Courbet's La Ronde Enfantine, returned from Cambridge

On 5 May 1941, two members of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the Nazi task force that seized art in occupied Europe, took a painting from a flat at 8/10 rue Oswaldo Cruz in Paris. The flat belonged to Robert Bing, a Jewish citizen of France. Bing’s own later claim says he had fled before the Germans reached Paris, and that they occupied the flat from 9 September 1940. The painting was a small Courbet of children dancing in a dark forest lit by sun, signed at lower left, about 67 by 52.5 centimetres.

Gustave Courbet painted it about 1862 at Saintes, in western France. Its first known owner was Etienne Baudry, his local patron. The path from Baudry to the Bing family is not documented. Bing’s claimants argued that his maternal grandmother, Clara Ballin, probably bought it. Their evidence was indirect, and the Fitzwilliam Museum found nothing on where the painting was in those years.

The seizure is a finding, not a recorded fact. The Spoliation Advisory Panel, a UK government advisory body, decided on the balance of probability that the Nazi file entry for a signed “Waldlandschaft” of the same size was this painting. It found a deliberate seizure, with no reason other than Bing being Jewish. The painting was then held at the Jeu de Paume in Paris for the collection of Hermann Goering, a Nazi leader who died in 1946. The Panel says Goering proposed a swap involving the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, but that Ribbentrop or his wife disliked the picture and it did not go ahead. The Art Newspaper, reading a US Army report in 2022, took the swap to have happened. The Panel’s version is the one used here.

Its route after the war is unknown. The museum suggested that Allied soldiers recovered it at Berchtesgaden. The claimants disagreed. In 1951 it surfaced in the art trade. André Schoeller, a French expert, certified it as a Courbet on 10 January. On 1 May the London dealers Arthur Tooth and Sons bought it from Kurt Meissner, a Zurich dealer. No source records a charge against either man. On 19 November, Tooth sold it to Eric Milner-White, the Dean of York, who gave it to the Fitzwilliam in memory of his father. The Panel found that he and the museum acted properly. Milner-White was not accused of anything.

The museum learned of a claim in July 2021. On 22 October 2021, the law firm Pinsent Masons wrote on behalf of Mondex Corporation, a firm that helps families recover Nazi-looted art. A key document was an inventory that Bing signed in April 1948. It lists an unframed Courbet in his small salon, and the Panel took it to show that Bing, not his mother, owned the painting. The claimants say Bing joined the French Resistance, was arrested, and was freed from a Lyon hospital on 8 January 1944. He died in 1993. His post-war compensation, paid in 1961, names no artwork, and the Panel did not reduce its advice because of it.

The Panel reported on 28 March 2023. It recommended that the Fitzwilliam return the painting to Mondex Corporation on behalf of the heirs of Robert Bing. It said this was no criticism of the museum. The Fitzwilliam said on 29 March that it would follow the advice.

No source consulted for this entry gives the date of the handover or says where the painting is now. The museum’s online record still listed it in storage on 22 October 2026. No source reports a sale.