A Paris court has annulled Sotheby's 2024 sale of a Camille Pissarro landscape and ordered the painting returned to the descendants of Salomon Flavian, the Jewish banker and collector whose holdings were seized by the Nazis in occupied Paris. The ruling found that the agreement under which the work was offered had never been validly accepted by the family as a whole.

The canvas at the centre of the case is the 1902 Dieppe harbour scene Darse de pêche et bassin Duquesne, Dieppe, après-midi ensoleillée, which Sotheby's sold in London in 2024 for £1.2 million. The auction house had described the lot as offered under a settlement with Flavian's heirs, negotiated through Mondex Corporation, a Toronto firm specialising in recovering art looted during the Second World War. Seven descendants challenged that account in a Paris court in September, arguing that only two relatives had signed the settlement and that the rest of the family had not been consulted.

The judges accepted the family's evidence that Flavian had owned the painting, that German forces had confiscated it, and that he had taken steps after the war to recover his property. The court declared every sale of the work since its seizure null and void, and ordered its return to Flavian's descendants. Sotheby's was also ordered to reveal the identity of the anonymous buyer from the 2024 sale within two months, failing which it will face a fine of €1,000 for each day of delay. The judgment takes effect immediately, even if an appeal is lodged.

An appeal is already planned. Mondex consultant James Palmer told ARTnews the firm would challenge the decision at once, arguing that the archives of dealer Paul Rosenberg and the 1939 catalogue raisonné of Pissarro's work both record the British artist and collector Edward Le Bas as the painting's owner from 1939 into the early 1950s, which would rule out a wartime seizure from Flavian. Palmer also criticised France for having no formal restitution framework, unlike Britain, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands, where he said the benefit of the doubt is presumed to favour the claimant.