Joburg sisters win battle for looted Nazi artwork

Two Johannesburg sisters - the heirs to a priceless art collection - will finally see the return of a R49-million painting which has been in the possession of an Australian public gallery for 74 years.

The reclusive sisters, both in their 70s, have been trying to retrieve the 33cm×40cm work, believed to be by Vincent van Gogh, from the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, for a number of years.

For security reasons, the pair do not wish to be identified.

The story of how the painting ended up in Australia begins in Nazi Germany and is peppered with anecdotes of how a Jewish-German industrialist, Richard Semmel, was forced to sell his art collection by the Nazis.

Semmel was a close friend of the Johannesburg sisters' grandmother and he had bequeathed his collection to her.

The 1886 painting, Head of a Man, was part of Semmel's prized collection. The collection also included works by French impressionist Renoir and Renaissance artist Raphael, whose 16th-century piece Head of an Apostle fetched $48-million at an auction by Sotheby's in London in 2012.

The gallery has agreed to return the painting to the sisters following a claim in December last year lodged by their Zurich-based lawyer, Olaf Ossmann.

In a letter to Ossmann, the gallery's attorney, Peter Stewart, said it "acknowledges that the painting was part of Mr Semmel's art collection, that in all circumstances Mr Semmel's auctioning of the painting in 1933 should be regarded as involuntary and that your clients are the sole heirs of Richard Semmel".

Stewart said that with Australia being a signatory to the Washington conference principles on Nazi-confiscated art, the gallery believed it was "appropriate to restitute the painting to your clients".

The gallery also proposed that, should the sisters so wish, it was eager to discuss the possibility of buying the piece.

"Head of a Man holds an important place in Australian art history. The gallery acquired it from the exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art in 1940. At the time, it was considered the first Van Gogh painting to enter an Australian public collection and it remained the only accessible painting by Van Gogh in Australia in 1990," said the letter.

Ossmann said he would travel to Melbourne to discuss "the consequences of this decision and the future of the painting".

The Sunday Times reported earlier this year that researchers hired by the sisters were scouring museums and art galleries in Europe in search of their missing artworks.

According to a detailed statement by the sisters, their family and Semmel had known each other in Poland and their families were close friends.

Semmel, a member of the German Democratic Party, fled to the Netherlands in April 1933 after Hitler became chancellor.

He and his wife, Clara Brück, settled in New York in 1941. After Semmel's wife died in 1945, he was reunited with the sisters' grandmother, who became his companion and cared for him until he died in 1950.

The sisters later settled in South Africa with their mother.

"We understand that our grandmother and mother at different times tried to locate documents about the Semmel paintings to prove our family's ownership. We are the legal heirs and it is only right that we get back what is rightfully ours," the sisters said.