A Nazi-looted painting by Dutch artist Pieter de Grebber is to be auctioned this week in a deal between the current owner and descendants of the former Jewish owner.

A boy, in profile, singing in a feigned oval was once owned by Jewish art collector and antiquarian Abe Gutnajer, who was killed in the Warsaw ghetto in July 1942.

A boy, in profile, singing, in a feigned oval by Pieter de Grebber dates from the late 1620s. The Nazi-looted work was thought to be lost until 2006.
(Christie's/Associated Press)

Poland has brokered a deal between Gutnajer's descendants, many of them Americans, and the Latvian owner of the work.

The oil painting, created in the 1620s, is valued at $40,000-$60,000 by Christie's auction house in London.

Gutnajer bought the work in Berlin in 1917, but after he was sent to Warsaw, it went missing. It may have been confiscated by the Nazis along with other Jewish property or looted by passing troops.

It resurfaced in 2006 when a Latvian family attempted to sell it through Christie's.

Wojciech Kowalski, who leads Poland's efforts to restitute works of art plundered during the Second World War, spent two years negotiating a deal to allow the painting to be sold.

Both the current owner and Eve Gutnajer-Infanti of Philadelphia, the widow of Gutnajer's son, Ludwik, are satisfied with the deal, Kowalski said. Gutnajer-Infanti's children also approved the deal. 

"We are happy that it was not destroyed and surfaced, but it's privately owned and there was no way Poland could get it back," he said.

Kowalski would not release terms of the deal.

With files from the Canadian Press