Rob Horgan
A JEWISH family is fighting a Spanish museum for a priceless painting they were forced to surrender to the Nazis.
Lilly Cassirer and her husband surrendered Camille Pissarro’s impressionist masterpiece ‘Rue Saint-Honore dans l’apres-midi. Effet de pluie’ to the Reich ahead of the holocaust in 1939, but their heirs – who have been involved in a legal battle for 16 years – want it returned.
The piece, created in 1897 and worth well in excess of €40 million, has been held at the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum in Madrid since 1993.
The museum argues it has legal ownership but the family’s lawyer David Boies disagrees.
He said: “This is an issue that is critically important not only in terms of trying to right terrible wrongs that had their origin in the Nazi persecution of the Jews but also to establish principles that are very important to what’s happening now in the world.”
