A Guardi sold at Nice in 1943, restituted in 2005

On 12 and 13 July 1943, the contents of a villa on the Promenade des Anglais were sold at the Hôtel Savoy in Nice. The villa had belonged to John and Anna Jaffé, collectors who lived in the English community in the city. Christie’s says the wartime French government at Vichy seized the house and its collection, and that the sale was a forced auction. It was ordered by the Commissariat aux questions juives, the Vichy office that ran anti-Jewish policy. Anna Jaffé had died in 1942. John Jaffé died earlier, in 1933 according to the Getty and in 1934 according to Christie’s.

One of the pictures sold was a small canvas by Francesco Guardi, painted about 1768. It shows the Grand Canal in Venice with the Palazzo Bembo. The Getty Museum says members of the Bembo family appear on the upper balcony and were probably the patrons. Its record says the first owner may have been Carlo Spinola, Marchese di Rocca Forte. John Jaffé owned the picture from the 1880s, and it passed to Anna Jaffé.

The sources differ on the date of the seizure. The Getty dates the looting to 1942. Christie’s dates the seizure and the sale to 1943. Neither explains the gap. The Getty says the Guardi was lot 99 in Nice and was bought by a Mrs. Bonfils. It gives no first name and no price.

The Getty record then says the picture was sold through Hildebrand Gurlitt, a German art dealer, to the Führermuseum in 1944. That was Hitler’s planned museum at Linz, in Austria. Christie’s agrees that the Guardi was chosen for Linz. Its restitution director said in 2011 that an album of paintings for Linz, shown to Hitler, held a photograph of this one. The sources do not say how the picture passed from Mrs. Bonfils to Gurlitt.

In 1945 the painting was found at Altaussee, in Austria, and taken to the Munich Central Collecting Point, the Allied depot for recovered art. It went to the French government in 1946 and was given the inventory number MNR 286. The Office des Biens privés assigned it to the Louvre in 1950. In 1952 it was lent to the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse, in exchange for the return to the Louvre of another Guardi, The Departure of the Bucintoro.

On 17 May 2005 the French state, through its Foreign Ministry, restituted the painting to the Jaffé heirs. The Toulouse museum records that this was done in view of a sale at Christie’s. The family had recovered it after more than sixty years.

Christie’s offered it in London on 8 July 2005, in its Important Old Master Pictures sale, as lot 48. artnet reports that it sold for 4,376,000 pounds, or $7,605,488, to the J. Paul Getty Museum. Antiques and the Arts and a Christie’s press release of 2007 give the same dollar figure. Another outlet gives $7,745,000. None of the sources says whether the sterling price includes the buyer’s premium. The Getty’s own record gives no price. The painting is now in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, accession number 2005.41.