful claim for restitution of art, following the 2014 return by the NGV of Head of a Man to the heirs of Jewish industrialist Richard Semmel. The work, which had been owned by the NGV for 74 years, was believed to have been painted by Vincent van Gogh until a 2007 inspection by the Van Gogh Museum led to the institute decreeing that it was not, in fact, a van Gogh piece.

Another painting from the Bromberg collection, the 16th-century work Portrait of George the Bearded, Duke of Saxony, by Lucas Cranach the Elder was purchased by The Allentown Art Museum, Pennsylvania, in 1961. After a 2022 restitution claim, the museum agreed to sell the work and share the proceeds with Bromberg’s descendants. The painting was sold via Christie’s in early 2025 for $US327,600 ($503,000).

Prior to Lady with a Fan and Portrait of George the Bearded, Duke of Saxony, the Bromberg heirs successfully campaigned for the return of three 16th-century paintings that surfaced in France.

Schulman noted that the NGV’s approach had differed from that of Allentown Art Museum, in returning the painting directly to the family, rather than selling it and sharing the proceeds.

“I’d be very interested in how the museum came to that decision,” he said.

“Did the museum get new information from the Brombergs that the Allentown museum did not have? Did they interpret the existing evidence differently? Or did they think that returning the painting was a fairer solution than the Allentown compromise? I think there is a legitimate public interest in this decision-making.”

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