A long-lost impressionist masterpiece by Camille Pissarro will be sold at Sotheby’s London on February 5, 2014. ‘Boulevard Montmartre, Matinée de Printemps’ (1897) is expected to sell for £7 million to £10 million during the auction house’s Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale.
The painting belonged to the wealthy industrialist Max Silberberg, who amassed a considerable collection of 19th and 20th century artwork by masters such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, and Vincent Van Gogh. Between 1935 and 1937, Nazis forced Silberberg to sell his entire art collection before deporting him and his wife to Auschwitz, where they both perished. Silberberg’s son, Alfred, and his wife, Gerta, survived the Holocaust and fled to England. Following Alfred’s death in 1984, Gerta worked tirelessly to locate her late father-in-law’s collection. ‘Boulevard Montmartre’ was restituted to her in 2000 after having spent many years in the Israel Museum’s collection in Jerusalem. Gerta later loaned the painting back to the museum where it remained on public view until her death earlier this year.
Profits from the sale of the Pissarro painting will support the charitable causes championed by the late Gerta Silberberg.
