Restitution claims

Arts Council England has appointed the Institute of Art and Law to help form new guidance for institutions around the thorny issues of restitution and repatriation of cultural objects.

Pictures restored to the family of an important Jewish collector whose property had been seized by the Nazis led Sotheby’s latest evening sale of Impressionist and Modern art in London.

Three Impressionist paintings believed to be worth over £14m that were taken by the Nazis during the Second World War but recently restituted to the heirs of a French-Jewish art collector will be offered at Sotheby’s in London next month.

A Japanese museum has claimed it bought a painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds “in good faith and without fault from a respectable art dealer” after it was identified as being stolen from a UK stately home.

The FBI’s art crime team and auction house Christie’s have returned a pair of Louis XVI bronze vases that were stolen by the Nazis to the heirs of the original Jewish owners.

Six-hundred rare books, manuscripts and prints which were lost or stolen from a German library during the Second World War have been returned after they were consigned to Sotheby’s.

A cathedral in Germany has returned a painting that was seized by the Nazis in 1941 to the heirs of its original Jewish owners. The work had entered the collection of Adolf Hitler’s photographer Heinrich Hoffmann and was found among the numerous works he kept in a castle in Bavaria at the end of the Second World War.

An exceptionally rare Western Zhou bronze, taken when the Summer Palace was sacked by British troops in 1860, has been returned to China.

A Persian limestone relief sculpture is to be returned to Iran, a New York court has ruled.

A Washington DC appeals court has upheld a decision to allow a ‘Nazi forced sale’ claim against a spectacular collection of medieval devotional art to go to trial in the US.

A Dutch Old Master painting looted by the Nazis after the Battle of Arnhem but now returned to its rightful owners after 73 years has sold at Sotheby’s for £1.6m.

A small bronze figure of a horse from ancient Greece is at the centre of a New York court case after Greece’s ministry of culture demanded its return and stopped its sale at auction.

A judge in a test case in international restitution law relating to Nazi-looted artworks has ruled in favour of a Holocaust victim's heirs rather than an art dealer who owned the pictures.

An Old Master portrait missing for nearly 80 years has been returned to the heirs of Dutch banker and art collector Fritz Gutmann. They now plan to auction the picture with an estimate of $1m-2m.