BBC News
By Lucy Williamson
image captionParis under occupation: Nazi Germany controlled the French capital from June 1940
Eighty years ago, Nazi officers entered a local bank in a sleepy corner of south-west France, and raided a safe deposit box there.
Hidden inside, they found a stack of artworks, including a painting by Impressionist artist Camille Pissarro, showing a shepherdess bathed in warm light greeting her flock.
image copyrightPatrice Schmidt/Musée d Orsay
The painting had been hidden there by a Jewish couple, Raoul and Yvonne Meyer, the heirs of famous French department store Galeries Lafayette. It was 1941, and France had already been under German control for a year. The Pissarro canvas disappeared into Nazi custody.
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Last modified on Mon 15 Feb 2021 03.50 EST A French woman is being threatened with multi-million-dollar fines by a US court if she continues a legal battle to retrieve a Pissarro painting the Nazis stole from her adoptive father.
The legal tussle over La Bergère Rentrant des Moutons
(Shepherdess Bringing in Sheep), completed by Camille Pissarro in 1886 and worth an estimated €1.5m (£1.3m), is between Léone-Noëlle Meyer, 81, a former president of the Galeries Lafayette department store, and Oklahoma University’s Fred Jones Jr Museum of Art, which was gifted the painting by a local family.
It is currently hanging in Paris’s Musée d’Orsay but is due to return to Oklahoma later this year under an agreement to share the work, which Meyer is contesting.
Camille Pissarro’s La Bergère Rentrant des Moutons (or The Shepherdess Bringing in Sheep) (1886)
The renewed tussle over a Nazi-looted painting by Camille Pissarro, which the former owner’s heir agreed to share with an Oklahoma museum then later changed her mind, will now move to mediation, following a Paris court’s order on Tuesday.
The fresh negotiations about the fate of
Shepherdess Bringing in Sheep (1885), now hanging at the Musee d’Orsay, will need to be quick, however, since the court plans to consider the merits of the case on 19 January. And if the two sides cannot reach a new agreement, the Paris court will decide what will happen to the painting starting on 2 March.