(Q62531834)
Statements
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Following the death of her husband and the 1940 Nazi occupation of France, Anna, a childless British expatriate, specified in her will that, “considering the new tragic situation,” the paintings in her collection should go to her family. But soon after her death in 1942, at the age of 97, France’s Vichy government—prodded by Hitler’s art adviser Karl Haberstock, a high official in the Reich’s well-funded looting program—seized the collection from her home. At a forced sale in 1943, an unnamed intermediary gained possession of the Constable and took it to Switzerland, where it was acquired by Georges Moos, a gallerist in Geneva.In 1946, the Constable was bought by collectors and patrons Madeleine and René Junod, with whom it remained for 40 years. After the death of René and later, in 1986, of Madeleine, the work was bequeathed with others from their collection to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in La Chaux-de-Fonds, a center of the Swiss watchmaking industry located along the border with France. (English)
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As he researched his family’s lost paintings, Monteagle discovered the Constable in a catalogue of the Swiss museum that matched a log of the forced sale in 1943 as well as the Sedelmeyer Gallery purchase from decades before. But when, in 2006, he requested that the Constable be returned, the city of La Chaux-de-Fonds, which owns the Musée des Beaux-Arts, sent a letter stating that “it could not freely dispose of this property which belongs to the public collectively.” (English)
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