The city of Cologne said it will return a painting by the French artist Narcisse Virgilio Diaz de la Peña (1807-1876) that was sold at a compulsory auction by the Nazis.
The still-life of a bouquet, currently held at the city's Wallraf-Richartz Museum, will be given to the previous Jewish owners' heirs, who want the painting to be sold at auction.
The de la Pena had originally belonged to the newspaper publisher Rudolf Mosse (1843-1920), who passed it on to his daughter Felicia Lachmann-Mosse. In 1934, several months after Hitler's rise to power, her possessions were put up at a compulsory auction in Berlin, where it was bought by the German Jewish art dealer Walter Westfeld.
Westfeld's art collection was later confiscated by the Nazis and put up for auction in Cologne in 1939. Westfeld was later deported and murdered at Auschwitz.
Researchers have found a number of paintings from the former Mosse collection in museums. Only recently, the University of Zurich returned two portraits of Egyptian mummies to Mosse's heirs. Several returned art works from the Mosse collection are to be sold at auction in Berlin in early June.
