Stolen Camille Pissarro Goes Back To France

Stolen Camille Pissarro

A Camille Pissarro mono print valued at $80,000 is returning to France after being missing for over 30 years. The valuable artwork was stolen from the Museum in Aix-la-Bains, France, in 1981 and smuggled into the United States.  The French ambassador in Washington has attend a repatriation ceremony celebrating its successful return. In January 2010, a federal jury ruled that the monotype should return to France in accordance with the National Stolen Property Act. The 2nd Circuit Court upheld the decision in June 2011.The picture was sold by J. Adelman Antiques and Art Gallery in San Antonio, Texas, to the Sharan Corp. in 1985 for $8,500. When the company dissolved in 1992, one of its owners, Sharyl Davis, displayed “Le Marché” in her home for the next decade. Sotheby’s estimated its value at $60,000 to $80,000 when it was consigned it to the auction house in 2003. The print was recorded in the Art Loss Register and was soon noted by Interpole and removed from a Sotheby’s sale where it had been consigned.

French police informed the United States about the museum theft and eventually, the Department of Homeland Security pressed Sotheby’s to withdraw the picture and cooperate with the authorities to ensure its safe return to France.. To return the painting to France, the United States started forfeiture proceedings in 2006, citing a customs statute enacted as part of the Tariff Act of 1930, which authorises forfeiture of any merchandise which is introduced into the United States contrary to law if it is “stolen, smuggled, or clandestinely imported or introduced.”
Emile Guelton was arrested and charged at the time of Sotheby’s planned 2003 auction. Guelton admitted to stealing “Le Marché” from the Faure museum by placing the monoprint under his coat. A security guard also positively identified him.

Camille Pissarro was one of the most influential members of the French Impressionist movement, not only as an artist but also as a teacher, and he was the only artist to participate in all eight Impressionist exhibitions.Born in St. Thomas in the Danish West Indies, Camille was sent to school in Paris at the age of 11 where he displayed a talent for drawing. In 1855, having convinced his parents of his determination to pursue a career as an artist rather than work in the family import/export business, he returned to Paris where he studied at the Academie Suisse alongside Claude Monet. At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, Camille moved to England. With Monet he painted a series of landscapes around South-East London as well as studying English landscape painters in the museums. When he returned home to Louveciennes a year later, Camille discovered that all but 40 of the 1500 paintings he had left there – almost twenty years’ work – had been vandalised.

In 1872 Camille settled in Pontoise where he remained for the next ten years, gathering a close circle of friends around him. Gauguin was among the many artists to visit him there and Cézanne, who lived nearby, came for long periods to work and learn. These were also the years of the Impressionist group exhibitions in which Camille played a major role, but which earned him much criticism for his art. While mainly interested in landscape, he introduced figures (generally peasants conducting their rural occupations) and animals into his work and these became the focal point of the composition. It was this unsentimental and unliterary approach, and the complete absence of any pretence, that seemed to stop his work from finding appreciation with the general public. In the last years of his life Camille divided his time between Paris, Rouen, Le Havre and his home in Eragny and painted many series of different aspects of those cities, with varying light and weather effects. Many of these paintings are considered amongst his best and make a fitting finale to his long and eventful career. When Camille Pissarro died in the autumn of 1903 he had finally started to gain public recognition and today, of course, his work can be found in many of the most important museums and private collections throughout the world.

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