‘Justice can triumph’: painting looted by Nazis returned to owners after 80 years

Gustav and Emma Mayer owned 30 paintings, which were left in storage in Brussels after a 14-month stay in the Belgian capital, Flowers is the only one to have been recovered. Photograph: Johanna Geron/Reuters

Approximately 80 years after it was looted by the Nazis, an expressionist painting has been returned to the descendants of a German-Jewish couple by the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels.

Flowers, a 1913 still life by the German artist Lovis Corinth, was entrusted to the museums in 1951, because postwar investigators were unable to trace the original owners.