MONASTERY PAINTINGS.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 213, 8 September 1928, Page 10 (Supplement)

MONASTERY PAINTINGS.

TO BE SOU) FOR DEBT. WORKS GIVEN AS SECURITY. _ A judgment filed in the City Court of Ifew York direeta tJie Slier iff to sell four paintings, owned by tlie ChorberreuStjft, a monastery at Innsbruck, .Austria, and valued by it at more than £2000, to satisfy two judgments aggregating oyer £600. They arc "Saviour and His Disciples,' .Titian school; 'Hiame and Fruit," by Snyder; "Madonna and Child," Rubens school, and "Holland Landscape." The judgments were entered in a suit by Hans Hansen against the monastery. Mrs. Louise Niedermaier, Hans Ranter and Zdenko Safarik to recover £200 lentin 1921 to Rauter, who gave the paintings as security. The papers showed that the monasterv delivered the pictures to Rauter, an art! dealer, to be sold in the United States.! and he left them in the apartment of Mrs. Niedermaier, at 2,880 Broadway, to be seen by would-be purchasers. After waiting for six years for the repayment of his loans out of the proceeds of the Bale, Hansen brought suit, in which Mrs. Niedermaier Uled an auswer asserting that she had a lien for £180 for caring for them. The monastery answered that it had rescinded the agreement by which Rauter was to sell the pictures and demanded that they be returned because they had been sold to Safarik for £520 in 1923. The case was referred to former Justice Finelite, as referee, for determination. The monastery failed to put in its defence at the trial, with the result that the referee gave judgment for £300, with £60 costs, in favour of Hansen, and for £180, with £18 costs, in favour of Mrs. Niedermaier. The paintings were attached when the suit was brought last year.