Portrait of a Lady as Pomona

1909-28 in the collection of the Marquis de Chaponay, Paris; purchased in 1928 by Jules Strauss, Paris, together with his son-in-law Roger Sauerbach; sold by Jules Strauss in 1941 and purchased via Margot Jansson for the Deutsche Reichsbank; transferred in 1953 by the vault administration of the Ministry of Finance of the GDR to the Gemäldegalerie Berlin and in 1959 from there to the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden; restituted in December 2020 to the descendants of Jules and Marie-Louise Strauss.

In 1941, the painting was sold by the Jewish banker and art collector Jules Strauss (Frankfurt/Main 1861-1943 Paris), apparently under pressure from persecution in Paris, and purchased in the same year by the middleman Margot Jansson for the Deutsche Reichsbank. The Reichsbank was one of the main players on the art market in France, which had been occupied since the summer of 1940. Largillière's portrait of a lady can be traced to the Berlin representation rooms of Reich Economics Minister and Reichsbank President Walther Funk in 1943.

The provenance and especially the circumstances of the sale in 1941 were investigated as part of the provenance research project "Daphne" and in exchange with descendants of the Strauss family. In accordance with the principles of the "Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets" of 1998, the SKD restituted the "Portrait of a Lady as Pomona" from the collection of the Gemäldegalerie to the descendants of Jules and Marie-Louise Strauss. With the support of the French Embassy in Berlin and the French Commission for the Compensation of Victims of Spoliation (CIVS), the work returned to Paris in January 2021.