Danish Park Landscape with Villa

In July 1941 a Berlin auction house sold the stored belongings of Ella Lewenz, a banker's daughter persecuted as a Jew, who had fled to the United States in 1938. The Gestapo had ordered the sale. Lot 529, listed only as a landscape by Leistikow, fetched 430 Reichsmarks. This is that picture. It came from her father, the Dresden banker and collector Georg Arnhold, and a photograph of a room in his house later helped identify it. In February 1944 the Österreichische Galerie, today's Belvedere, bought it from the dealer Wolfgang Gurlitt for 8,500 Reichsmarks. In 2011 Austria's restitution advisory board recommended returning it to Ella Lewenz's heirs, and the museum says the succession is still being examined. The scene is a Danish park, a white villa on a green rise between two dark masses of red and brown trees.