French court upholds return of Vichy-looted painting to family of Jewish collector

PARIS, France — An American couple loses their bid today to win back a painting by Impressionist master Camille Pissarro, as a French court confirms it must be handed to the family of the Jewish collector it was looted from during World War II.

Wealthy art collectors Bruce and Robbi Toll had launched an appeal after a court ruled in November that the painting belonged by rights to the descendants of Simon Bauer, a Jewish businessman disappropriated by the Nazis in 1943.

The Tolls insisted they had no idea the painting, “La Cueillette” (“Picking Peas”), had been looted when they bought it at Christie’s in New York in 1995 for $800,000.

But the Paris appeals court rules Tuesday that the original court decision stands, in a move hailed by the Bauer family.

The ruling “gives victims of the savagery committed by the Vichy government the right to recover their looted possessions, without a time limit,” their lawyer Cedric Fischer says in a statement.

The Vichy regime, France’s anti-Semitic wartime government which collaborated with the Nazis, seized 93 paintings from Bauer. The wealthy businessman narrowly escaped death when a train drivers’ strike stopped him from being sent to a concentration camp. Bauer recovered a few of his paintings after the war, but never La Cueillette, which Pissarro had painted in gouache in 1887.

— AFP