The Sisley sold by a dealer fleeing Paris

In March 1941, Grégoire Schusterman left Paris. He was a Russian-born Jewish art dealer with a gallery on the avenue Kléber, and the French Ministry of Culture says he went to escape the Nazi occupation and persecution by the Vichy regime, the wartime French government. He had to sell paintings to support himself. One of them was a Sisley.

Alfred Sisley painted Vue d’un port, les péniches around 1870. It is an oil on canvas, about 68.5 by 100 centimetres, signed at the lower left. The French state’s recovery database says it was shown at the Galerie Fiquet in Paris in 1926 and belonged to the English collector Charles Pearson. The sources do not say when Schusterman acquired it.

The database records that he sold it on 1 March 1941 to another Paris dealer, Raphaël Gérard, for 170,000 francs. Gérard sold it on to Maria Gillhausen, a dealer in Munich. The database gives more than one possible date for that second sale and does not settle it. It also notes that a copy of the invoice carries a remark that the sale was made on the orders of Adolf Wüster, a cultural attaché at the German embassy in Paris.

After the war the painting turned up at Traben-Trarbach, in the Rhineland, in the house of a relative of Gillhausen. In October 1948 it was taken to the Allied collecting point at Baden-Baden, a depot for recovered art. France assigned it to the Louvre in 1950, deposited it at the château-musée in Dieppe in 1954 and placed it with the Musée d’Orsay in 1986. The database lists it as MNR 206, the number given to recovered works the state keeps for their owners, and classes it as a work that was definitely looted.

Schusterman’s heirs filed a claim in 2022. The ministry says the commission for the compensation of victims of spoliation, the state body that reviews such claims, found that the 1941 sale was forced and recommended restitution. The sources date that opinion differently: the ministry cites a session of 17 November 2023, the database 31 January 2024. The Prime Minister approved restitution on 11 April 2024, and the painting was handed back at the ministry on 16 May 2024.

The heirs chose Sotheby’s to sell it. It was offered in Paris on 18 October 2024 as lot 115 of the Modernités sale, with an estimate of 800,000 to 1,200,000 euros. The sources consulted give no result for the sale and do not name a buyer.