Couple ordered to surrender Pissarro stolen by Nazis

American art historians to appeal against ruling after France seizes painting they lent to Parisian museum

A FRENCH court yesterday ordered an American couple to return a painting by Camille Pissarro, the Impressionist master, to the heirs of the Jewish collector from whom it was looted by the Nazis. Bruce and Robbi Toll bought the 1887 gouache Picking Peas in good faith, paying £600,000 at auction in New York 22 years ago.

During a bitter legal battle, Mr Toll, 74, said he was unaware that the work, now worth millions of pounds, had been seized during the Second World War from Simon Bauer, who made his fortune in the shoe industry.

Jean-jacques Bauer, his grandson, 87, argued that the couple must have known because they had claimed to be specialists and the painting was included in an official list of artworks looted during the occupation.

Ron Soffer, their lawyer, said: “They are not experts, art historians. Nowhere was it written in the auction catalogue that the painting had been confiscated.”

The Bauer family spotted an opportunity to recover the painting when they learned this year that the Tolls had lent it to the Marmottan museum in Paris for a Pissarro retrospective. They secured a court order to keep it in France until the case could be heard. French courts have previously annulled the sales of art and property looted from Jews by the Nazis.

Mr Soffer said it was the first time since the Sixties that a court had ordered private collectors to return a looted artwork. All other cases related to museums or public institutions.

The Tolls, he said, had no inkling that it was one of 93 works stolen from Bauer in 1943 by officials of France’s wartime Vichy government. A year later Bauer was sent to the Drancy internment camp near Paris and the painting was sold to a private dealer.

The couple will appeal against the decision, Mr Soffer said. “They do not consider that it is up to them to pay for the crimes of the Vichy regime.”

He added the Bauer family had been compensated by the French state and that was just.

Bauer was released in September 1944 and began looking for his collection, recovering only a small part before he died in 1947. His family kept up the search, but lost track of Picking Peas for half a century. In 1965 they heard that it had been sold under the counter with another painting. It later emerged that it had been sold again at Sotheby’s in London in 1966.

In a landmark case and after a prolonged legal battle with Austria’s Belvedere museum, five masterpieces by Gustav Klimt were returned in 2006 to the descendants of the Jewish family from whom they were seized.

About 100,000 of an estimated 650,000 artworks stolen by the Nazis in the war are still missing.