The painting Bord de Mer by Claude Monet was created in 1865 and was bought in 1936 at an art auction in Austria by the Jewish couple Adabelt and Hilda Parlagio. However, they did not enjoy him for long. Two years later, their country was annexed by Germany, and the couple had to flee in a hurry, leaving more or less all their belongings, including a number of works of art, in a warehouse.
In 1940, all their possessions were confiscated by the Nazis, and subsequently the work of the prominent Impressionist artist came into the possession of a German art dealer. A year later, the image was lost, the website said The Guardian referring to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
Adabelt Parlagio tried to find the painting after the end of the war, but was unsuccessful until her death in 1981. The search for his son, who died in 2012, also ended without success.
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The FBI got involved in the case in 2021, when it was contacted by the non-profit organization Commission for Looted Art in Europe, whose field of activity is the search for looted works of art. She discovered that in 2017 the apparently lost Monet painting came into the possession of an art dealer in New Orleans, who sold it to private collectors two years later.
The new owners did not resist
Federal agents then discovered the painting at an auction in Houston and immediately contacted its owner. They had no idea about the story of this work and quite surprisingly agreed without hesitation to return it to the heirs of Mr. and Mrs. Parlagio, who are their granddaughters Francoise Parlagio and Helen Lowe.
“While this Monet is undoubtedly very expensive, its real value lies in what it represents to the Parlagio family. It’s about connecting with their history and a legacy that has almost been erased. The emotion involved in returning something like this cannot be measured in dollars, it is priceless,” FBI Deputy Director James Dennehy said in a statement.
However, American federal police continue to search for other works of art that were stolen by the Nazis from the Parlagios. One of them is, for example, another valuable painting, the Pont de Grenelle watercolor from 1903, by the French neo-impressionist Paul Signac.
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