This is the story of 2 families, a remarkably valuable art trove and a righting of history’s wrongs. And it’s about how the Deutsch de la Meurthe drawings finally made their way back home
Share to linkedinDark CapitalIt took a random police check, a rare voluntary surrender and nearly 80 years to recover four drawings connected to a possible billion-dollar collection hidden away by Hitler’s art dealer.ike thousands of other Jewish families throughout Europe, the Deutsch de la Meurthe family desperately fled their Paris home to escape the Nazi forces marching toward the city during World War II.
In the late 1890s, Henry purchased four drawings by little-known artists to furnish his home: two portraits and two landscapes, two in tones of brown, one in color and one in black and white. There were two drawings by 18th-century French artist Charles Dominique Joseph Eisen, Augustin de Saint Aubin’s “Portrait of a Lady in Profile,” and a self-portrait by Anne Vallayer-Coster, a female painter who counted Marie Antoinette as a patron.
With the Deutsch de la Meurthes gone, the mansion was transformed into a residence for the head of the occupation forces. Georgette returned to Paris from Switzerland almost immediately after the city was liberated in 1944. But when she came back to her house, her family’s possessions were gone. Now alone, she could never bring herself to live in the house again.
Like many other Jews who survived the war, Georgette filed for restitution of the four drawings, some family furniture and other works of art with the French government in 1946. She never told anyone before she died in 1987 at the age of 92, Gradis said, so the family was particularly shocked to learn of the drawings from the Lost Art Foundation in March 2018, not to mention that an owner had come forward to give them back to the family voluntarily.
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