Rue Saint-Honore in the Afternoon. Effect of Rain

A Paris street in the rain, painted from a hotel window in December 1897 in the weeks after the artist's son died, taken from a Jewish woman in Berlin in 1939 as the price of an exit visa, and hanging in Madrid since 1993. The claim on it has been in litigation for twenty-one years, has been to the United States Supreme Court twice, and is not over.

This is the record in the corpus where nothing has been decided. No panel has ever heard it. No object has moved. The courts that reached the merits held for the museum on Spanish law; the Supreme Court then vacated that judgment in March 2025 because California had changed its statute; the case went back to the trial court, and in November 2025 the Attorney General of California intervened to defend the new statute against constitutional attack. A reader who wants to know who owns this painting is asking a question that has no answer today.

The claim is outstanding, and that is the point of this record

Most objects in this archive have an ending. This one does not, and the honest way to publish it is to say where the file stands on the day it was written.

The Fundacion Coleccion Thyssen-Bornemisza holds the painting in Madrid and asserts title under Spanish law. The heirs of Lilly Cassirer Neubauer, from whom it was taken in Berlin in 1939, claim it. Since 2005 the claim has been litigated in the United States federal courts under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. Every court that reached the merits has held for the foundation, on the ground that Spanish law governs and that Spanish law lets a good-faith possessor acquire title by prescription. The Supreme Court of the United States has intervened twice on how the governing law is chosen.

On 10 March 2025 it did so a second time, vacating the Ninth Circuit's judgment of January 2024 so that the courts below could reconsider it under a California statute enacted in September 2024. The case returned to the district court in Los Angeles. On 17 November 2025 the Attorney General of California moved to intervene to defend that statute's constitutionality. Nothing in this record should be read as a statement of who owns the picture.

What it is, and the fortnight it was painted in

Oil on canvas, 81 by 65 centimetres, dated 1897. It shows the junction of the rue Saint-Honore and the place du Theatre-Francais in the rain; in the left foreground the rue de Rohan runs down towards the rue de Rivoli and the Louvre.

Pissarro painted it from a rented room. Between 4 and 22 December 1897 he was in Paris looking for new motifs and took a room at the Grand Hotel du Louvre, writing that he had found a room with a superb view of the avenue de l'Opera and the corner of the place du Palais Royal, and that the Paris streets people call ugly were silvery, luminous and alive. He painted two canvases from that room before going home for Christmas, and this is one of them.

He was working through something. In the spring of 1897 his eldest son Lucien had a stroke and Pissarro went to London from May to July to sit with him. In November his fifth child Felix, whom the family called Titi, died at twenty-three. On 15 December, in the middle of the fortnight in which this picture was made, he wrote to Lucien that they should work in order to heal their wounds and that he hoped his son could shield himself with art. The museum's own scholarship makes the connection between the bereavement and the intensity of the December campaign, and it is the only reading of this picture the sources support.

Why he was painting out of windows at all

The urban series were forced on him by his eyes. A recurrent infection made it impossible for him to work outdoors except in warm weather, and from 1893 he rented rooms with views and painted through the glass. The first campaign, at the Hotel-Restaurant de Rome in the Saint-Lazare quarter in 1893, came directly from his doctor's instruction not to expose the eye to street wind and dust.

Out of that constraint came a body of work that changed his market. In the last decade of his life, between 1893 and 1903, he made over three hundred canvases of Paris, Rouen, Dieppe and Le Havre, in eleven separate series. Durand-Ruel bought the views in bulk for the first time and they sold. The painter who had been mocked as the cabbage painter for his fields and orchards ended his career as the most systematic recorder of the modern French city, and did it because he could not stand in the street.

He had also lost most of his earlier work. Of roughly 1,500 paintings made in twenty years and left behind when he fled the Franco-Prussian war, about forty survived; Prussian soldiers quartered in his house had used the canvases as floor matting. A late Pissarro is not just a late work. It is a large part of what is left.

Three pictures of the same street corner, and how to tell them apart

On 5 January 1898 Pissarro moved into the Grand Hotel du Louvre proper, at 172 rue de Rivoli, and stayed four months painting the same view under snow, rain, fog and spring light. In May, Durand-Ruel bought twelve canvases from the series at once.

That is a version-safety problem, and it is a real one for this object. At least three canvases carry the title Rue Saint-Honore with a weather effect attached:

PDR 1196, dans l'apres-midi, effet de pluie, 1897, 81 by 65 cm. The picture in this record. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, inventory 712 (1976.74). The one under claim.

PDR 1199, apres-midi, effet de soleil, 1898, 65.4 by 54.6 cm. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. Not under claim.

PDR 1200, matin, effet de soleil, 1898, Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen. Not under claim.

Coverage of the litigation routinely reproduces whichever of these an editor found first. The catalogue number is the only reliable discriminator, and the difference matters commercially as well as legally: two of these three have clean chains and one does not.

The chain to 1939

The painting entered a German Jewish collection almost immediately. It passed to Lilly Cassirer Neubauer through her husband's family. The Cassirers were among the most important collectors and dealers of French modern painting in Berlin, and the picture was in the family for about four decades before the state came for it.

By 1939 Lilly Cassirer Neubauer needed to leave Germany. The mechanism used against her is documented and it is not ambiguous in outline, whatever the parties call it. Jakob Scheidwimmer, an art dealer and a member of the Nazi party, would not permit the painting to leave Germany and required that it be sold to him. She parted with it for 900 Reichsmarks, roughly 350 dollars at the time, paid into a blocked account she could not touch. In exchange she got out.

The foundation's own published chronology puts it as a sale below market value made in order to obtain a visa to escape from Germany and avoid a concentration camp. That is the holder's language, and it concedes the coercion while declining the word theft. This record uses neither side's adjective: the transaction was a transfer compelled by a state that had made her flight conditional on it.

What happened to it inside Germany

Scheidwimmer did not keep it. The painting was acquired by Julius Sulzbacher, and it was then seized from Sulzbacher by the Gestapo. Both facts appear in the holding institution's own account of the provenance, which is worth noting: the museum that resists the claim publishes a chain containing a Gestapo confiscation.

It was sold at auction in Berlin in 1943 for 95,000 Reichsmarks and then dropped out of sight. The gap between that sale and its reappearance in California in 1951 is the classic 1933 to 1945 break this archive exists to record, except that here the break sits after the seizure rather than around it.

The American decades

In 1951 the painting was acquired at the Frank Perls gallery in Beverly Hills by the American collector Sydney Brody. In 1952 Perls was instructed by Brody to place it for sale at the Knoedler gallery in New York, where it was bought the same year by Sydney Schoenberg, a collector from Missouri. In 1976 Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza acquired it from the Stephen Hahn Gallery in New York.

The route matters because of what the courts later made of it. Two respected New York and Los Angeles dealers handled the picture in the early 1950s, and neither the American buyers nor the Baron is recorded as having known of the 1939 transfer. The foundation's case rests on exactly that: good faith at the moment of acquisition. The claimants' case is that good faith is beside the point, because a thief cannot pass good title, which is the rule in California and is not the rule in Spain.

From 1976 the picture was exhibited as part of the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection at Lugano and, up to 1990, in temporary exhibitions in Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy and Spain. The foundation notes the publicity; the implication drawn is that the family could have found it. The family did not find it until 2000.

The 1958 settlement, and what it did not do

In 1950 Lilly Cassirer Neubauer brought proceedings in Germany to recover the painting. She did not know where it was.

In 1958 she reached an agreement with the Federal German government, with Scheidwimmer and with Sulzbacher, accepting compensation of 120,000 Deutschmarks, a figure agreed to represent the market value of the work as at 1 April 1956. The foundation's chronology records that she gave 14,000 marks of that sum to another party to the agreement.

What that settlement did to the claim on the object itself is one of the sharpest questions in the case, and the answer is that it did not extinguish it. The point has been argued and the courts have not treated the 1958 compensation as a waiver of the right to seek physical restitution should the painting resurface. This is a distinction with wide application: a post-war compensation payment made against a lost object is not a sale of it, and a diligence file that treats a German Wiedergutmachung settlement as clearing title is making an error of law, not a judgement call.

What the settlement does establish is that by 1958 the German state had accepted, and paid on the basis, that this painting was taken from her by persecution.

1993: how the picture became Spanish state property

The Spanish state agreed the purchase of the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection under a contract signed on 21 June 1993, between the Fundacion Coleccion Thyssen-Bornemisza and Favorita Trustees Limited. The collection ran to 775 works and the reported price was 350 million dollars. The museum had opened in Madrid the previous year.

The foundation's position is that the transaction was carried out after due diligence into the seller's title and that its acquisition is accordingly valid, effective and incontestable under Spanish law, which it says is the law applicable to the sale.

The consequence for the claimants was structural rather than evidential. The holder was now an instrumentality of a sovereign state, which is why every subsequent step has had to be taken under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act and why the case has spent two decades on questions of jurisdiction and choice of law rather than on what happened in Berlin in 1939.

Twenty-one years of litigation, in order

The family made its first claim in 2002 and the foundation rejected it. In 2005 Claude Cassirer, Lilly's grandson, sued in California. He died in 2010 at eighty-nine; his children continued the action, supported by the United Jewish Federation of San Diego County. The Jewish Community of Madrid and the Federation of Jewish Communities in Spain entered the case as interested parties.

In June 2012 the district court rejected the claim as time-barred. In July 2014 the Ninth Circuit reversed. In June 2015 the district court held that the foundation would in any event have acquired title by prescription under Spanish law. In July 2017 the Ninth Circuit overturned that and sent the case back to examine whether the foundation could be treated as an accessory to a crime against property, which under article 1956 of the Spanish Civil Code would block prescription; the foundation sought rehearing, the Kingdom of Spain appeared as amicus curiae, and rehearing was refused in December 2017. The foundation petitioned the Supreme Court in April 2018 and certiorari was denied in May.

In December 2019 Judge John F. Walter dismissed the case, holding that under Spanish law the foundation is the rightful owner and that neither the Baron nor the foundation knew at acquisition that the painting had been stolen. The Ninth Circuit affirmed in August 2020.

On 21 April 2022 the Supreme Court decided the case unanimously. The holding is narrow and important: in a suit under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act raising non-federal claims, a court must determine the substantive law using the same choice-of-law rule it would apply in a similar suit against a private party, which means the forum state's rule and not one derived from federal common law. The Court did not decide who owns the painting. It decided which signpost the lower courts must read.

On remand the Ninth Circuit read it, applied California's governmental interest test, and concluded in January 2024 that California's own rule pointed to Spanish law, and therefore to the foundation. Rehearing en banc was denied in July 2024.

A legislature answers a court

On 16 September 2024 the Governor of California signed Assembly Bill 2867. The statute concerns the recovery of artwork and personal property lost through persecution. It states the rule that a thief cannot convey good title and that stolen art should be returned to its original owner, defines duress to include a threat of force, violence, danger or retribution sufficient to coerce a reasonable person, and rejects good-faith acquisition and adverse possession as defences. It applies retroactively, including to claimants whose limitation period had run, and by its terms it applies to all actions pending on the date of enactment.

The Cassirer plaintiffs asked the Supreme Court to send the case back in light of it. On 10 March 2025 the Court granted certiorari, vacated the Ninth Circuit's January 2024 judgment and remanded. The case is now back before the United States District Court for the Central District of California, and on 17 November 2025 the Attorney General of California filed to intervene in defence of the statute's constitutionality.

Set that sequence against this archive's argument about the Washington Principles. The 1998 text bound nobody and left every design choice to national machinery. Here the machinery is a state legislature in a third country, retrofitting a choice-of-law rule in order to change the result of one case. It is not a restitution commission and it does not pretend to be. It is the only lever that existed.

What the holder publishes, and where its chronology stops

The museum links a document headed as the Cassirer lawsuit from the painting's own catalogue page. It is a useful thing to read, because it is the holder setting out the history in its own words, and because it concedes more than a reader would expect: the 1939 sale below market value made to obtain an exit visa, the Gestapo seizure from Sulzbacher, the 1950 German proceedings, the 1958 compensation.

The file carries a March 2025 date and its chronology ends with the Ninth Circuit's decision of January 2024 and the statement that the foundation is the legitimate owner. It does not record the Supreme Court's order of 10 March 2025 vacating that judgment. Anyone consulting the museum's page for the current position of the case is reading a chronology that stops one step short of it.

The museum's catalogue entry for the painting itself carries no provenance list at all. The inventory number, 712 (1976.74), encodes the year the Baron bought it and nothing before.

What a collector should take from this file

Four things, none of which is about Pissarro.

First, a compensation settlement is not a conveyance. Lilly Cassirer Neubauer was paid 120,000 Deutschmarks in 1958 for a picture nobody could find, and that payment has not been held to extinguish the right to the picture. Any file that treats a German post-war award as clearing a 1930s break is wrong.

Second, the identity of the holder decides the forum, and the forum decides the law. The moment the collection became Spanish state property the claim became a sovereign immunity case. Twenty-one years have gone on choice of law and jurisdiction.

Third, good faith is a defence in some systems and irrelevant in others. Spanish law lets a good-faith possessor take title by prescription; California law says a thief conveys nothing. The same facts produce opposite owners. There is no international rule that resolves it, which is exactly what the 1998 principles left unbuilt.

Fourth, and most practical: this object has never been before a restitution panel. Not one. Every step of it has been taken in American courts because that was the only door that opened. Where a claim looks unresolved for decades, ask whether a forum exists at all before concluding that the claim is weak.