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Successors to a Jewish financier are suing a Japanese firm over a Van Gogh painting they claim was stolen by the Nazis.

The descendants of a German Jewish banker who sold his art collection to evade the Nazis are suing a Japanese holding firm for the return of a painting by Vincent van Gogh.

On December 13, a group of heirs to composer Paul von Mendelssohn named Bartholdy from New York and Germany filed a lawsuit in an Illinois district court against Sompo Holdings, a Japanese insurance company, to challenge the firm's claim of title to the artwork Sunflowers by Bartholdy (1888).

In the middle of the 1930s, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy allegedly sold his collection, which included pieces by Picasso, Claude Monet, and August Renoir, because he was "a victim" of Nazi policy and economic penalties. The van Gogh picture he sold in 1934.

Bartholdy's descendants from Mendelssohn claim that the painting's sale to Sompo Holdings in the late 1980s was "reckless disregard" and a "ignorance" of the painting's history. The charges made in the 98-page case have been "categorically denied" by Sompo, according to Sho Tanka, a business spokeswoman who talked with Courthouse News.

In 1987, the Yasuda Fire & Marine Insurance Company, a forerunner to Sompo, paid $39.9 million at a Christie's auction in London to acquire the van Gogh. The picture has been on loan to Tokyo's Sompo Museum of Fine Art since it was purchased there.

Nearly a decade had passed before major auction houses formally embraced the Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, which are currently the standard for returning and studying art with ties to Nazism.

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