“The Harvest” (1887) by Camille Pissarro

While several decades have passed since the end of WWII, there have been many claims in more recent years to restitute artworks looted during the Nazi regime.

Among these, the 2017 restitution lawsuit in a French court of one of such artworks attracted a lot of interest. It involved Impressionist painting The Harvest, painted by Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) in 1887. The Harvest (a.k.a. La Cueillette des Pois) originally belonged to Jewish businessman Simon Bauer. It was confiscated during the war along with 92 other pieces from the Bauer collection in order to be resold by an art dealer appointed by the Vichy Jewish Affairs Commission. Simon Bauer was supposed to be sent to a camp in Drancy but thanks to a railway strike managed to escape deportation. After being released, he actively tried to find the paintings from his collection, but only managed to recover a small part before his death in 1947. Since then, his descendants have been looking for the rest of it for decades.

In 1965, a first lead helped them find the traces of two paintings (including The Harvest), which were about to be sold. The Bauer family tried to prevent the sale with no success: after seizing the painting, the judge finally ordered to lifting the seizure and gave the right of property of the artworks to an American dealer, who transferred them to London where The Harvest was put on sale by Sotheby’s in 1966. From then on, the Bauer family lost sight of the painting until Simon Bauer’s grandson found The Harvest fifty years later in 2017 Pissarro monographic exhibition “The First of the Impressionists” at the Marmottan Monet Museum in Paris. He discovered the work had been loaned to the Museum by an American couple who had purchased it at a 1995 auction sale at Christie’s in New York for $880,000.

The Bauer family filed a new claim for restitution in France. As The Harvest was physically kept in France, the judgment was to be made within the French law. The Museum kept the artwork until the end of the exhibition on July 2, after which date it was placed in the Musée d’Orsay Museum and then in the Musée de l’Orangerie as the trial went on. Bauer based his restitution claim on an ordinance from 1945 which declares the nullity of purchases after an act of spoliation, regardless of how much time has passed. This was decisive in the final decision given by the French High Court and Court of Appeal. On July 1, 2020, the Court of Cassation finally confirmed The Harvest should belong and be returned to the Bauer family, ending three years of legal debate.

In 2021, the Bauer family put the painting on sale at Sotheby’s. With an estimation between 1.2 and 1.8 million euros, it was finally sold for 3.3 million euros. For Simon Bauer’s grandson, the successful restitution case of The Harvest was mainly a victory for his family: “It’s not its financial value which matters to me, it’s what it symbolizes. It represents a defining part of my life”.

Source: Pandora Langlais, The Restitution of La Cueillette des Pois by Camille Pissarro, 2022, Ecole du Louvre