The First Art Newspaper on the Net
by Doreen Carvajal
(NYT NEWS SERVICE)
.- For more than 70 years, Léone Meyers family has fought to reclaim a looted painting, and yet she cannot bear the thought of displaying it in her Left Bank home, across from the River Seine. The small work, by Camille Pissarro, shows a shepherdess tending her flock, and hangs not far away at the Musée dOrsay, with other precious French impressionist paintings. But the peaceful countryside scene from 1886 is fraught with a backstory of plunder, family tragedy and legal battles that stretch from Paris to Oklahoma. Meyers mother, grandmother, uncle and brother died in Auschwitz. Her father hid the painting in a French bank that was looted in 1941 by the Nazis, and the work vanished in the murky universe of art market collaborators and middlemen. Decades later, in 2012, she discovered the whereabouts of La Bergère, or Shepherdess Bringing in Sheep, in the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, at th
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.