A U.S. district court ordered a German baroness to turn a painting over to the estate of a Holocaust survivor.

U.S. District Judge Mary Lisi said in her ruling that Max Stern did not voluntarily sell the painting “Girl from the Sabiner Mountains,” by 19th-century artist Franz Xaver Winterhalter, in 1937.

Rather, Stern was forced by the Germans to auction off hundreds of works of art from his family’s Dusseldorf art gallery because he was Jewish. Soon after the auction Stern fled Germany, eventually finding his way to Canada, where he became a well-known art dealer. www.jta.org

Posted: 12|30|07 at 11:05 pm. Filed under: Auction News.