A Canadian foundation set up to recover Nazi-looted works once owned by Montreal art dealer Max Stern has recovered a 17th-century Dutch painting.
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The Max Stern Art Restitution Project announced Thursday it has located a landscape by Jan de Vos the First called An Extensive Landscape with Travellers on a Track Near a Walled Town with a Castle and Church, a Village Beyond.
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Stern, a German-Jew who fled Germany in 1937, lost 250 European masterpieces confiscated or sold by force by the Nazis before the Second World War.
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Stern came to Canada in 1941. In 1947, he and his wife, Iris Stern, bought the Dominion Gallery in Montreal and made it a focal point for art collecting.
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When he died in 1987, Stern named Concordia University, McGill University and Hebrew University of Jerusalem the beneficiaries of his estate.
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The executors have set up the Max Stern Art Restitution Project to help track down the works taken by the Nazis.
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Christie's auction house helped locate the de Vos painting, currently being exhibited in a London gallery.
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The oil-on-canvas work will eventually be returned to Montreal.
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The foundation is working with dealers around the world and with databases of looted art to recover the works.
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In February, it found a Portrait of Jan van Eversdyck, by Flemish-born Nicolas Neufchatel, in a collection in Spain.
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It has recovered several other works and has started legal procedures to recover others.
With files from the Canadian Press