A German museum has handed back a painting by Max Slevogt to the family of the man who once owned it. The Von der Heydt-Museum in Wuppertal restituted Birds of Paradise, painted in 1900, to the heirs of Eduard Fuchs, a collector, Communist and writer who left Nazi Germany with his Jewish wife, Margarete. Wuppertal city council approved the return on 13 July 2026, after a provenance investigation that began in 2020 and drew on a German Lost Art Foundation project reconstructing the Fuchs collection.

The painting's journey shows how thoroughly the collection was scattered. Nazi authorities confiscated Fuchs's holdings, later releasing them, and in 1937 he was forced to sell works to pay a punitive emigration tax. Birds of Paradise was auctioned in Berlin in June 1937 and bought by the dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, before passing to Fritz Slevogt in 1939. It appeared at Kunsthaus Lempertz in December 2004, estimated at €100,000–€120,000, but failed to sell; the museum showed it in 2005 and bought it through the auction house in 2006 for €120,000.

Staff acknowledge that the 2004 sale catalogue documented the provenance, but say they can no longer establish whether a proper check was carried out before the purchase. The museum is not pursuing legal action against Lempertz. Its director, Roland Mönig, said the loss of the painting was outweighed by the certainty of having acted responsibly towards history.

The heirs have consigned the painting to Ketterer Kunst's day sale on 5 December, where it carries an estimate of €40,000–€60,000; with many heirs, a sale was the only practical option. A second Slevogt from the Fuchs collection, Don Quixote and the Flock of Sheep from 1907, will appear in the same sale at €20,000–€30,000 under a separate arrangement: a settlement reached in 2026 between the current private owners and the heirs cleared it for sale free of restitution claims. In 2024 the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart restituted the 1899 triptych The Prodigal Son to the same heirs, and it was sold at Ketterer later that year.