Painting looted by Nazis is spotted in estate agent photo

More than 80 years after it was looted by the Nazis from a Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam, a portrait by a 17th-century Italian master has been spotted on an estate agent's website advertising a house for sale in Argentina.

- Jon Henley

A photo shows Portrait of a Lady (Contessa Colleoni) by the late-Baroque portraitist Giuseppe Ghislandi hanging above a sofa in a sitting room of the property in a seaside town near Buenos Aires.

The Dutch newspaper AD said it had traced the work, which is listed by the Dutch culture ministry as "unreturned" after the second world war, after a long investigation and with the unwitting help of the estate agent.

Portrait of a Lady belonged to Jacques Goudstikker, a Dutch art dealer who fled the Netherlands in mid-May 1940 to escape the invading Nazis but who died after falling in the hold of the vessel carrying him to safety and breaking his neck.

Within weeks, Goudstikker's entire collection of more than 1,100 artworks, including numerous paintings catalogued as Old Masters, had been bought up in a forced sale and for a small fraction of its true value by Herman Goring.