Christie’s intends to auction off the 1888 painting, called “Mole de Blaise” (Heaps of Wheat), after facilitating negotiations between the heirs of an American oil tycoon who now own it and the heirs of two Jewish collectors who owned it at different times before looted by the Nazis.
A Christie’s spokesperson said details of the settlement are confidential.
The painting is set to be auctioned on November 11, along with other artworks from the Edwin L. Cox, the oil tycoon from Texas who died last year at the age of 99.
The painting depicts three heaps of wheat high and below it are the harvest workers on a bright summer’s day.
It was bought in 1913 by industrial magnate Max Mirowski, who fled Germany for Amsterdam in 1938 for fear of Nazi persecution.
Mirovsky entrusted the painting to a Paris-based antiques dealer who sold it to Alexandrine de Rothschild, who was a member of a famous Jewish banking family.
Rothschild fled to Switzerland at the start of World War II and her art collection, including a Van Gogh watercolor, was confiscated by the Nazis during the occupation.
It is unclear where the artwork was located between the end of the war and the 1970s, but Cox bought it at the Wildenstein Gallery in New York in 1979.
Giovanna Bertazzoni, Vice President of Art of the 20th and 21st Centuries at Christie’s, described the painting as one of Van Gogh’s most powerful paperwork ever to appear on the open market.
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