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Antiques Roadshow solves mystery surrounding portrait of Dutch resistance heroine

Carolyn Strobos with the painting of her mother, a member of the Dutch resistance during the Second World War.
Carolyn Strobos with the painting of her mother, a member of the Dutch resistance during the Second World War.

Glamourous and artistic, the 20-year-old Tina Strobos was part of a bohemian circle of friends in 1940s Amsterdam.

She posed for paintings and sculptures while studying psychiatry at university in the hope of embarking upon a career in medicine.

Within months, however, she was on her way to becoming a darling of the Dutch resistance and a Jewish heroine after the Nazi invasion changed her life for ever.

From her family’s three-storey rowhouse she hid more than 100 of the city’s Jews from the Gestapo, with the aid of an informant who warned them of imminent raids with moments to spare on no less than eight separate occasions.

One of the portraits painted of her during those troubled times now hangs on the wall of daughter Carolyn Strobos’ home in Newport.

For years mystery has surrounded the picture, with the family unable to say for sure who was responsible for the unsigned work even after an appearance on the Antiques Roadshow when it visited Scone Palace in 2013.

Carolyn’s mother, who became Dr Strobos, had always believed it was the work of the celebrated Jewish artist Martin Monnickendam and indeed told everyone so.

In fact, further research by the Antiques Roadshow detectives has now discovered that it was one of the final works by another Amsterdam painter of Jewish origin, Buruch Lopes de Leao Laguna.

It was a fingerprint in varnish left on the top of the unsigned painting by the artist that eventually enabled experts to say for certain that it was one of his works.

Secluded in the shadows of a studio and anonymous even to his muse, he’d captured her likeness before apparently gifting the painting to her.

Laguna was one of many Jews smuggled out of Amsterdam by a network of resistance cells such as the one Carolyn’s mother was part of.

He eventually went into hiding on a farm in Laren, 20 miles away, only to be betrayed and captured by the Nazis.

Laguna was then taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp where he was murdered on November 19 1943 aged 79.

“They believe that the portrait may have been one of his very last, produced in 1943, not long before he died,” Carolyn said of her mother.

“Though the artists were in hiding they wanted to keep painting and often asked people to sit for them.

“My mother was quite glamorous and as a member of the Dutch resistance she was also safe, so she sat for paintings and sculptures a number of times.”

The Laguna portrait will be on display at the Tatha Gallery in Newport until May 16.

Carolyn will be at the gallery on Friday May 1 and Saturday May 9, between 1 and 3pm each day, to discuss the painting and her mother’s life.