Painting looted by the Nazis returned to heirs after nearly 90 years: Albert Lang’s “Music (Arcadian Scene)” handed over in Washington

In the article’s photo: a self-portrait of painter Albert Lang (public domain, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, via Wikimedia Commons). The image shows the artist himself, not the returned work «Music (Arcadian Scene)», for which no free photograph exists.

An 1892 painting by German artist Albert Lang, looted by the Nazi regime, has been returned after nearly 90 years to the heirs of the Jewish family that once owned it. The New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) handed over «Music (Arcadian Scene)» to the descendants of Sofie Heilbronner (née Wimpfheimer) at a ceremony held on September 22, 2026, at the German Embassy in Washington DC.

Heilbronner, a Jewish woman persecuted by the Nazis, was forced to sell her personal belongings and fled Germany for the United States in 1938. Shortly before her departure, she packed her household goods, including several artworks, into crates to be shipped to New York — but the German government seized the crates, auctioned them off and confiscated the proceeds. In 2015, the Bavarian State Painting Collections published Lang’s painting in the Lost Art Database; the work had been expropriated from unidentified Jewish collections, had been found in a Munich warehouse and transferred to the museum in 1955. In 2018, the heirs contacted the DFS’s Holocaust Claims Processing Office (HCPO), which identified the painting and pressed the claim for its return.

«Returning this painting rights a long-standing historical wrong and returns to us an important part of our heritage… It is one of the few surviving witnesses to our family’s life in Germany before persecution and displacement,» said Paul Laporte, Sofie Heilbronner’s great-grandson.

The HCPO, founded in 1997, has helped return more than $184 million in assets to the families of victims and has resolved claims involving more than 370 cultural objects. The restitution was made possible through the cooperation of the Bavarian State Ministry for Science and the Arts and the Bavarian State Painting Collections, in line with Germany’s commitment to the Washington Principles on handling art confiscated by the Nazis.

Source: New York State Department of Financial Services (via EIN Presswire)