A Pissarro gouache returned to the heirs of Simon Bauer

In October 1943, in occupied Paris, the collector Simon Bauer lost his paintings. The Commissariat général aux questions juives, the Vichy regime’s office for Jewish affairs, had his collection confiscated. Euronews and franceinfo count 93 pictures. One was La récolte des pois, a gouache on paper that Camille Pissarro made in 1887, 53.7 by 64.5 centimetres. Sotheby’s dates the confiscation of this painting to 13 October 1943. The University of Geneva’s case record gives 1 October, so the exact day is not settled.

Bauer had acquired the picture around 1930. Sotheby’s traces it back through the dealers Paul Rosenberg and Georges Bernheim to Theo van Gogh, to whom the artist consigned it in Paris in 1887. On 7 April 1944 it was sold, through an intermediary the commissariat had appointed, to a buyer named Jane Eudeline. Bauer was held at Drancy and survived. A Paris court declared the sale void on 8 November 1945, but the painting was not given back. The Geneva record says an appeal court confirmed that judgment in 1951, yet the painting still did not come back to him. Franceinfo reports that Bauer died in 1947 with only a small part of his collection recovered.

The painting next appears in the dealer David B. Findlay’s hands in New York, then Daniel Maggin’s. In 1995 it sold at Christie’s New York to Bruce and Robbi Toll of Philadelphia. Franceinfo reports that the Tolls said they knew nothing of its history. In 2017 they lent it to the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris for a Pissarro exhibition. Members of the Bauer family saw it there, and a court placed it under sequestration, a legal hold, in May 2017.

On 7 November 2017 a Paris court ordered the painting returned to Bauer’s heirs. Euronews reports that the judge found the Tolls had not acted in bad faith but held the sale void all the same, and awarded them no compensation. The appeal court upheld the order on 2 October 2018. On 1 July 2020 the Cour de cassation, France’s highest court for civil cases, rejected the Tolls’ appeal. Citing the ordinance of 21 April 1945 on wartime spoliation, it held that later buyers cannot become lawful owners, even in good faith. The Tolls’ lawyer said they would take the matter to the European Court of Human Rights.

Sotheby’s offered the painting in Paris on 25 March 2021 as lot 8, described as restituted to the heirs of Simon Bauer. The estimate was 1.2 million to 1.8 million euros. Sotheby’s later listed it among its top ten sales of 2018 to the first half of 2023, at 4 million dollars. That page does not say whether the figure includes the buyer’s premium, and the sources consulted do not name the buyer.