Two 17th-century paintings were recently donated to the Louvre Museum after being returned to their owners.
Floris van Schooten’s Still-Life with Ham and Peter Binoit’s Food, Fruit and Glass on a Table were for decades part of the Louvre’s Nordic painting collection, held under the “National Museum Recuperation” program for stolen works whose owners are unknown.
The government called on genealogy experts 2015 to look into a few items in these collections — part of a broader movement in French museums to hunt down rightful owners.
The experts traced the paintings back to a mansion in central Paris owned by Mathilde Javal that was seized and emptied by the Nazis in 1944. She had put in a restitution request after the war, but some simple errors in the spelling of her name and address undermined the process, according to the Louvre. After World War II, Javal officially requested the return of her family’s artworks. The Louvre museum noted that evidence of Javal’s request was discovered in a letter, but the paintings could not be returned due to insufficient information about their rightful ownership. The museum also mentioned that errors in Javal’s name and address contributed to the confusion.
The museum’s director Laurence Des Cars told AFP the case was “a commitment to transmitting memory and a constant reminder to action”.
Around 100,000 cultural items were looted or sold under duress in France during the Nazi occupation of 1940-45, mainly from Jewish families — with many transferred to Germany.
Around 60,000 works came back to France after the war, of which 45,000 were returned to their owners by a special commission that operated until 1949.
Of the remaining 15,000, around 13,000 were sold by the state and 2,200 were entrusted to museums.
