A Pissarro Settlement Seven Heirs Never Signed
In June 2024 Sotheby’s London sold Camille Pissarro’s Darse de pêche et bassin Duquesne, Dieppe, après-midi ensoleillée (1902) for £1.2 million. That was a bit below its £1.5–2.5 million estimate. The catalogue carried the now-familiar line: the work was “offered for sale pursuant to a settlement between the current owner and heirs of Salomon Flavian.” Settlements like this have become the ordinary way Nazi-era spoliation claims to privately held works get resolved at auction. The consignor gets clean title and the claimants get a share of the proceeds. The auction house gets to sell the picture.
Except that not everyone was at the table. As Vincent Noce reports in The Art Newspaper, seven of Flavian’s heirs appeared before a Paris court on September 18 and asked it to retrospectively cancel the sale and annul the contract behind it. Only two heirs, Gilles and Nicolas Flavian, signed the agreement with the seller. They were represented by Mondex, the Toronto restitution firm, and they waived all their rights. The other heirs say they were never consulted. They apparently found out in a Mondex letter dated October 17, 2024, nearly four months after the hammer fell, which offered them an 8% share of the net sale price. The same letter mentioned a 16% commission owed by the two signatories. Mondex’s founder James Palmer says the firm received no payment for the transaction. A decision is expected November 5.
Was it looted at all?
The provenance fight is the more interesting half of the case. Salomon Flavian was a Jewish banker whose Paris collection was seized in 1941. The painting appears in the Répertoire des biens spoliés, France’s 1947 register of property looted during the war. Sotheby’s own catalogue lists the Répertoire under literature, so nobody disputes that the entry exists.
The seller commissioned research from Mary Kate Cleary, who has since become curator of provenance at Princeton University Art Museum. She concluded the painting was not among the 45 works seized from Flavian in 1941. She found it on no Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) confiscation list. She also found that Paul Rosenberg’s archives, together with the 1939 Pissarro catalogue raisonné, point to a sale around 1938 to the British painter and collector Edward Le Bas. Mondex accepted that finding, which is a somewhat unusual position for a firm in the business of making claims. Palmer says it did so “in the interests of rigour and intellectual honesty.”
Corinne Hershkovitch, for the heirs, has several answers. Works were regularly scrubbed from ERR lists with the help of unscrupulous dealers. Rosenberg’s postwar notes are allegedly imprecise. The catalogue entry does not mention that Flavian had owned the painting since 1935. Rosenberg may simply have confused this Dieppe with another picture Le Bas bought. And its seems Cleary may have worked from Rosenberg’s archives without checking them against the Flavian family’s own papers.
They can’t both be right. Sotheby’s published provenance has the painting going from a 1935 Drouot sale to Flavian and then to Rosenberg “by 1937,” with no date for when it left Flavian. That undated step is the whole case. The Répertoire is an important document, but it was compiled largely from owners’ own postwar declarations, made in chaos and grief, and it has errors in it. A 1939 catalogue predates the seizures, and that counts for something. But dealers’ stock books are not neutral records either.
A couple of tangents
The first is that the archive doing the most work for the seller belongs to Paul Rosenberg. He was one of the most celebrated dealers in Paris and was himself among the ERR’s biggest victims after he fled to New York in 1940. The 1939 catalogue raisonné by Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro and Lionello Venturi was published by Rosenberg’s own gallery. So the records of one looting victim dealer are now being used to show that a looted victim banker’s painting was never looted. Nobody has suggested Rosenberg did anything improper here. Still, it shows how much of our knowledge of this period rests on a handful of dealers’ paperwork.
The second is that the provenance runs through David Rockefeller, by way of Sam Salz, before ending up in the Dreitzer estate and a 1985 Sotheby’s New York sale. The painting was exhibited at the Tate in 1952 and the Met in 1966. It is a reminder that “hiding in plain sight” is the normal condition for works like this, and that no one apparently raised the Répertoire entry for decades.
The fee question, again
Readers with long memories may recall the Bermann-Fischer Pissarro I wrote about years ago. Gisela Bermann-Fischer found her family’s painting in a Zurich vault, and the fight over what the experts who helped find it should be paid ended with Jonathan Petropoulos resigning from Claremont McKenna amid extortion allegations. The Art Loss Register had proposed a sliding scale of 20% of the first million and less above that. I said then that money is a key focus of restitution, and the Flavian case is that point in a new form. Here the money question isn’t how much the intermediary takes. It is whether an intermediary acting for two heirs can bind a family it never spoke to, and then offer the others a fixed percentage after the sale. If French law treats the claim as belonging to all the heirs jointly, it is hard to see how two of them could settle it alone. If the painting was never looted, there was no claim to settle, and the settlement was simply insurance the seller bought to make the picture marketable.
Can Paris undo a London sale?
Sotheby’s also argues that a French court has no business ruling on a sale made in London between two clients with “no relationship with France.” Since Brexit, the EU’s Brussels I bis rules no longer sort out jurisdiction between France and the UK, so the Paris court will I think apply its own rules. And even a French annulment would still have to be enforced against a buyer whose identity hasn’t been reported and a painting that may be anywhere. The French courts have not been shy about Nazi-era claims. In the Bauer case, another Pissarro, La Cueillette des pois, was seized while on loan to the Musée Marmottan. Its American owners, who bought in good faith, lost it under the 1945 ordinance voiding acts of spoliation, and the Cour de cassation upheld that in 2020. But Bauer involved a painting physically in Paris. This one sold in London to an unnamed buyer.
That leaves a lot to watch on November 5. Will the court even reache the merits? Are the heirs proceeding under the 1945 ordinance or on ordinary contract and succession principles? How will a judge weigh a 1947 government register against a dealer’s catalogue from 1939?
Pissarro must be among the most litigated artists in restitution law. Cassirer, Bauer, Bermann-Fischer, and the University of Oklahoma’s Shepherdess all turned on a Pissarro. I can only speculate about why, but a few reasons might be: First, he was prolific. There are simply more of them out there to be lost and later found. Second, his collectors; many were the assimilated Jewish families of Paris, Berlin and Vienna whose collections were seized or sold under duress after 1933. Third, the money; a Pissarro is valuable enough to justify years of litigation, but not so famous that it couldn’t pass quietly through the postwar market. And finally, he liked to paint in series. He returned to the same harboror bridge again and again, in different weather and light. A wartime claim form or a dealer’s stock book that says “Pissarro, port of Dieppe, 1902” could describe several canvases, and the heirs here argue that is exactly what happened with Rosenberg’s records.
Why so many fights now? Part of it is that the evidence is easier to get at. The ERR card files, the Répertoire and dealers’ archives like Rosenberg’s are all searchable now in ways they weren’t a generation ago, so a listing that sat unread for decades can surface with a few keystrokes. Part of it is the auction houses themselves, which now want a settlement in hand before a flagged work goes on the block. And part of it is simple arithmetic. Eighty-five years on, a claim belongs to grandchildren and great-grandchildren scattered across several countries, which is exactly the situation that produced two signatories and seven plaintiffs here.
Whatever the court decides, it has a lesson for the settlement model the market depends on: a deal that gives clean title is only as good as the list of heirs who signed it.
Vincent Noce, Was this Pissarro painting—sold at Sotheby’s in 2024—looted by Nazis? A Paris court deliberates, The Art Newspaper (Sept. 24, 2026), https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/09/24/was-this-pissarro-paintingsold-at-sothebys-in-2024looted-by-nazis-a-paris-court-deliberates.
Camille Pissarro, Darse de pêche et bassin Duquesne, Dieppe, après-midi ensoleillée, Lot 49, Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction, Sotheby’s London (June 25, 2024), https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2024/modern-contemporary-evening-auction-including-the-ralph-i-goldenberg-collection/darse-de-peche-et-bassin-duquesne-dieppe-apres (last visited Oct. 1, 2026).
Heirs of a Jewish Collector Contest Sotheby’s Sale of a Pissarro Painting Possibly Looted by Nazis, ARTnews, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/heirs-jewish-collector-sothebys-sale-pissarro-nazi-looted-1234799464/ (last visited Oct. 1, 2026).
Bureau central des restitutions, Répertoire des biens spoliés en France durant la guerre 1939-1945 (1947), digitised by the French Ministry of Culture, Accès au Répertoire, https://www.culture.gouv.fr/rechercher-une-publication-du-ministere-de-la-culture/bases-de-donnees/mnr-historique-de-la-publication/acces-au-repertoire (last visited Oct. 1, 2026);
Répertoire des biens spoliés en France pendant la Guerre 1939-1945, Lootedart.com, https://www.lootedart.com/MFEU4B37276 (last visited Oct. 1, 2026).
Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com