Now that
Roses Under the Trees (1905), the only painting by Gustav Klimt in a French national museum, is due to be restituted from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris to the heirs of Viennese Jews whom the Nazis robbed, eyes are on another Klimt landscape painting believed to be in France:
Apple Tree II (1916), returned to the wrong family 20 years ago after it was confused for
Roses Under the Trees, and now held by billionaire Bernard Arnault.
Apple Tree II was owned by Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt, the daughter of Erich and Serena Lederer, from a family of Jewish distillers, before the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938. Many of the Lederers’ paintings were seized and major works by Klimt were destroyed in 1945, including another possible arboreal landscape