Seventh Circuit Rejects Bid to Return Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’

Illinois federal court isn’t the proper venue for a dispute over Vincent van Gogh’s iconic “Sunflowers” painting, the Seventh Circuit ruled Friday, siding with a lower court that threw out the case on jurisdictional grounds.

The purported heirs of a German-Jewish art collector who liquidated his holdings, as Nazis assumed power in the 1930s, presented no federal cause of action to proceed with four of the 12 counts, said Judge Kenneth F. Ripple in an opinion for the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. And the district court lacked in personam—or personal—jurisdiction over the defendants on the other ...