Wheatstacks, the Van Gogh watercolour two families claimed

In late 1938 the German industrialist Max Meirowsky fled Germany. Christie’s says he left a Van Gogh watercolour with Paul Graupe and Company, an émigré dealership then working in Paris. He had owned the picture for twenty-five years. What happened to it next became a dispute that was settled only in 2021.

The watercolour is Wheatstacks (Meules de blé), painted at Arles in June 1888. The Art Newspaper says Van Gogh sent it to his brother Theo about a week later, and that the collector Gustave Fayet bought it in 1907. Christie’s says Meirowsky acquired it in 1913 at Galerie Druet in Paris.

The next owner was Alexandrine de Rothschild, who had a collection in Paris. The Art Newspaper says she bought the watercolour there and left for Switzerland when the Second World War began. Christie’s says the Nazi regime confiscated her collection during the Occupation, and that she did not recover this work afterwards. According to The Art Newspaper, the watercolour was seized in 1941 and held at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris. A few weeks later it was sent to Schloss Kogl in Austria.

After 1945 the trail goes quiet. The Art Newspaper calls the immediate postwar history unclear. It places the watercolour with the Wildenstein gallery in New York in 1978, and says the Texas oilman Edwin Cox bought it there in 1979. Cox hung it in his Dallas house, and his ownership stayed secret.

By 2021 three sides had an interest in it: the Cox collection, Meirowsky’s heir and the heirs of Alexandrine de Rothschild. Meirowsky’s heir described the 1938 handover as a forced sale. The Rothschild heirs argued that the work was looted in 1941. The sources we have seen report no ruling on either claim, and they do not say which account the parties accepted.

Instead the parties reached a settlement, in a negotiation that JTA says Christie’s helped to arrange. The terms are confidential, although press reports say the proceeds were divided between the Cox estate and the heirs of Meirowsky and Rothschild. The watercolour sold at Christie’s in New York on 11 November 2021. The Art Newspaper reported 35.5 million dollars including the buyer’s premium; JTA gave 35,855,000 dollars and did not say whether the premium was included. Both describe a record for a Van Gogh work on paper. The sources do not say who owns it now.