A Goddess of the Night, a Roman Gem, and the Bachstitz Gallery.

Two Roman objects in the J. Paul Getty Museum, a bronze statuette of the moon goddess Luna and a cornelian gem were among the handful of classical antiquities purchased for Adolf Hitler's unrealized "Führermuseum" in Linz. This study presents new provenance research that tracks their itineraries from European private collections to the gallery of Kurt Walter Bachstitz, a prominent Jewish art dealer active in The Hague between the 1920s and the 1940s. His precarious personal and business relationships with German art agents expose how ordinary commerce was entangled with coerced sales in the Nazioccupied Netherlands. Informed by debates over the status of works that had changed hands on wartime art markets, in 2015 the Dutch Restitution Committee recommended that the gem be returned to Bachstitz's heirs but rejected their claim for the statuette. Having passed through various collections following their restitution after World War II, the two objects were reunited at the Getty in 2017. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]