1 of 1 “La Ronde Enfantine” by French painter Gustave Courbet — Photo: AFP PHOTO / The Fitzwilliam Museum “La Ronde Enfantine” by French painter Gustave Courbet — Photo: AFP PHOTO / The Fitzwilliam Museum
A museum at the University of Cambridge, UK, will return a painting by French painter Gustave Courbet that was stolen by the Nazis in Paris in 1941. The canvas belonged to a Jewish resistance fighter.
The return follows a complaint from the descendants of Robert Bing, who owned the painting “La Ronde Enfantine”, a work by Courbet (18191877) painted around 1862, depicting a group of children playing in a forest.
The Spoliation Advisory Panel, a body created by the British government in 2000, concluded this Tuesday (28) “that the painting was stolen by the Nazi occupying forces because Robert Bing was Jewish”.
Shortly thereafter, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge announced that the work would be passed on to his descendants.
“The museum has taken care of the piece, which can now be returned to the descendants of the original owners,” the institution wrote on its website.
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According to the communiqué released by the panel, on May 5, 1941, at Bing’s Paris apartment, two members of the Einzatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the Nazi force responsible for the theft of artworks, seized the painting, which had been purchased from his maternal grandmother. . .
The statement also said the artwork was stored in the French capital “in the possession of key Nazi collector Hermann Goering,” founder of the Gestapo.
According to the Fitzwilliam Museum, the canvas was found by Allied soldiers in one of the secret tunnels in Bavaria towards the end of the war.
Reverend Eric MilnerWhite bought the work in 1951 and donated it to the museum.