Camille Pissarro painting belongs to heirs

A Paris appeals court upheld a ruling yesterday ordering an American couple to return a Camille Pissarro painting to the descendants of a Jewish family who owned the artwork before it was seized during the Second World War. The couple, Philadelphia collectors Bruce and Robbi Toll, loaned Pissarro’s La Cueillette des Pois (Picking Peas), pictured, to a Paris museum for an exhibition last year. But the painting from the impressionist master was placed in temporary escrow after one of the heirs of the family recognised it and sued to get it back. The Tolls, also Jewish, said they did not know when they bought the Pissarro that it had been stolen by France’s war-era Vichy regime from Jewish collector Simon Bauer. The lawyer representing Bauer’s descendants, Cedric Fischer, said the ruling “sanctions the right of the victims of acts of barbarity committed by the Vichy regime to recover, without limit of duration, the goods they have been disposed of”. A civil court last year ruled that the Tolls did not act in bad faith when they bought the painting from Christie’s auction house more than two decades ago. But it said that sales of all goods looted from Jewish people by the French Vichy regime or its Nazi allies during the war were declared void by France’s post-war authorities in 1945. Judges awarded no compensation to the couple, who bought the painting for $800,000 (Dh2.938 million) in 1995.