Art Historian Says 10 Works in the Louvre’s Collection Were Looted by Nazis

By the end of the 1940s, about 60,000 of the 100,000 French artworks looted by Nazis during World War II had been returned to France, but not all of them made it back to their owners—some were auctioned off, while others were labeled as “National Museum Recovery” (MNR) and stored at various museums around the country, including the Louvre.

Earlier this month, the Louvre hired art historian Emmanuelle Polack to help identify the origins of those works, and she’s already traced 10 of them back to a Jewish lawyer from Paris named Armand Dorville, whose 450-piece collection was looted by the Nazis in the early 1940s.

Smithsonian reports that Dorville escaped to his southern chateau when the Nazis invaded Paris in 1940, leaving his collection behind. He died of natural causes a year later, and the Nazis sold his entire collection—containing works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Édouard Manet, and more—at a 1942 auction in Nice, where Louvre curator René Huyghe bought 12 items.

Ten of those items are still housed in the museum today, including four works by Henri Monnier, five by Constantin Guys, and one by Camille Roqueplan. The Musée d’Orsay owns the eleventh—a Jean-Louis Forain painting—and the twelfth is a lost bronze by Pierre-Jules Mène.

Polack knew the whereabouts of some of Dorville’s former possessions as early as last year, when the Louvre loaned two of them to her for an exhibition on MNR works that she was curating for the Shoah Memorial; the Musée d’Orsay’s painting was also part of that show.

Right now, Dorville’s great-niece, Francine X., has made a restitution claim for the artworks, which is still under investigation. And, considering that the Louvre holds almost 1800 MNR works in its collection, there could be more restitution claims to come.

[h/t Smithsonian]