After 76 years of exile in Germany, a small painting by Nicolas Rousseau stolen in France under the Nazi Occupation is exhibited at the World Peace Center in Verdun (Meuse), in the hope of finding its owners or beneficiaries.

For ten days, the oil on canvas of the painter, a pupil of the Barbizon school, has been hanging in the lobby of the World Center for Peace, Freedoms and Human Rights, visited by 60,000 visitors each year.

"Pride and emotion"

"If you recognize the landscape or have any information on this painting, we thank you for indicating it", it is written next to the painting which represents a character sitting at the edge of a river framed by high trees , a village in the distance under a cloudy sky.

"We wanted it to be accessible to visitors immediately when they enter and free of charge," explains the director of the establishment, Philippe Hansch, who picked up the work in early August by car in Berlin.

“There is pride and emotion, a lot of happiness, but also a responsibility,” he says.

"Inestimable historical value"

More than its market value, the small untitled canvas by Nicolas Rousseau, painted in the 19th century and estimated between 3,000 and 5,000 euros, conceals "an inestimable historical value", he emphasizes.

"The painting is a great symbol of Franco-German friendship and allows the story of the Second World War to be told with a new eye on the French side and the German side", develops the director.

Hanging in the family Berlin living room for 75 years

In the spring of 1944, Alfred Forner, non-commissioned officer of the Luftwaffe (Air Force), stationed in France, somewhere between Normandy and Saint-Omer (Pas-de-Calais), was commissioned to bring a painting in Berlin while on leave.

When the non-commissioned officer arrives at the address indicated, the building is in ruins. “In a pragmatic way, he goes home, leaves the painting at his home and goes back to the front,” explains Philippe Hansch. He died in combat a few months later, in the summer of 1944.

The small painting - 38 x 55 cm - hung in the family living room in Berlin for 75 years.

"Something which should weigh on the conscience" of Alfred Forner's son

In January 2019, Alfred's son, Peter Forner, contacted the French Embassy in Berlin: he wanted to return the painting and above all, find its owners.

“Peter Forner had a health accident four or five years ago with a long hospital stay. He made a list of things to settle and restore the table was at the top of this list, ”says Julien Acquatella, from the Commission for Compensation for Victims of Spoliation (CIVS) in Berlin. Its mission is to offer measures of reparation, restitution or compensation to families, mostly Jewish, despoiled under the Occupation.

“It was a very courageous gesture and a natural act for him: this painting did not belong to his family. It was something that should weigh on his conscience, ”adds Julien Acquatella.

"A very difficult case"

The CIVS and the Mission for the Search and Restitution of Cultural Property Spoliated between 1933 and 1945, which depends on the French Ministry of Culture, have since sought, but in vain, to identify the owners or beneficiaries of the bucolic landscape.

“This is a very difficult case because the painting is not of great value, so it is not necessarily listed. It is a vast field of research ”, notes Julien Acquatella, who does not lose hope for all that.

"New device"

The exhibition of the painting, "an unprecedented device", according to him, therefore aims to identify the owners, while fulfilling the last wishes of Peter Forner, who died last May at the age of 80: to present the work in a place that embodies peace and Franco-German friendship so that it becomes an object of pedagogy.

An official restitution ceremony is to be organized in October at the World Peace Center, housed in a former episcopal palace. The work will then join an exhibition on the end of the Second World War, scheduled for the end of the year.

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