# Rue Saint-Honore in the Afternoon. Effect of Rain > Camille Pissarro - 1897 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/camille-pissarro/pissarro-rue-saint-honore-effet-de-pluie/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-03 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Camille Pissarro - **Date:** 1897 - **Medium:** Oil on canvas - **Dimensions:** 81 x 65 cm - **Object type:** Painting - **Period:** French, nineteenth century - **Current location:** Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, room 33. TITLE is asserted by the Fundacion Coleccion Thyssen-Bornemisza on the basis of Spanish law and has been upheld in every United States court to reach the merits; it is not settled, because the Supreme Court vacated the last such judgment on 10 March 2025. CUSTODY has been continuous in Madrid since 1993 and has never been interrupted by any order. - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary 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. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **1897** Camille Pissarro `[documented]` (origin) Painted from a rented room at the Grand Hotel du Louvre between 4 and 22 December 1897, one of two canvases made there before the artist returned to Eragny for Christmas. - **-1939** Cassirer family, Berlin; latterly Lilly Cassirer Neubauer `[documented]` (ownership) The painting was in the Cassirer family in Berlin and belonged to Lilly Cassirer Neubauer by 1939. The Cassirers were among the principal Berlin collectors and dealers of French modern painting. Published accounts differ on whether the first family purchase was made from the artist or through Durand-Ruel, and this record does not resolve it. - **1939** Jakob Scheidwimmer, Munich art dealer and Nazi party member `[documented]` (forced transfer) Scheidwimmer refused to allow the painting to leave Germany and required that it be transferred to him. The stated price of 900 Reichsmarks, about 350 dollars, was paid into a blocked account to which Lilly Cassirer Neubauer had no access. The transfer was the condition of an exit visa. The holding institution's own chronology describes it as a sale below market value made in order to obtain a visa and avoid a concentration camp. - **undated** Julius Sulzbacher `[documented]` (ownership) Acquired from Scheidwimmer. Recorded in the holding institution's own published chronology. - **undated** Gestapo `[documented]` (seizure) Seized from Julius Sulzbacher by the Gestapo. This link appears in the account published by the institution that currently resists the claim. - **1943-1951** Unknown `[unknown]` (gap) Sold at auction in Berlin in 1943 for 95,000 Reichsmarks and then untraced. No owner is documented between that sale and the painting's appearance at the Frank Perls gallery in Beverly Hills in 1951. Eight years are missing from every published chain. - **1951-1952** Sydney Brody, Los Angeles `[documented]` (purchase) Acquired at the Frank Perls gallery, Beverly Hills. - **1952-1976** Sydney Schoenberg, Missouri `[documented]` (purchase) Frank Perls was instructed by Brody to place the painting for sale at the Knoedler gallery in New York, where Schoenberg bought it the same year. - **1976-1993** Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza `[documented]` (purchase) Acquired from the Stephen Hahn Gallery, New York. Shown thereafter with the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection at Lugano and, to 1990, in temporary exhibitions in Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy and Spain. - **1993-present** Fundacion Coleccion Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid `[disputed]` (purchase by the Spanish state) Acquired under a contract of 21 June 1993 with Favorita Trustees Limited, as part of the purchase of 775 works reported at 350 million dollars. The foundation asserts that the acquisition is valid and incontestable under Spanish law. The Cassirer heirs dispute that title. Every United States court to reach the merits has upheld the foundation, but no such judgment currently stands: the last was vacated by the Supreme Court on 10 March 2025 and the case is pending in the Central District of California. Custody has not been interrupted. ## Auction results Hammer and buyer's premium are stated separately. Where a source conflates them this record says so. - **** , - This painting has not been offered at public auction since 1943 and is not for sale. It is the property of a Spanish state foundation and is subject to an outstanding restitution claim, which makes any published estimate of its value speculative. The only documented prices in its history are the 900 Reichsmarks paid into a blocked account in 1939, the 95,000 Reichsmarks it made at auction in Berlin in 1943, the 120,000 Deutschmarks agreed in 1958 as its market value at 1 April 1956, and its share of the 350 million dollars the Spanish state paid in 1993 for 775 works. No hammer or premium figure is published for any of them, and the 1993 sale was a private treaty purchase of a whole collection, not an auction. ## Exhibitions - Durand-Ruel gallery showing of the Paris series, Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris, 1898 - Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, permanent display and touring exhibitions in seven countries, Villa Favorita, Lugano, and elsewhere, 1976-1990 - Permanent collection, room 33, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, 1992-present ## Open questions - Who owns the painting? No court judgment currently stands on the merits: the Ninth Circuit's January 2024 judgment for the foundation was vacated by the Supreme Court on 10 March 2025 and the case is pending in the district court. - Is Assembly Bill 2867 constitutional as applied to a pending action against an instrumentality of a foreign state? That question is live and is why the Attorney General of California moved to intervene on 17 November 2025. - Who bought the painting at the Berlin auction of 1943 for 95,000 Reichsmarks, and by what route did it reach the Frank Perls gallery in Beverly Hills by 1951? Eight years of the chain are unaccounted for in every published version, including the holder's. - What due diligence did the Fundacion Coleccion Thyssen-Bornemisza actually carry out in 1993? The foundation states that investigations into the legitimacy of the seller's title were made. The scope and the documents have not been published. - Why does the museum's own catalogue entry for the painting carry no provenance list, when the museum publishes a separate document setting out a full chronology of the ownership dispute? - To whom did Lilly Cassirer Neubauer pay the 14,000 marks recorded in the foundation's chronology as taken out of her 1958 compensation, and on what basis? ## Sources - [1] Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, 'Lawsuit Cassirer / Thyssen', the foundation's own published chronology of the ownership and the litigation, linked from the painting's catalogue page, file dated March 2025. PRIMARY, and the holder's own account. Its chronology ends with the Ninth Circuit decision of January 2024 and does not record the Supreme Court order of 10 March 2025. - [2] Cassirer v. Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation, 596 U.S. 107 (2022), slip opinion, decided 21 April 2022, Kagan J. for a unanimous Court. Holding: in an FSIA suit raising non-federal claims, a court determines the substantive law using the same choice-of-law rule applicable in a similar suit against a private party. PRIMARY. - [3] Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, collection entry for Rue Saint-Honore in the Afternoon. Effect of Rain: 1897, oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm, inventory 712 (1976.74), room 33. The entry carries no provenance list. - [4] Paula Luengo, 'Camille Pissarro: Rue Saint-Honore in the Afternoon, Effect of Rain, 1897', Open Windows 6, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. The museum's own scholarship on the picture: the December 1897 stay at the Grand Hotel du Louvre, the view, the death of Felix Pissarro, the series method and the PDR numbers. - [5] Office of the Attorney General of California, press release, 17 November 2025, 'Attorney General Bonta Steps Up to Defend California Law Helping Holocaust Survivors Recover Stolen Art', recording the motion to intervene in Cassirer v. Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation in the United States District Court for the Central District of California. PRIMARY. - [6] Transnational Litigation Blog, Cassirer v. Thyssen-Bornemisza post index, for the dated sequence of the 2023 to 2025 steps including the denial of rehearing en banc in July 2024 and the GVR petition. - [7] Center for Art Law, 'Rehearing with a Chance of Restitution: The Effects of Rainfall and Recent Developments on Rue Saint Honore', for the terms of Assembly Bill 2867 and the Supreme Court's March 2025 order. - [8] The National Law Review, 'Nazi-Looted Art: One Painting, Two Owners, and Two Laws in Conflict: Cassirer v. Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation', for the blocked account, the dollar equivalent of the 1939 payment and the 1958 valuation date of 1 April 1956. - [9] Wikipedia, 'Rue Saint-Honore in the Afternoon. Effect of Rain', TERTIARY, used only for the 900 Reichsmark figure, the 1943 Berlin auction at 95,000 Reichsmarks and the reported 1993 collection price. Flagged for replacement with the pleadings in the Central District of California. - [10] Wikipedia, 'Camille Pissarro', TERTIARY, used only for the biography: birth, nationality, the eight Impressionist exhibitions, the anarchist associations, the 1,500 lost canvases, the eye condition and the children. Flagged for replacement with Joachim Pissarro and Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro: Critical Catalogue of Paintings (2005). --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.