Leonardus Nardus (5 May 1868 – 12 June 1955) was a Dutch fencer,[1] impressionist painter and art collector of Jewish origin whose considerable collection was looted by the Nazis.

[4] During the 1890s and early 1900s Nardus gained an alarming reputation for his work as an art dealer in the United States, operating primarily out of New York and Philadelphia.

Nardus swindled American millionaires such as Peter Arrell Brown Widener by selling for extraordinarily high prices relatively worthless pictures as landmarks of Western Art, under what Widener later described in a distraught personal letter as “gross false pretenses.” [5] Nardus was unmasked as a swindler in 1908 by the art connoisseurs Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, Bernard Berenson, Wilhelm Valentiner and Roger Fry, but the incident was kept (mostly) quiet at the time because Nardus’s wealthy clients, including J.P. Morgan and the influential Philadelphia corporation lawyer John G. Johnson, feared embarrassment of the Emperor’s New Clothes variety.

His collection included Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, Rubens, Botticelli, Goya, Turner, and Vélasquez among others.

[11] Botticelli's Mary and the Child, John the Baptist and an angel, seized in 1942, was recognized as Nazi loot and restituted to Nardus' descendants in 2014.