The Bavarian State Painting Collections in Munich has returned Albert Lang's Music (Arcadian Scene) (1892) to the heirs of Sofie Heilbronner, a Jewish collector who fled Germany in 1938. The handover took place on September 22 at the German Embassy in Washington, DC.

Paul Laporte, Heilbronner's great-grandson, spent eight years working to reclaim the painting. "The return of this painting corrects a longstanding historical wrong and restores to us an important piece of our heritage," he said at the ceremony.

According to a notice from the New York State Department of Financial Services, which administers the Holocaust Claims Processing Office, Heilbronner packed up her artworks before leaving Munich for the United States, intending to sell them in New York. Instead, German authorities seized the works and auctioned them off.

The Lang painting later surfaced in a former Army barracks in Munich that had been converted into a warehouse, and it eventually entered the holdings of the Bavarian State Painting Collections. The museum identified the work as looted, but there was no record of who its rightful owner was.

The gold-framed canvas depicts a bacchanalian scene in a forest, with a nude reclining figure in the foreground surrounded by men and women playing instruments.

As the Washington Post reported, Laporte's first lead came from digitized records of Heinemann Gallery, an international art gallery founded in Munich in 1972. Heilbronner had her artwork appraised there, though the gallery declined to purchase Music (Arcadian Scene). That trail led Laporte to discover the painting was part of the Bavarian State Painting Collections.

The work now hangs in Laporte's living room in Maryland, at a shipping cost of $3,000 from Munich. Aesthetically, the painting is not really to his taste, he says, but he regards it as "more than a work of art."

"[It] remains a tangible connection to a life and world irrevocably altered by the Holocaust," Laporte said. "It is one of few surviving witnesses to our family's life in Germany before persecution and displacement."

He added: "We are deeply grateful to all those whose integrity and diligence helped make this moment possible. Their efforts ensure that this piece of our story can once again be reunited with the descendants of those to whom it originally belonged."