The Schloss Story: Art, War, and Restitution

In their upcoming Old Masters Evening Sale and Online Sale, Christie’s Paris will auction eight paintings that were once part of the renowned Adolphe Schloss collection, a private art collection that was seized and divided during World War II through forced sales and legal maneuvers involving both French and German authorities. While the recent restitution of several of the seven Schloss paintings featured in the Online Sale is emblematic of the broader, ongoing efforts to address the injustices of Nazi-era cultural theft, the wartime history of the Schloss collection itself reveals more than a loss. It serves as an illuminating case study of the political power struggles and opportunism that defined the complex dynamics of Franco-German collaboration and rivalry in acquiring works of art during the occupation of France.

The Collection

“The importance of these three hundred paintings by seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish masters, collected throughout the life of the late Adolphe Schloss, cannot be overstated.” Rose Valland, The Art Front (2024)

Adolphe Schloss (1842–1910), a German of Jewish heritage, immigrated to Paris, where he married Lucie Mathilde Haas (1858–1938) and assembled a renowned collection of Old Master paintings. The majority were seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish works—masterpieces and those by their lesser-known contemporaries alike—interspersed with other European schools and hung throughout the couple’s residence at 38, avenue Henri-Martin. The collection was a comprehensive curation that exemplified the artistic achievements of Europe. When Adolphe died on New Year’s Eve in 1910, the remaining 333 paintings in his collection were inherited by his wife, and later their children, upon her death in 1938.

Conflict and Confiscation

“Among the artistic depredations that most impacted France, the looting of the Schloss collection was regarded as the most representative example of the methods and excuses employed.” Rose Valland, The Art Front (2024)

Anticipating that the impending armed conflict would reach Paris and threaten the collection, the Schloss children had it transferred in its entirety from the family residence to the Château du Chambon, near Tulle, in the small village of Laguenne in August 1939. There, it was entrusted to the care of the Banque Jordaan and secured within its vaults.

Vintage postcard of Château du Chambon, surrounded by trees on a grassy hill. Text reads: La Corrèze Illustrée, LAGUENNE—Château du Chambon. — Château du Chambon, where the Schloss collection was evacuated for safekeeping in August 1939. Photo via Cartorum

The Schloss collection, well known among European circles of art collectors and dealers alike, was coveted by senior Nazi officials and marked for seizure. German occupation authorities, assisted by French agents, moved quickly in pursuit of the collection, carrying out a raid on the mansion at 38, avenue Henri-Martin in July 1940—just weeks after the French surrender. But this particular instance of Franco-German alliance only discovered empty frames, as the paintings themselves were hundreds of kilometers away in Chambon. The château lay south of the demarcation line that separated German-occupied France from the supposed Free Zone controlled by the Vichy regime. This geopolitical boundary perhaps initially impeded German efforts to trace and seize the collection but also ensured that Vichy officials would be involved, in some capacity, when it was discovered.

However, the dynamics of this Franco-German collaboration shifted drastically when Germany invaded and occupied the Free Zone in late 1942. The Vichy regime was stripped of its territory and administrative autonomy; it no longer held the jurisdictional advantage. The French would have to contend with the efforts of their German occupiers if they wanted the collection for themselves. The creation of the French central agency the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives (CGQJ) had escalated the Vichy government’s antisemitic stance and aligned their anti-Jewish legislation and actions closer to that of the Germans, further asserting their role as an opportunistic competitor in the acquisition and liquidation of Jewish assets for the benefit of the French state. Although it took nearly three years into the occupation, representatives of the CGQJ with assistance from Nazi agents seized the Schloss collection in ten crates from the vaults of Chambon and a nearby storage facility in Tulle in April 1943. The holdings were temporarily relocated to the Banque de France in Limoges upon intervention from Vichy officials—who were vying to maintain control of the collection—before being transferred to the Banque Dreyfus and CGQJ headquarters in Paris that August.

“These paintings provoked clashes between the most powerful figures who were either for or against the confiscation of works of art.” Rose Valland, The Art Front (2024)

document — An inventory page from a bound volume listing the Schloss paintings chosen for the Führermuseum and those selected by the Louvre in its preemption. The Isenbrandt painting is listed as no. 281. National Archives (NAID 312293741)

It was throughout this time that the fate of the Schloss collection was subjected to negotiations between the highest Vichy and Nazi officials and their intermediaries. The French planned to integrate the Schloss works into their national collections, which ran contrary to the German intentions of offering the collection to Hitler for his planned Führermuseum in Linz. Meanwhile, the Louvre leadership—headed by Jacques Jaujard, the director of the French National Museums—prepared to exercise its legal right of preemption, which would allow the French state to block any sale of the Schloss holdings to the Germans by exercising its right of first refusal. The Louvre preempted forty-nine works after their arrival in Paris and transported them to its repository at the Château de Sourches. It was a clandestine Resistance operation cloaked in a Vichy legal maneuver that ultimately saved those works from the unfortunate fate of being transported to Germany. They were the first paintings restituted to the Schloss heirs in 1946.

According to Rose Valland in her memoir The Art Front (2024) (originally published in French as Le Front de l’Art in 1961), Hitler angrily proclaimed that he had been left with nothing more than “beautiful crumbs” upon learning that the French National Museums had been given priority in its selections from the Schloss collection. With approval from the Vichy government, 262 Schloss paintings were purchased for the Führermuseum and transferred from the CGQJ to the Jeu de Paume in early November 1943, in preparation for their shipment to the Führerbau in Munich later that month. The remaining twenty-two paintings were disposed of on the art market.

Those paintings destined for the Führermuseum were stored at the Führerbau until late April 1945, when in the final moments of the war, the building was ransacked by the masses, who were desperately searching for provisions. By the time the US Army secured the former Nazi headquarters, the Schloss works were gone. The building soon became integral to the Allied restitution operation when the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program (MFAA) established the Munich Central Collecting Point at its location. In the aftermath of the theft, the MFAA, with assistance from local law enforcement, were able to recover nearly 100 of the looted Schloss works.

Contemporary Restitutions and Sales

Collectively, the eight former Schloss paintings being auctioned in the upcoming Christie’s Old Masters sales demonstrate the discerning curation of Schloss, who ensured his collection represented the artistic heights of each artist’s respective period and his personal tastes. They are also representative of the diverging paths taken by Schloss works after the collection was dismantled by French and German authorities in 1943. Their provenances exemplify the need for ongoing research to decipher the complicated histories of works of art affected by Nazi-era theft, verify their legitimate ownership, and ensure just solutions.

In the Evening Sale, Adriaen Isenbrandt’s intimate portrait of the Madonna and Child set against a rolling landscape offers a refined example of early Netherlandish painting. When René Huyghe, senior Louvre curator and paintings department head, assessed the Schloss collection while it was sequestered in Paris, he noted to Jaujard, “Paintings by great primitive masters whose absence from the Louvre Museum we have long deplored, and which have become extremely rare…a Virgin by Adrien Isenbrandt.” Louvre officials preempted this panel, diverting it from being transported to Germany and instead to the care of French art administrators at the Sourches repository until the war’s end. In July 1946, it was returned to the Schloss heirs and soon thereafter appeared at auction.

Painting of a woman holding a baby, set in an ornate frame with red accents. The back shows labels and text, hinting at art details. — **Lot 6** | ADRIAEN ISENBRANDT, *Vierge à l'Enfant dans un paysage (Virgin and Child in a Landscape)* Images courtesy of Christie’s

Five paintings in the Online Sale are lesser-known artists from the Dutch Golden Age—genre scenes and portraiture of high technical quality that were iconic of that period. These were among the 262 paintings that were transferred to the Führerbau and subsequently looted before entering private collections in Germany after the war.

Images courtesy of Christie’s

Lastly, a pair of small tondo portraits of the Virgin and Mary Magdalene set within a landscape, dating to around 1500, reveal a clear Sienese influence in their handling of form and color. These two panels were among the twenty-two works that entered the art market under mysterious circumstances. Jean-François Lefranc, an opportunistic art dealer associated with the CGQJ and the appointed administrator and liquidator of the Schloss collection, supposedly sold the works to a Mr. Buitenweg, an art dealer in Amsterdam. Yet his claims are supported by evidence that is circumstantial at best and suggest his involvement actually extended beyond what he admitted to.

Two framed paintings of haloed women in ornate gold frames. Left: praying woman in dark attire. Right: woman with long hair holding a book. — **Lot 132** | MAÎTRE DE GRISELDA (Master of Griselda), *La Vierge dans un paysage ; Marie Madeleine dans un paysage (The Virgin in a Landscape; Mary Magdalene in a Landscape)* Images courtesy of Christie’s

The seizure of the Schloss collection is just one of the notable instances of Nazi-era looting in France recounted in The Art Front, the first English edition of Rose Valland’s French memoir, Le Front de l’Art. Published by the Monuments Men and Women Foundation with financial support from Christie’s, it details Valland’s firsthand account of her courageous efforts to secretly document the Nazi looting operations from within the Jeu de Paume museum—risking her life to ensure the recovery of stolen works of art after the war.