A breakthrough came when Yana unearthed correspondence between the museum and an art dealer at the time of the sale.
The art dealer had sold the painting from one of the Eisners’ former family homes – a property taken over by Martin Hartig in 1938. Hartig had lived the rest of his life there, meticulously restoring the building after damage during the fall of Berlin, before dying of natural causes in 1965.
After Hartig’s death, the property passed to his daughter, who was now in her 80s. She had gifted the house to her own children in 2014, and had moved to a country cottage, where she arranged to meet Antony and Yana.
The elderly lady made them tea and cakes, which they ate in the living room under a portrait of her father – a man with thick-rimmed glasses and oiled hair, gaunt in the face and wearing a black suit. It had been painted in 1945, just after the end of World War Two.
Martin Hartig’s daughter had a very different story to the one Antony and Yana were expecting.
She told them her father had always been opposed to the Nazis and had helped save the Eisners, who she described as great friends, from the Holocaust. She said he helped convince them to get away, urging the family: “You can’t stay here. Go to Great Britain, to London.”
Her father had also told her he helped them smuggle paintings out of Germany by taking them out of their frames and hiding them among clothes.
When asked about the properties her family took over from the Eisners in 1938, she said they were all legitimate purchases.
“My father bought two houses, legally,” she said. “It always had to be very correct.”