The Quai Malaquais and the Institute

Camille Pissarro · 1903

A spring street along the Seine, horse carts rolling toward the dome of the Institut de France. Pissarro painted it in the last year of his life. Then it vanished for almost seventy years, seized by the Gestapo and hidden in a Swiss bank safe.

The story behind the painting

The full title is Le Quai Malaquais et l'institut, Printemps, the Quai Malaquais and the Institute, Spring. Camille Pissarro made it in 1903, his final year, and signed and dated it at the lower right. In 1904 one of his sons sold it to the Paris dealer Bernheim-Jeune, and on 30 March 1907, through the Berlin dealer Paul Cassirer, the publisher Samuel Fischer acquired it. After his death in 1934 it passed to his son-in-law Gottfried Bermann Fischer.

What to look for

The street, busy with horse-drawn carts, runs diagonally. At the bottom edge it fills two thirds of the width and dominates the right half, then narrows and loses itself among rows of houses in the middle of the picture. Beside it the river widens, half hidden by a line of sparsely leaved trees. In foreshortened perspective the Pont du Carrousel and the Pont des Arts form horizontals, and the dome of the Institut de France breaks the horizon. Grey-brown and grey-blue dominate. It is late Impressionism with touches of Pointillism, 54 by 65 cm.

Meaning and intent

Persecuted as a Jew, Gottfried Bermann Fischer fled to Vienna and later, via Stockholm, to New York. The painting stayed behind in the family's Vienna house, where the Gestapo seized it in March 1938. It went to auction at the Dorotheum on 21 May 1940, wrongly catalogued as a Paris Boulevard by Paul Emile Pissarro, Camille's youngest son, with the wrong date and size. Because of those false details, the family's lawyer could not identify it after the war, and the trail went cold.

Legacy

In 2003 Gisela Bermann Fischer, Gottfried's daughter, learned it had been shown in Lausanne in 1984. Suspicion fell on Bruno Lohse, a wartime art looter for the ERR in France and later a dealer, who denied knowing anything. In 2007 intermediaries offered its return for a finder's fee, and she reported attempted extortion. In June 2007, after Lohse's death, Zurich prosecutors opened a bank safe and found the painting there. It was returned to her in 2008 and sold at auction in November 2009.