A portrait looted during WWII and found by the Monuments Men and Rose Valland sold at Christie’s for €529.200
Last November 21st, the painting “Portrait de femme à mi-corps” by Nicolas de Largillierre (1656-1746) was sold in Paris at Christie’s “Tableaux anciens et du XIXe siècle” sale
The painting had been looted by the Nazis from the safe of Baron Philippe de Rothschild and then transferred to the Musée du Jeu de Paume in Paris in 1941, where it was registered by Rose Valland. She was the museum curator and, unbeknownst to the Nazis, kept a register with all the information on the looted paintings sent to Germany.
Monuments Men discovered Largilliere’s Portrait in May 1945 at the Castle of Neuschwanstein, former home of the King of Baviera. It was then restituted to the Rotschild family in 1946, where it remained as part of their art collection until it was sold at auction in 1978.
Painted by one of the most appreciated artists under Louis XV and the Regency period, the portrait was appraised between 50.000 and 80.000 before selling for over 500.000 euros (i.e. 10 times its lowest estimation) at the end of a long bidding battle. Its strong symbolic value, due to its WWII looted history, as well as the role Rose Valland and the Monuments Men played in its restitution, certainly made it one of the most iconic artworks sold at the auction.
Art crime/cultural heritage protection specialist and researcher in AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning. Expert in Impressionist and post-Impressionist art. Provenance researcher and specialist in looted art cases. Master degrees in Art Market and Art History from the Ecole du Louvre and Sorbonne University in Paris and Master degree in Information and Communication Sciences from the CELSA-Sorbonne. Work experiences at the Wildenstein Plattner Institute (2018-2019), Artcurial Paris (2020) and on the EU-funded RITHMS project. Contributor to articles in the Journal of Cultural Heritage Crime, Journal of Art Crime, on the Wildenstein Plattner Institute website and on Hugging Face. Research on AI, more specifically at the moment on LLM/VLM. Studying the impact of AI and new technologies on the art world and provenance research. Author of a Master’s thesis on the state of Impressionism in today’s art market (Ecole du Louvre – 2020) and a Master’s thesis on Claude Monet’s first journey to the Mediterranean (under the supervision of Professor Pierre Wat – Sorbonne Paris I, 2019). Currently working on a book project.
