In some living rooms the furniture ends up becoming an archive, even when no one wants to call it that. A picture hung for years, a frame, a label on the back that resists dust, a number engraved in the wood. Then someone takes a closer look, asks a family question, hears an answer that weighs more than the painting itself. This is how a painting stolen by the Nazis during the Second World War resurfaced in the Netherlands, in the house of the descendants of Hendrik Seyffardt, a Dutch general who collaborated with Nazism and was linked to the Waffen-SS, the armed formations of the SS also used on the Eastern Front.
The painting is titled Portrait of a Young GirlPortrait of a Young Girl, and is attributed to the Dutch artist Toon Kelder. The canvas, according to the reconstruction of the art investigator Arthur Brand, remained in the possession of the Seyffardt family for decades. Before that, it belonged to Jacques Goudstikker, a Jewish art dealer from Amsterdam, who was forced to flee after the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in 1940. Goudstikker died during that attempt to escape, leaving behind an enormous collection, estimated at over a thousand works. His gallery contained around 1,400 works, mostly looted by the Nazis, and his case remains one of the best known in the European history of the restitution of stolen works.
The number 92 on the frame
It would have been a descendant of Seyffardt who started it all. After discovering the family connection with the collaborationist general, the man allegedly asked his grandmother for explanations about the provenance of the painting. The answer, reported in Brand’s reconstruction, would have opened the room that had been closed for years: the painting would have been purchased during the war, it came from Goudstikker, it was looted Jewish art, therefore impossible to sell. A domestic, almost hasty phrase. Inside, however, there was an entire piece of the twentieth century.
The family member would have contacted Brand through an intermediary, convinced that making the story public was the only way to achieve restitution to Goudstikker’s heirs. The family, who changed their surname after the war, admitted having had the painting, but claimed to be unaware of its true origin. The grandmother, in statements reported by the Dutch press, explained that she received it from her mother and only now understands why the Goudstikker heirs want it back. Here the question becomes less of an art catalog and more of a family kitchen: what passes from hand to hand can become habit, even when it arises from plunder.
Brand started checking. On the back of the painting there was a label from the Goudstikker collection. In the frame, the number 92. That detail led to the archives of a 1940 sale, when part of the collection stolen from Goudstikker was dispersed at auction. In item 92 there was just one Portrait of a Young Girl by Toon Kelder. According to the investigator’s reconstruction, the work was first raided by Hermann Göring, one of the most powerful men of the Nazi regime, then sold to Seyffardt and finally passed on to his descendants.
The lawyers of the Goudstikker heirs, contacted by Brand, confirmed another piece: the dealer owned six paintings by Toon Kelder and those works were included in the 1940 sale. The story of number 92, therefore, fits in with the label, with the auction catalog and with the provenance of the collection. In cases of stolen art, the truth often comes like this: less spectacular than imagined, more stubborn. A card, a back, an acronym left there.
The house, the name changed
Hendrik Seyffardt had had a career in the Dutch army before becoming a figure of collaboration with the Nazi occupation. During the war he was linked to the Dutch Volunteer Legion, employed alongside the Waffen-SS on the Eastern Front. In 1943 he was killed by members of the Dutch Resistance. His death had enormous resonance in the Nazi propaganda of the time, also because Seyffardt represented a useful figure for the recruitment and collaboration project in the occupied Netherlands.
The descendant who brought the case to light reportedly said he felt ashamed and believed it was right to return the painting to the Goudstikker heirs. Brand, for his part, called the discovery one of the strangest cases of his career. He explained that he had already dealt with works looted by the Nazis that ended up in museums, public collections and prestigious collections, yet a painting from the Goudstikker collection in the house of the descendants of a Dutch Waffen-SS general surpasses, for him, all previous ones.
The most uncomfortable part remains the moral one. The descendants, as Brand himself pointed out, carry a family legacy, with no personal blame for Seyffardt’s crimes. The painting, however, according to the reconstruction, remained there for years. And when an object has a similar story, keeping it hanging also means letting that story continue to work in silence. The restitution of works stolen from the Jews during the Shoah concerns courts, archives, certificates and prescriptions. It’s also about a much simpler question, the one that comes when a label on the back already says enough.
The Argentine echo
The case recalls another recent story linked to the same collection. In 2025, a painting attributed to Giuseppe Ghislandi, Portrait of a Ladyappeared in a photo published online by a real estate agency in Argentina. The work was seen hanging above a sofa in a house near Buenos Aires that belonged to the family of Friedrich Kadgien, a Nazi official who fled to South America after the war. That painting also came from the Goudstikker collection and had been sought for decades.
When the Argentine police arrived at the house, the painting had disappeared. In its place, according to reconstructions, there remained traces on the wall and the suspicion of a hasty move. The scene seems almost banal: a real estate photo, a living room, a painting above a sofa. Then the image becomes evidence, or almost. There too, as in the Dutch case, the art stolen by the Nazis re-emerges inside a house, among furniture, heirs and silences handed down.
The Portrait of young girl by Toon Kelder now carries all of this: the painted face of a little girl, the number 92, the name Goudstikker, the Seyffardt family, an auction from 1940, a descendant who decides to speak. The frame has retained more memory than many people.
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