Rehearing with a Chance of Restitution: The Effects of Rainfall and Recent Developments on Rue Saint Honoré

By Parsa Zaheri

Something is stirring once again in connection with the Parisian street of Rue Saint-Honoré, as a legal case that was once thought to be entirely wrapped up is now budding from new legal developments. In 1939, Nazi officials compelled Lilly Cassirer, a Jewish woman from Berlin, to sell a painting by Camille Pissarro which had been in her husband’s family collection since 1900. After 1939, the painting passed through multiple different hands before ending up in Spain at the Thyssen-Bornemisza (Thyssen) Museum in 1976. The painting in question was Pissarro’s Rue Saint-Honoré in the Afternoon, Effect of Rain, an iconic Impressionist oil painting made by Pissarro while looking out from his hotel window onto the Rue Saint-Honoré, a historic Parisian street.

This case has already been discussed by the Supreme Court in the Cassirer v. Thyssen Bornemisza Collection Foundation from 2022. This particular case has become one of the longest-running restitution sagas, outperforming U.S. v. Portrait of Wally.

Beginning in 2005, the heirs of Lilly Cassirer, who had moved to California earlier in 1980, began litigation to recover the Pissarro. Numerous legal questions were brought up during the course of two decades of restitution efforts, such as the pivotal one of whether U.S. courts had jurisdiction over international entities, such as the Thyssen Museum, an instrumentality of the Spanish State, and what the right law is to apply when hearing a restitution dispute in a U.S. Court. This particular case was granted not only a hearing in the U.S. Supreme Court, but it also led to modifications to California law, extending the statute of limitations and mandating the choice of law selection. Eventually, in 2022, the Supreme Court granted certiorari for the first time and agreed to hear the case, leading to the Supreme Court case in Cassirer v. Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation, where the court decided that federal law should not have been applied in this case under choice-of-law rules, and that state choice-of-law rules should be applied instead. Soon after, the Ninth Circuit applied California’s choice-of-law rules and determined that Spanish law should be used in determining the rightful ownership of the Pissarro. The Cassirer case seemed to be settled once and for all, as Spanish law emphasizes the importance of good faith acquisitions as a determinant of rightful ownership; on the other hand, California law tends to prioritize the claims the original owners have to their looted property.^[1]