PARIS — For more than 70 years, Léone Meyer’s family has fought to reclaim a looted painting, and yet she cannot bear the thought of displaying it in her Left Bank home, across from the River Seine. The small work, by Camille Pissarro, shows a shepherdess tending her flock, and hangs not far away at the Musée d’Orsay, with other precious French Impressionist paintings. But the peaceful countryside scene from 1886 is fraught with a back story of plunder, family tragedy and legal battles that stretch from Paris to Oklahoma. Decades later, in 2012, she discovered the whereabouts of “La Bergère,” or “Shepherdess Bringing in Sheep,” in the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, at the University of Oklahoma. In 2016, she brokered a compromise to rotate it between the university and a French museum.

Source: New York Times December 17, 2020 20:48 UTC