"Le premier jour de printemps à Moret", by Alfred Sisley--Part Two

by Marc Masurovsky

“Frühlingslandschaft”

The Impressionist painter, Alfred Sisley, produced “Le premier jour de printemps à Moret” in 1889, an oil on canvas measuring 46,2 x 56 cm, signed and dated “Sisley. 89” on the lower left of the painting. The first name which appears on the provenance of the painting in the Christie’s sale listing for November 6, 2008, is “Camentron” with no date of acquisition.  There was a “Galerie Martin Camentron” in Paris in the 1890s which acquired a number of Sisley paintings. There was also a “collection Camentron” in which one could find a number of paintings by Sisley. 

The famed “Galerie Durand-Ruel” acquired “Le premier jour de printemps à Moret” in 1892 from Camentron, one of several that the gallery acquired, as attested by the provenance of a Sisley painting at the Musée d’Orsay.

Thirty years elapsed before Mr. Perdoux allegedly acquired the Sisley painting. There is nothing to indicate that he bought it from Durand-Ruel. This could be the same Perdoux as Yves Perdoux, a notorious Parisian art dealer who collaborated with the Nazis during the German occupation of France and denounced the locations of a number of Jewish-owned art collections, including that of Paul Rosenberg.

The Lindon family name does not appear in the Christie's provenance of this painting. At some point, the Wildenstein gallery in Paris came into possession of the painting. If one did not know that Lindon was associated with the Sisley painting, it would be impossible to deduce exactly when Wildenstein bought the painting—before, during or after WWII. On or about 1972, “the present owner” of the painting purchased “Le premier jour de printemps à Moret” and brought it to market at Christie’s on November 6, 2008 where Alain Dreyfus acquired it for 338,500 dollars.

So, what happened between Perdoux and Wildenstein?

The theft

Months after the German invasion of France in June 1940, the Lindenbaum/Lindon collection was confiscated and sent to the Jeu de Paume on December 10, 1940.   It included five paintings by Sisley which had been stored in a vault at the Chase Safe Deposit Company at 41, rue Cambon in Paris, until their removal by the German financial police agents with the Devisenschutzkommando (DSK) on December 5, 1940. The inventory drawn up by the DSK agents indicated a painting by Sisley 

excerpt from the DSK inventory

entitled “Frühling in Moret”. The initial inventory drawn up when the Lindenbaum collection first entered the Jeu de Paume in December 1940 showed a painting by Sisley with the following title: “Frühlingslandschaft mit blühenden Ostbäumen”, with a lower left signature and the date “89”. 

The ERR personnel at the Jeu de Paume gave the Sisley painting the title of “Frühlingslandschaft” (Spring landscape) and the number "Li 56"; it described the painting as a “View into a meadow landscape with still bare fruit trees, poplars and bushes. In the background a human figure”.

ERR card for Li 56

In early January 1943, a new inventory of the Lindenbaum collection was drawn up under the supervision of Dr. Schiedlausky, who was the principal manager of the ERR depot of Neuschwanstein in Bavaria near the town of Hohenschwangau close to Fussen. However a number of Impressionist and other modern works from the Lindenbaum collection remained at the Jeu de Paume in German-occupied Paris and were inventoried there on July 17, 1942 by Dr. Tomforde, one of the main art historians and cataloguers of confiscated collections working for the ERR in Paris. In May 1944, Dr. von Ingram working with Schiedlausky completed the Lindenbaum inventory at Neuschwanstein, including three Sisley paintings slated to be exchanged by the German dealer and agent, Gustav Rochlitz, on Goering’s initiative. Those paintings had been swapped in Paris for a painting by Titian, entitled “Portrait of a young lady” on July 9, 1941. Li 56, “Frühlingslandschaft” remained with Gustav Rochlitz who shipped it to his storage facility in Mühlhofen near Meersburg in southern Bavaria along the shores of Lake Constanz. A handwritten note from a postwar Bavarian official confirmed this possibility.

On September 25, 1945, Alfred Lindon submitted a “final list” of works of art plundered from the vault he had rented at the Chase Safe Deposit Company at 41, rue Cambon before the Germans’ arrival in the French capital. Incidentally, he named the Sisley painting “Sous-bois/printemps rose” and Mr. Lindon indicated that it had been acquired at Durand-Ruel.  Hence, when filling out the provenance advertised by Christie’s in November 2008, one could postulate the following:

Camentron, Paris
Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris (acquired from the above in April 1892)
Alfred Lindon?

Where does that put Mr. Perdoux (acquired from the above, November 1923)?

Could the 1923 Perdoux reference be a falsehood? If, as Mr. Lindon indicates on his inventory of works lost as a result of looting of the family vault at Chase Safe Deposit Company, he had bought the Sisley from Durand-Ruel, this would throw into question the mention of Perdoux in the provenance supplied to Christie’s. This would not be the first time that a provenance contained fictitious or misleading information. One possibility is that Alfred Lindon acquired the Sisley painting in November 1923 and that Yves Perdoux, if it is him, may have been involved in the recycling of the painting during WWII. He worked with various collaborationist art dealers, in particular Raphael Gérard, to whom he had sold numerous looted objects between 1940 and 1944. Anything is possible…

As a result of an exchange policy approved by the ERR and Hermann Goering, modern paintings confiscated from Jewish collectors were offered to French, Swiss, Belgian, Dutch, Italian, and German art dealers in exchange for Old Masters which could grace the collections of Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering. Under exchange (Tausch) No. 10 of July 9, 1941, a number of Lindenbaum paintings, including the Sisley painting in question were offered to Gustav Rochlitz in exchange for a Titian painting. According to Rochlitz’s testimony to the Allies after WWII, he shipped the Sisley and many other paintings he had obtained on the Paris art market, to a storage place that he managed at Mühlhofen near Meesburg in southern Bavaria, along the northern shore of Lake Constanz. Rochlitz misrepresented many of his transactions to Allied interrogators. Therefore, it would not be surprising if the Sisley in question had remained in Paris and been sold or consigned for sale with collaborationists like Yves Perdoux or Raphael Gérard.

In sum, the chain of ownership for the Sisley painting was broken on December 5, 1940. Its post-confiscation disappearance on the Paris art market made it impossible for French and Allied officials to recover the painting and return it to the Lindon family. Knowledge of these illicit market activities was not well-known in the postwar years, except by those who engaged in them, those who benefited from them, and some of the victims who investigated the fate of their lost cultural assets. 

The postwar French directory of looted cultural assets  known as Répertoire des biens spoliés (RBS) includes several paintings by Sisley which include the word “printemps” (spring/Frühling), one of the titles ascribed to the painting by Alfred Lindon, which point to two owners, the estate of Mrs. Berthe Propper and Mr. Lindon. A handwritten annotation in the 1947 RBS catalogue points to the fact that the French government’s investigative file on the whereabouts of the painting was closed on August 5, 1961, an administrative procedure indicating that the French government no longer considered the location of the painting as feasible. In these instances, government officials would tell claimants that they should accept instead a compensatory package from the German government for their losses, 16 years after the end of WWII. Whether or not the Lindon family continued to search for the painting is a question that needs an answer.

crossed-out mention of "Le Printemps" in RBS

Works by Alfred Sisley in lost art databases

www.lootedart.com

The database of the Commission for Looted Art in Europe (CLAE) includes three paintings by Sisley with the word “Spring”, none of which are ascribed to Alfred Lindon.

Lostart.de

The database of looted cultural assets which is managed by the German Lost Art Foundation contains 22 paintings by Alfred Sisley, none of which correspond to the Alfred Lindon painting.

Art Loss Register (ALR)

It’s impossible to know what information on the Sisley the London-based Art Loss Register holds since it is a proprietary database. In general, auction houses and art dealers routinely submit to ALR information on objects on consignment for sale in order to identify any potential problems with title. 

Tentative conclusion

Once Alfred Lindon became dispossessed of the painting on December 5, 1940, the painting became a looted work of art subject to restitution which required it to be returned to its rightful owner. Since it was not located at the end of WWII or thereafter, the painting’s postwar itinerary is illegal. Any transfer of title from one possessor  to the next since 1940 was illegal and amounted to resale and possession of stolen property.  Wildenstein & Cie, one-time owner of the Sisley painting, has contributed to the postwar problem surrounding this painting.

An art dealer's responsibility compels him/her to do systematic due diligence on every object which he/she acquires, sells, or borrows. It does not matter if the object is being offered for sale by an auction house or a gallery or a museum or another art dealer or a private individual. That is his/her professional and ethical responsibility. To treat auction houses differently from other market actors is frankly puzzling and illogical.

It is my frank opinion that if Mondex succeeds in bringing Christie's to heel over the Sisley painting, it will not only undermine one of the more successful restitution experiments in the private art market but also raise serious concerns about the actual meaning of restitution of works and objects of art plundered during the Nazi years by reducing it to a mercenary hunt for cash at whatever the cost. That, frankly, is unethical.  I honestly hope that all parties come to their senses and seek some other form of solution which will benefit the Lindon family, first and foremost.

Additional notes

Titles

“Le premier jour de printemps à Moret” by Alfred Sisley, painted in 1889, ended up in the possession of Alfred Lindenbaum/Lindon. The painting, before and after its racially-motivated confiscation, has had different titles prior to its purchase in 2008 by Alain Dreyfus:

“Printemps”
“Sous-bois/printemps rose”
“Frühlingslandschaft”
“Frühlingslandschaft mit blühenden Ostbäumen”
“Frühling in Moret”

Markings

Usually, the ERR staff wrote or stenciled on the back of works it confiscated, especially paintings, the alpha-numeric code that they assigned to the items they catalogued at the Jeu de Paume. Those markings would have been the obvious tip-off that the painting had been stolen during the German occupation of Paris. Was the painting restretched, reframed? Were the markings erased?  If so, who would have stripped the painting down of obvious markings left by the ERR?

Sources:

Bundesarchiv, B323/277 Koblenz, Germany

209SUP 2, 209SUP 603, French Foreign Affairs Ministry Archives, La Courneuve, France

RG 260 M1943 Reel 12, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD

A Gurlitt painting waiting to be restituted: View of the Seine from the Pont-Neuf, by Camille Pissarro

by Marc Masurovsky

One of the paintings found in the infamous Salzburg Depot in Western Austria which were part of the art collection of the late Cornelius Gurlitt is a view of the Seine from the Pont-Neuf by Camille Pissarro. It turns out that this painting had been stolen from a safe deposit box owned by the late Max Heilbronn and his family after they had fled Paris. The painting turned out to be a perfect match with the one listed in documents illustrating the plundering ways of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg in France between the fall of 1940 and the summer of 1944.

The painting can also be found on page 257 of the Répertoire des biens spoliés en France as still missing.

Please find some of the relevant documents concerning this painting so that you can appreciate how the historical evidence comes together to demonstrate that a theft took place and restitution becomes the order of the day.

The ERR inventory list tells us that the late Max Heilbronn had an apartment at 1, Place de l'Alma and a safe deposit box at the Crédit commercial de France in Mont-de-Marsan, in southwestern France. The Devisenschutzkommando (DSK) sent agents down to the CCF to remove the Heilbronn collection from its safe and transferred it to the ERR in Paris. The removal took place before February 13, 1941.

The  ERR assigned to the painting the title of "Ansicht auf Paris, 1902" under the moniker of "Heilbronn 7."  A card was then created for this painting confirming that it had been officially processed and indexed at the Jeu de Paume, in Paris, a central sorting, cataloguing, displaying, and shipping point for cultural and artistic objects plundered in Paris, the neighboring regions and selected parts of France (Bordeaux region in particular and Nice). You can find more details on the ERR database.

The painting was placed on an easel and photographed.  The use of the easel is most closely identified with the Louvre annex where most objects were stored and which served as a glorified warehouse for the ERR art historians from which they would retrieve objects, bring them to the Jeu de Paume for processing and then return them to the Louvre where they awaited their fate.

Mrs. Tomforde completed the Heilbronn inventory in July 1942.  On October 31, 1942, the Pissaro view of Paris from the Pont-Neuf was subject to the 23rd exchange (Tausch) engineered by Bruno Lohse, deputy commander of the ERR plundering unit in Paris and Gustav Rochlitz, a German dealer based in the rue de Rivoli in Paris who came up with the concept of the exchanges and proposed them to Lohse as an efficient way of unloading "modernist" works in exchange for Old Masters more coveted by the Nazi hierarchy in Berlin.

At this point, the painting vanishes.  Since we know that Hildebrand Gurlitt, father of Cornelius Gurlitt, obtained the painting and that he traveled frequently to Paris, one should presume that Gurlitt acquired the Pissarro work in Paris either directly from Rochlitz or through a mutual acquaintance.

After the war ended, the Heilbronn heirs filed a claim with the French government and reported their cultural losses to the Commission de recuperation artistique (CRA) set up to investigate cultural losses and facilitate restitutions to rightful owners.

The painting only resurfaced in the spring of 2014 upon the discovery of the Salzburg Depot.

To view the work go to the website of the Kunstmuseum Bern and download the list for Salzburg.

Sources: Bundesarchiv Koblenz, B323; Ministere des affaires étrangères, La Courneuve, France, Fonds RA

At the National Gallery of Art with Paul Gauguin

Yellow Christ
Source: Humanities Web

Not everyone is a fan of Paul Gauguin, myself included. But his obsessive sense of esthetics concerning exotic women (read, Tahitian) blended with mystical Catholic religiosity from his days in Brittany can produce a haunting effect on the viewer, innocent, skeptical, or not.

The “Yellow Christ” is one special painting and stands out as one of my favorite works on the theme of crucifixion. Unique in its rendition of Jesus on the Cross, its paganism coupled with ecstatic pain and melancholy is riveting. Even more fascinating is the history of the painting.

Owned by Paul Rosenberg of Paris at least since the 1930s, the “Yellow Christ” ended up in Bordeaux for safekeeping in the face of the Nazi onslaught against Western Europe in the spring of 1940.

Unfortunately, Paul Rosenberg’s collection was a highly coveted prize to unscrupulous agents of the Reich and their dealer friends in Paris. By the spring of 1941, all that could be found in various depots across southwestern France which belonged to Paul Rosenberg was conveyed to Paris and ended up at the Jeu de Paume, including a haul of works found on a cargo ship as it left Bordeaux.

PR 49, "The Yellow Christ" by Paul Gauguin
Source: NARA via ERR Project

Gustav Rochlitz obtained the Gauguin work on the occasion of the 21st officially recorded exchange (Tausch) with the ERR staff at the Jeu de Paume. The exchange occurred on 24 July 1942. In exchange for the “Three Graces”, a lovely work attributed to the School of Fontainebleau, Rochlitz obtained the Gauguin painting (PR 49) and a painting by Henri Matisse (Unb 353). Both paintings were allegedly shipped to Rochlitz’s warehouse in Baden-Baden in June 1944. I say allegedly because, as it turns out, the Gauguin was located in Paris. As it turns out, Paul Pétridès sold it to the "Yellow Christ" to Raphael Gérard for one million francs on 8 December 1942. Two years later Gauguin's painting returned to Gérard, this time offered for three million francs to Gérard on 29 December 1944.

It was recovered and restituted in 1945, Paul Rosenberg agreed to sell it to the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, NY, in 1946. The story of the acquisition has a charming twist in that Andrew Ritchie, then director of the Albright-Knox, had been detailed as an art advisor with the US Forces European Theater (USFET) headquarters to ferret out looted collections and aid in their return to their countries of origin. Rosenberg sold the Gauguin to the Albright-Knox in recognition of Ritchie’s efforts on behalf of spoliated collectors such as himself.

The other twist to this story reflects the oft glaring inadequacies of art-historical knowledge regarding artists and their creative output. These lacunae have come back to haunt claimants in their quest for restitution of items attributed to specific artists. When they are particularly famous, like Gauguin or Klimt, the stakes are even higher as the value for the work can increase exponentially. In the case of the “Yellow Christ,” very few people in the art world then and now knew of the existence of a smaller version of the iconic painting.

The infamous art book publisher, Albert Skira, whose wartime activities have been less than honest, spread a rumor in spring of 1945 to the effect that Rosenberg’s painting was sitting in a bank safe in Geneva, Switzerland. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) launched an investigation in Switzerland and contacted a Gauguin expert, Dr. Lucas Lichtenban who worked at the Basler Kunsthalle. He reported that, indeed, there was a very small work on panel depicting the Yellow Christ (measuring 8 x 5 cm!) which had been in his Basel gallery back in 1928 and was sold to a London concern, Brown and Phillips, in 1932. However, OSS wanted to make sure that there was no link to Paul Rosenberg and the inquest went on, in vain.

Back to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. If you go see the Gauguin exhibit before June 5, 2011, please do so and linger in front of the “Yellow Christ.” Soak it in and ask yourself why on earth there is no explanatory text next to the painting which reflects its extraordinary saga through wartime France and its happy ending at the hands of the Albright-Knox in Buffalo, NY. Transparency does not require much effort, or does it?

ERR database—Raoul Meyer, Pissarro, Modigliani, Soutine

You can never be too careful. Thanks to the watchful eye of a museum curator in Indiana, the information in the Jeu de Paume database concerning the thefts in 1941 of Raoul Meyer’s collection from a safe in Mont-de-Marsan required a serious overhaul. The painting entered the Jeu de Paume on February 2, 1941.  The most egregious mistake was to have indicated as restituted a painting by Claude Pissarro, “La Bergère,” a small work which, as it turns out, hangs currently in the Fred Jones Museum of Norman, Oklahoma. There is no evidence that the painting was ever returned to Raoul Meyer as of 1947. The subject of one of numerous exchanges engineered by the likes of Gustav Rochlitz, the painting most likely ended up on the private art market in Switzerland from which it wended its way to the United States.  In fact, thanks to Swiss Federal documents, additional light can be shed on the fate of Meyer 13, or "La bergère rentrant ses moutons," by Claude Pissarro.

La bergère rentrant ses moutons, by Claude Pissarro 

Source: Fred Jones, Jr., Museum

Bauerin und Schafe am Hof eines Bauernhauses, Meyer 13/

Bundesarchiv, B323/278
Source: ERR Project via Bundesarchiv

Indeed, in a confidential report filed on March 6, 1998, by Pablo Crivelli of the Independent Committee of Experts on Switzerland during the Second World War (Commission indépendante d’experts: Suisse-Deuxième Guerre Mondiale), Crivelli details the difficulties in reconciling the evidence of plunder aimed at the Pissarro painting stolen from Raoul Meyer and the sparse documentation in the  possession of the Swiss Compensation Office (Office Suisse de Compensation) at the time that the loss was declared to the Swiss government.

Unbeknownst to Raoul Meyer and his lawyers, the Swiss Compensation Office (SCO) receives a tip that a man named Léon de Sépibus, who already enjoyed an unsavory reputation among Swiss commercial circles, had imported two paintings into Switzerland in late 1945, one of which was the Pissarro.  The SCO wrote several letters to de Sépibus asking him for information about the paintings and official documentation regarding their origin.  According to SCO officials, de Sépibus panicked, replied that he had re-exported the paintings to the United States shortly after their arrival in Switzerland.  Nevertheless, SCO staffers had recorded the two paintings imported by de Sépibus as worthy of additional inquiry.

It was not until spring of 1947 that the French Embassy in Bern began circulating to dozens of Swiss entities the French government's official listing of works and objects of art looted during the period of German occupation of France, also known as the "Répertoire des Biens Spoliés." Hence, in theory, the SCO could not have known prior to spring of 1947 that the Pissarro in the hands of de Sépibus might have been the Meyer painting stolen in France in early 1941.

The entire case burst forth into the open when Raoul Meyer files two lawsuits in 1952, one against de Sépibus and the other against a Swiss art dealer, Cristoph Bernoulli, who is identified as the current owner of the Pissarro painting.   The case dragged on well into 1953, where the SCO denied knowing anything of the looted nature of the painting, while Bernoulli argued his good faith regarding the Meyer painting.  It transpires that no one had questioned de Sépibus about discrepancies in his story as well as contacting the French Embassy in Bern in 1946 about the possible looted origin of the Pissarro in the hands of de Sépibus.

One way or another, the Swiss experts were not given access to the court records pertaining to the separate Raoul Meyer proceedings against Bernoulli and de Sépibus.  Hence, the shroud of uncertainty continues to hover over this small painting currently on display at the Fred Jones Museum in Norman, OK.

The correction to the Pissarro Meyer have required a complete review of this small but important collection of modernist works held by a man who co-owned with Max Heilbronn, another victim of the ERR’s plundering units, the famed ‘Galeries Lafayette’ department store on the right bank of Paris.

The Meyer case becomes more complicated due to a single work—a painting by Amédéo Modigliani entitled ‘La Porteuse de pain’. It shows up on several lists referred to as the ‘collection of Raoul Meyer’ dated April 1945 which serve as reference for the French restitution authorities at the Commission de recuperation artistique (CRA). There is no correspondence, there are no signatures, hence it is unclear who compiled the list.

The Jeu de Paume database identifies a painting as ‘Frau mit Brot’ with the designator Meyer 9. The ERR inventory does not assign an artist to that painting. However, a handwritten note most likely placed by postwar German authorities ascribes the painting to Modigliani. Thus, one can surmise that this addition to the ERR inventory can be explained by the fact that the Raoul Meyer list was sent to the German restitution authorities.

Meyer 9 Bild
Source: NARA via ERR Project

Meyer 9 Bild
Source: Bundesarchiv via ERR Project

Here’s the problem. The image linked in the Jeu de Paume database to the alleged Modigliani is not a painting by Modigliani, but it is by Chaim Soutine. It is a sister painting to his famous “Servante en bleu” which he painted in 1934. A quick check of the Soutine catalogue raisonné does not disclose the existence of the painting mis-attributed to Modigliani. The photo comes from the Koblenz archives in Germany and is tagged as Meyer 9. It would be easy to blame an archivist for not knowing the difference between a Soutine and a Modigliani, like apples and oranges. But to see the error reproduced on a quasi-official inventory of the Raoul Meyer collection is perplexing at best.

Thus, we are left wondering whether the alleged Modigliani which is in reality a Soutine is truly a painting that belongs to Raoul Meyer. If it is, let’s suppose for one nanosecond that he did own a Modigliani, did Modigliani paint a woman holding a loaf of bread? If anyone out there is a Modigliani expert, please express yourself. This is the time to do it!

The strange odyssey of Mme. Stumpf and her daughter

Madame Stumpf and Her Daughter
Source: NGA

The National Gallery of Washington in Washington, DC, holds more than a dozen paintings that were once looted by the Germans during World War II and have since been restituted to their rightful owners. One of those paintings is “Mme. Stumpf and her Daughter”, by Jean-Baptiste Corot, stolen from the Paris art dealer, Paul Rosenberg. The painting appears in his Floirac inventory as “Portrait de Mme. Stumph née Elisa Monet et sa fille” and bears his inventory number No. 623 and was painted in 1872.

According to Paul Rosenberg, he had stashed away this painting together with many others at a small château in a southwestern French town called Floirac-la Souys, in the district of the Gironde.

In his own words: “On September 18, 1940, a group of German gendarmes and policemen, accompanied by an expert from Paris, whose name I do not known, took possession of the paintings packed at Castel Floirac and loaded them in motor trucks.” The German gentlemen were part of so-called Geheime Feldpolizei units (GFP) working under orders of the German Embassy in Paris. In November 1940, the German Embassy was forced to cede to the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) all of the art objects that it had forcibly removed from Jewish owners who had fled France. The works were deposited at the Louvre and from there at the Jeu de Paume.

The ERR staff at the Jeu de Paume inventoried a segment of the Paul Rosenberg collection in three lots—Floirac (P.R.), Bordeaux (Rosenberg-Bernstein Bordeaux), and Paris (Rosenberg Paris). But, being the disorganized lot that they could be, the ERR staff comingled some of the works, not that it ultimately mattered. Hence, Mme. Stumpf ended up as Rosenberg-Bernstein Bordeaux Nr. 27 (“Mutter und Kind”), although the painting had not been seized in Bordeaux. Interestingly, the inventory was drawn up in 1942, a year after the painting had already been recycled on the Paris art market.

Rosenberg Bernstein-Bordeaux 27 Öl auf Leinwand
Source: NARA via ERR Project

“Mme. Stumpf and her daughter” was the subject of the first exchange of paintings between Hermann Goering and dealers such as Rochlitz who obtained it from Goering on 3 March 1941 as part of a lot of 11 Impressionist paintings. Rochlitz provided Goering with two Old Masters—one by Jan Weenix and another from Northern Italy. He turned around and provided it to a man named Zachariah Birtchansky. Together with his brother, Birtchansky operated from several addresses in Paris, including the rue Royale. Although of Jewish descent, the pair had established itself as art brokers on the Paris art scene for many years prior to the Second World War and had cultivated shady relationships with a number of unsavory pro-Nazi art dealers, especially Gustav Rochlitz, Hans Wendland, and Karl Haberstock.

Hans Wendland, characterized as the most prolific art dealing operator working for the Nazi government in Western Europe, paid a visit to Birtchansky in 1941 and left with Rosenberg’s Corot painting. He consigned the painting with several others from the Paul Rosenberg collection at a Swiss gallery named Fischer, whose owner was Theodor Fischer, and was based in Lucerne, Switzerland. Fischer, too willing to transact in works of dubious provenance, sold the painting to Dr. Raeber of Basel, another recipient of looted works from France.

The Corot painting was found, repatriated to France, and restituted to Paul Rosenberg.

Decades later, in 1965, Madame Stumpf and her daughter was in the hands of Alexandre Rosenberg, son of Paul Rosenberg, who had his own gallery in New York City not too far from East 79th Street and Madison Avenue. Alexandre’s claim to fame was to have been part of the French resistance unit that intercepted the infamous train of looted art that had left Paris on 1 August 1944, heading for Nikolsburg. To his great surprise, he discovered a great number of his father’s paintings on that train. Back to New York…

Eugene Thaw, the New York art expert, bought the painting from Rosenberg who sold it to Rudolf Heinemann, international man of mystery, close partner of Knoedler’s, and the brains behind the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection. Heinemann turned around and sold part interests in the painting to a number of collectors including Sir Geoffrey Agnew. Within months, Agnew had sold the painting to Ailsa Mellon Bruce for $275,000. Ironically, the transaction to Bruce had been the brainchild of John Walker, then director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, where the Corot masterpiece eventually ended up.