The Musée d’Orsay has confirmed that it is the custodian of the four works. The two drawings are kept in the graphic art cabinet of the Louvre.
The Paris administrative court on Friday ordered the French state to return two paintings and two drawings by Gauguin, Renoir and Cézanne, which disappeared at the end of the Second World War, to the heirs of art dealer Ambroise Vollard.
These works, “Marine: Guernsey” (painting) and “Le jugement de Paris” (drawing) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, “Nature morte à la mandoline” (painting) by Paul Gauguin and “Sous-bois” (drawing) by Paul Cézanne, had disappeared in troubled circumstances along with three other paintings – “Roses in a Vase” and “Les grandes baigneuses” by Renoir and “Tête de vieillard” by Cézanne – during the Second World War, following the dispersal of the estate of the art dealer, who died in 1939.
Request from the beneficiaries
The two experts commissioned for the estate allegedly misappropriated the works with the complicity of one of the art dealer’s brothers in order to sell them in Germany, where they were found at the end of the war, the court said.
The beneficiaries of Ambroise Vollard’s estate had asked the French Museums Directorate and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the return of these seven works classified in the MNR (National Museums Recovery) register, created to ensure the safekeeping of works looted in France during the Second World War and found outside France.
Following a procedure based on complex jurisprudence, the State refused to return four of them in 2018, a decision which the rightful claimants had asked to be annulled. Once the ownership of the works was confirmed in 2022 by the Paris court and the court of cassation, the administrative court ruled on Friday that the state had “wrongly” refused to return them to their rightful owners.
This decision can still be appealed to the Paris administrative court of appeal.
