LONDON.- Several items with chequered pasts are to be offered in the Fine European Ceramics and Glass sale on the 26th of November in Bonhams New Bond Street salerooms.

These pieces - and many others like them - have, in recent years, been re-discovered and returned to the descendents of their original owners, after being appropriated by the Nazi Germany regime in the 1930s and 40s.

The restitution of property seized from Jewish families by the Nazis, either by forced sale or outright theft, has become a prominent issue of the day. This is a result of the 1998 Washington Principles directive, an agreement by 44 nations to take more active steps to return items confiscated by the Nazis to their lawful owners.

Some cases are more clear-cut than others; collections that had clearly catalogued inventories and surviving records of sale make the task of tracing items easier. However, descendants of Jewish victims of the Nazis without those advantages have had less success in tracing their rightful legacies.

Some items ended up in museums, while many others came to be in private hands. As Robert Bevan points out in his article ‘Fragile Legacy’, about the Nazi-looted Emma Budge collection, “Many people who now own looted artworks may have little idea about the dubious provenance of items that their own parents or grandparents might have bought, postwar, in good faith”.

One such item is a very rare Meissen teapot and cover, circa 1725-30, which carries an estimate of £30,000-50,000. Once part of the famed collection of Meissen porcelain formed by Gustav and Charlotte von Klemperer, the teapot is finely painted in famille verte-style, and depicts a garden scene with Japanese figures. There only other recorded teapot of this type, the cover of which has slightly different decoration.

The collection of Meissen porcelain formed by the von Klemperers in Dresden was one of the finest ever assembled, formed between the mid 1890s and Gustav von Klemperer's death in December 1926. A few weeks later, a catalogue of the collection was published in a limited private edition of 150 copies. It is the only complete record of the family’s treasures, as the collection was seized by the Nazis at the end of 1938, and was mostly destroyed in the bombing of Dresden in February 1945.

Of the pieces and fragments that were recovered from the rubble after WWII, many were generously donated by the von Klemperer family to the Dresden Porcelain Collection. In 2008, more von Klemperer treasures were discovered in the Porcelain Museum's storerooms, and were swiftly returned to the family. Bonhams was selected to catalogue and value the pieces, and of these, 43 were sold in these salerooms in December 2010.

A rare Meissen figure of Harlequin with a monkey, modelled by J.J. Kaendler circa 1740 and estimated at £30,000-40,000, is another piece with a problematic provenance.

This piece was once the property of Emma Budge, a wealthy German collector who, by the First World War, had gathered together one of the most important collections of decorative arts in private hands. She filled her grand mansion, with paintings, antique china, silver, bronzes, tapestries and fine furniture. Collecting only the best, among her finds were choice works by the early European porcelain manufacturers – including many pieces by Meissen.

However, for the Budges and other Jewish families, the ascendency of the Nazi Party spelled disaster. Emma passed away in 1937, and rather than the estate passing to her heirs, the Nazis seized control of her 2,000 or so treasures- putting all of it up for sale at Berlin auction house Paul Graupe. Selling for between 70 and 95% below their actual value, not even those relatively meagre sums raised made it to Budge’s rightful heirs. The collection was dispersed across the globe, with museums in the UK, the United States, the Netherlands, and in Germany itself eventually acquiring items.

Emma Budge's heirs have since managed to reclaim some items from their lost inheritance; indeed this very Harlequin figure was restituted to them by the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2014.

Sebastian Kuhn, European Ceramics Specialist at Bonhams, says, “Bonhams is the only leading international auction house to maintain regular stand-alone sales of European Ceramics, and we are honoured to have been chosen to offer such important porcelain as part of the restitution process. This sale will offer collectors around the world a rare opportunity to acquire important examples of early Meissen porcelain from some of the most distinguished collections of the pre-War era”.