Long-lost painting looted by Nazis recovered after it was spotted in a real estate listing

It took 80 years to track down and a week of international intrigue, but a long-lost 18th-century painting looted by the Nazis has been recovered after it was spotted in a recent Argentinian real estate listing.

“Portrait of a Lady,” which belonged to a prominent Jewish art collector before it was stolen during World War II, is now in the hands of authorities, officials in the South American nation said Wednesday.

The full-length portrait of Countess Colleoni by Italian artist Giuseppe Ghislandi “was part of the Goudstikker Collection, comprising more than 1,100 works of art. Jacques Goudstikker, a Jewish art dealer, died in 1940 while fleeing the Nazis,” the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands told NBC News in a written statement.

The painting resurfaced last month after it was spotted on a real estate website, hanging above a velvet sofa in a virtual tour of a property for sale in the coastal town of Mar del Plata, about 160 miles south of Argentina’s capital, Buenos Aires.

On Wednesday, the portrait of the countess, in a flower-embroidered dress and in a golden frame, was sitting in a nearby federal prosecutor’s office.

“We’re doing this simply so that the community to whom we partly owe the discovery of the work … can see these images,” the prosecutor, Daniel Adler, said, according to The Associated Press. “It was people from the community, specifically journalists, who prompted the investigation,” he added.

A group of Dutch journalists made the discovery as they investigated Friedrich Kadgien, a high-ranking official under Adolf Hitler, who fled Germany’s Third Reich and went into hiding in Argentina.

Under the government of three-time President Juan Domingo Perón, fugitive German fascists brought plundered Jewish property with them, including gold, bank deposits, paintings, sculptures and furnishings.

News of the portrait’s find first appeared in the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad (AD), and was part of a nearly decadelong project by investigative journalists Cyril Roseman and Peter Schouten, as well as researcher Paul Post. NBC News reached out to the journalists who declined to comment.

After coming across the image of the painting, the journalists contacted Friedrich Kadgien’s daughter, Patricia Kadgien, but did not receive a response for weeks, according to their report in AD.

The image of the painting was soon replaced with an image of a tapestry, and an initial raid by Argentinian authorities on the family home did not find the artwork.

But prosecutors carried out four raids at different locations that belonged to the Kadgien family this week and both Patricia Kadgien and her husband, Juan Carlos Cortegoso, were placed under house arrest, pending a formal hearing Thursday on charges of concealment and obstruction of justice.

Adler, the prosecutor, told reporters that the couple’s lawyer had handed over the painting to authorities Wednesday. He did not specify where the portrait would go next.

“My search for the artwork of my father-in-law, Jacques Goudstikker, began in the late 1990s and I have not given up to this day,” Goudstikker’s daughter-in-law Marei von Saher told AD. “It is my family’s goal to recover every artwork stolen from the Goudstikker collection and to restore Jacques’ legacy.”