THE FBI DELIVERS TO THE HEIRS OF A JEWISH GALLERY OWNER A PICTURE TAKEN BY THE NAZIS 80 YEARS AGO

The seventeenth-century portrait of the Dutch master Jan Franse Verzijl is the sixteenth canvas recovered by the Max Foundation and Iris Stern

A painting of the seventeenth century was expelled by the Nazis in 1936 and returned by the United States justice to the heirs of a German Jewish art dealer.

The painting "Young Man as Bacchus" by the Dutch painter Jan Franse Verzijl (1599-1647) was seized by the FBI at the art gallery Luigi Caretto in Turin, Italy, which had sent it for sale at the Spring art fair Masters of New York in May 2015.

The Italian gallery has shown great generosity by voluntarily waiving its right of ownership over the work in negotiations with the FBI, the foundation said in a statement.

The FBI had intervened following the request of HCPO, the New York State's Shoah related claims office. Founded in 2002 and run by Concordia University in Montreal, this foundation is currently the world's largest project of restitution of paintings sold forcibly by its owners during Nazi Germany.

This is the sixteenth canvas recovered by the foundation. Several institutions are heirs to Max Stern, a German of Jewish origin (1904-1987), former owner of an important art gallery in Düsseldorf, expelled from the Academy of Fine Arts of the Reich and forced by the Nazis in 1937 to sell more than 400 pictures.

The return of the painting was made at a ceremony on Wednesday at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, under a landmark US court decision in 2007 in another case related to Stern.

• Pablo Miranda and Ainhoa Peregrín