On the right, Camille Pissarro’s “Rue Saint-Honoré, Afternoon, Effect of Rain.” On the left, the painting is seen hanging in the parlor of the family from whom the Nazis looted the impressionist masterwork (images via court filing).
A family once forced to give up their impressionist masterpiece in order to escape Nazi Germany suffered a major legal loss Tuesday when a federal appeals court ruled in favor of the Madrid art museum seeking to keep the looted painting.
The painting
The work at issue is “Rue Saint-Honoré in the Afternoon, Effect of Rain,” a Paris streetscape by impressionist master Camille Pissarro. The painting is one in a series of fifteen works that Pissarro painted from the window of his hotel in the Place du Théâtre Français during the winter of 1897 and 1898. It is now valued at approximately $40 million.
Pissarro was an early Danish-French Impressionist painter who has been credited by some as beginning the art movement that would come to include Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, and many others. In 1900, visionary art agent Paul Durand-Ruel sold Pissarro’s “Rue Saint-Honoré, Afternoon, Rain Effect” to Paul Cassirer, a prominent German-Jewish art dealer who was a key promoter of the works of Vincent van Gogh.
In 1926, Cassirer shot himself during divorce proceedings with his wife, stage actor Tilla Durieux, then died a few hours later. Upon Cassirer’s death, his sole living relative, Lilly Cassirer, inherited the Pissaro and displayed it in her home. Lilly was forced by the Nazis to “sell” the painting for 900 reichsmarks — approximately $360 — in 1939 in exchange for an exit visa to England.
Lilly sought safety in the U.S. and the painting was believed lost. In 1954, the U.S. Court of Restitution recognized Lilly’s loss. She was thereafter awarded $13,000 in compensation from the German Federal Republic.
