‘The Childish Round’ will leave the Cambridge University Museum. This painting by Gustave Courbet looted by the Nazis in 1941 in Paris will be given to the descendants of the legitimate owner, of Jewish faith and resistant. Since 1951, the painting has been in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Painted around 1862, it depicts children playing in a peaceful wood. But the history of this work is to say the least turbulent.
The Spoliation Advisory Panel, a body created in 2000 by the British government, concluded “that the painting was seized by Nazi occupying forces because Robert Bing (its owner, editor’s note) was Jewish”. This organization is in charge of investigating claims concerning objects lost during the Nazi period.
In a 19-page report released Tuesday, he recommends returning the work to the descendants of Robert Bing, who initiated the proceedings. “The museum has taken care of the work which can now be returned to the descendants of the original owners,” it says. The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge immediately announced that the work would be returned to them. The report attempts to trace the path of the painting.
On May 5, 1941, two members of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, a Nazi force responsible for looting works of art, seized Gustave Courbet’s painting from Robert Bing’s apartment in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. . Many apartments belonging to Jews were completely emptied during the Second World War. The resistance fighter no longer lived there: he had fled Paris when the German troops arrived with his widowed mother.
The work had, according to the report, been purchased by Robert Bing’s maternal grandmother, who was married to a wealthy banker. Robert Bing was a resistance fighter from 1941 to 1944. He was arrested but released in January 1944. He died in 1993, after receiving the Croix de Guerre and the French Resistance medal.
After being stolen, the painting was placed in Paris at the Jeu de Paume, “for the benefit of the main Nazi collector, Hermann Goering”, the founder of the Gestapo and one of the most powerful figures of the Nazi regime. He reportedly offered a trade to the German Foreign Minister, but he or his wife did not like the work and the transaction did not take place. The painting was said to have been found by Allied soldiers at the end of the war in secret tunnels in Bavaria southeast Germany.
It resurfaced in 1951, when a London art dealer, Arthur Tooth and Sons, bought it from a Swiss, Kurt Meissner, suspected of looting by the American authorities. Also in 1951, The Childhood Round was purchased by the Reverend Eric Milner-White, who donated it to the Fitzwilliam Museum.
The painting has since been in the museum, but has been loaned out for exhibitions in the UK and several countries around the world. In its report, the Spoliation Advisory Panel insists on the good faith of the museum. Our “recommendation does not imply any criticism of the museum or the donor, the Reverend Eric Milner-White, who acted honorably and in accordance with the standards prevailing at the time of acquisition and since then,” it says.
Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) was the leader of the realist current. He is the author of more than a thousand works, including L’Origine du monde, probably the most shocking work of the 19th century, representing a woman’s sex.
