UK museum to return painting stolen by Nazis to family of Jewish owner

A British university museum has agreed to return a 19th-century painting by French artist Gustave Courbet, which was seized by the Nazis, to the descendants of its original Jewish owner.

Cambridge University’s Fitzwilliam Museum, in eastern England, is acting on the advice of a government-appointed expert panel, which investigates claims for Nazi loot.

For more than a year, the panel probed the history of “La Ronde Enfantine,” an oil landscape dating from about 1862 that has been lying in the museum’s storage.

In a report the museum concluded that the evidence supported the restitution claim made by the heirs of its one-time owner, Robert Bing, a French Resistance hero during World War II.

“This is a deliberate seizure by the German authorities from a Jewish citizen of France with the diversion of the work of art to Nazi leaders,” the 19-page review stated.

The panel confirmed that Nazi occupiers stole the artwork from Bing’s Paris apartment in 1941, after he and his widowed mother had fled the city before their arrival.

His maternal grandmother had likely acquired the oil-on-canvas, depicting children playing in woodland, after marrying a wealthy banker and merchant.

Two members of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) — a Nazi organization set up to traffic plundered art — stole the painting, the report said.

The artwork then had “a somewhat colorful history” and was held during the war for Gestapo founder Hermann Goering, who amassed a large collection of stolen art.

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