Jewish family make claim for still life now in city collection

WHEN Sir William Burrell bought Le Pate De Jambon in June 1936, he thought he was acquiring a still life by one of France's finest eighteenth-century artists.

Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin was nicknamed the Grand Magician by the Parisian critics for the uncanny realism of his quiet domestic scenes.

The price tag of (pounds) 647 and 14 shillings was hardly cheap for the time but for a work by a favourite of King Louis XV, it must have seemed worth it. Burrell never found out he'd bought a dud.

It was only 10 years ago it emerged that the piece was almost certainly by one of Chardin's followers.

However, the worst that could be said of the matter was that Burrell had been duped.

Last month, a letter from a legal firm in Berlin changed all that and the transaction took on an altogether more sinister air.

Acting on behalf of elderly members of a Jewish family, whose members are now living in Germany and US, the letter stated that the painting had been wrenched from its rightful owners under the Nazi regime in June 1936.

It said the family - which is still guarding its anonymity - was forced to sell the work through an auction to meet a bogus tax demand.

Shortly after this auction, Burrell, the shipping magnate and art magpie, bought a similar work from Julius Bohler, the Munich-based art dealer.

According to Anne Webber, co-chair of the Commission for Looted Art in Europe, Bohler is well known for having traded in ''suspect works''.

Glasgow City Council's repatriation working group now has to judge whether the painting sold at the forced auction was also the work sold to Burrell and if the chain of events outlined by the German lawyers stands up.

Bailie John Lynch, who heads the group of four councillors, said the assessment would not be a simple one.

He said: ''We look at each repatriation claim on an individual basis. It's not done on a balance of proof or beyond reasonable doubt basis. We try to do what we think is right for everybody.

''This is the only request we have received on the subject of Nazi spoliation and it will be considered fully and sensitively.''

He said the process was likely to take around three months.

''We will take expert advice as required and make a recommendation to the city council as soon as possible.

''Through its work on the Lakota Ghost Dance shirt and other requests for the return of cultural property, Glasgow has devised a well-developed process for dealing with such requests.''

Ephraim Borowsky, vice-president of the Jewish Representative Council in Glasgow, said: ''There are national procedures for adjudicating these matters but we have every confidence that, if the claim is substantiated, Glasgow City Council will do the right thing.''

To date, there has been only one other spoliation claim in the UK - against a work by Jan Griffier the Elder in the Tate Gallery in London. Its owner had been shot by the Nazis and the painting subsequently bought in good faith by the Tate in 1961.

Earlier this year, the owner's heirs received an ex-gratia payment of (pounds) 125,000 instead of the return of the work.

However, the money was paid by the Department of Culture, Media, and Sport, not the gallery, because the issue was regarded as being of national importance.

Bailie Lynch said that if a cash settlement was recommended by his working group, then ''there would have to be discussions with the Scottish Executive or the exchequer''.

It is understood the multiple claimants in the case make a cash settlement likely.

However, a spokesman for the Scottish Executive said: ''We do not envisage any role for the executive at this stage.''

Glasgow's list of 232 suspect paintings and drawings, which includes works by Picasso, Cezanne, and Whistler, includes 55 items in the Burrell collection.

It was submitted to the national museum directors' conference spoliation committee in May, along with similar lists from other UK museums in a nationwide drive to return art stolen from Jewish families to its rightful owners.

Glasgow University's Hunterian Museum has also identified 28 works of art among its 1.5m items, mainly seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings, as having dubious provenance.

Last year, the National Galleries of Scotland said it had identified 50 prominent works of art in its possession which could not be tracked through the entire Nazi period.

A spokesman said last night the galleries had not yet received any spoliation requests.