Inside the Musée D’Orsay in Paris. Photo: Benh via Wikimedia Commons.

France’s national museums Musée du Louvre and Musée D’Orsay were court ordered last week to return four masterpieces to the heirs of a French art dealer that previously owned them before the artworks were stolen during the World War II and sold to the Nazis, The Art Newspaper reported.

A Paris administrative court said on Feb. 10 that the Paris museums must restitute to Ambroise Vollard’s family two Pierre Auguste Renoir pieces — the 1883 painting Marine: Guernsey and the drawing The Judgement of Paris from around 1908-1910— as well as the painting Still Life with Mandolin (1885) by Paul Gauguin and the watercolor Undergrowth (1890-1892) by Paul Cézanne.

A separate court confirmed in May 2022 that these works were owned by Vollard at the time of his death. The court ruling was upheld by France’s High Court in November 2022 and the administrative court has now backed the restitution. The French government, whose has authority over the Musée D’Orsay, said it will not appeal, according to The Art Newspaper.

François Honnorat, a lawyer representing one of Vollard’s descendants, told the publication that “although it seems normal for the State to check the history of the works before restitution,” he “regrets that the process took 10 years,” during which two of the heirs died.

Vollard, who was not Jewish, was an influential dealer of post-impressionist and modern art, known for working with 19th and 20th century icons such as Picasso, Bonnard, Renoir and Cézanne, according to The Art Newspaper. He died in 1939 at the age of 73 in a road accident and his collection of more than 6,000 artworks were handed over to his brothers and sisters. His brother Lucien Vollard was designated as his executor and, with his compliance, part of the collection was stolen by art dealers Étienne Bignou and Martin Fabiani. They sold the artworks to German museums, dealers or Nazi officers, The Art Newspaper reported.

In 2013, Vollard’s heirs requested the restitution of seven works allegedly stolen by Bignou and Fabiani. The French state refused, claiming there was insufficient information regarding the circumstances of their transactions. But the court ruled that any work recovered in Germany after the war “has to be restituted to its legitimate owner or beneficiary, even if it had not been looted” by the Nazis.

Vollard’s heirs are still requesting the restitution of two paintings by Renoir and another by Cézanne that were allegedly part of his art collection.