Pissarro's Hoar-Frost, returned to Gaston Lévy's heirs

Camille Pissarro’s Gelée blanche, jeune paysanne faisant du feu, which the Museum Barberini calls Hoar-Frost, Peasant Girl Making a Fire, shows a cold winter morning and a young peasant at a fire. He painted it in 1887 and 1888 in the small dots of colour of Neo-Impressionism, and dated it 1888. It is an oil on canvas of 92.8 by 92.5 centimetres, signed at the lower right.

The dealer Durand-Ruel bought it from the artist in April 1888, and it was shown in Brussels with the Cercle des XX in 1889. In June 1927 the Paris collector Gaston Lévy acquired it. Around October 1940, Sotheby’s says, the Nazi agency Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, known as the ERR, seized it. The Museum Barberini likewise records that Nazi authorities confiscated it.

In June 1943 it was moved to the Jeu de Paume in Paris. It was later stored at Schloss Kogl in Austria, and the Allied Munich Central Collecting Point received it on 21 March 1946. On 25 September 1947 it was returned to the French state.

Then the trail breaks. The French Ministry of Culture says the painting disappeared in circumstances still unknown, so it could not be restituted or entered in the list of recovered works held by the national museums. Sotheby’s and the Museum Barberini list a transfer by the state to a private owner in 1949 and a confiscation by French customs in 1988. The ministry says the painting was recovered in a customs seizure. It was assigned to the Musée d’Orsay in 2000. The sources consulted do not explain why the state transferred it in 1949.

On 26 July 2018 the ministry announced that this painting and a Signac had been returned to Lévy’s heirs, whom their counsel and agent Agnès Sevestre-Barbé represented. The ministry credits research by the museum services, the Musée d’Orsay and the diplomatic archives, with documents from the heirs, for making the restitution possible.

Sotheby’s offered the painting in London on 4 February 2020, one of three restituted works in its evening sale. It was lot 11, with an estimate of 8 million to 12 million pounds, which the house gives without the buyer’s premium. The Museum Barberini records that it sold there. The sources consulted do not give the price. The painting now belongs to the Hasso Plattner Collection at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, where the museum shows it.