A historic portrait by the French Baroque artist Nicolas de Largillière with a storied history has sold for €529,000 ($550,000) at auction, vaulting past the presale estimate of €50,000 to €80,000 ($55,000 to $88,000). Looted by the Nazis during World War II, the portrait was famously featured in a photo of the Monuments Men recovering it from Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany following the war.
The painting, titled Portrait d’une femme, à mi-corps, was stolen from the bank vault of Baron Philippe de Rothschild in 1940 and was stored for most of the war at the Jeu de Paume in occupied Paris.
Rose Valland, a curator at the museum who was fluent in German, deceived Nazi occupiers into believing she was merely an administrative worker. She then took detailed notes of what items entered and exited the museum during the Nazi occupation, which led to the Monuments Men being able to recover the work from the Neuschwanstein Castle.
The Largillière painting is one of three in the April 1945 photo, which shows U.S. Army Capt. James J. Rorimer—a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York before the war who later became its director—overseeing American soldiers recovering 5,000 looted paintings and 20,000 other objects from the castle. Sergeant Antonio “Anthony” T. Valim of California holds the Largillière painting in the photograph.
The French government returned the work in May 1946 to Baron Rothschild, who survived the war after fleeing to London. His wife Élisabeth died in a concentration camp. The work remained in the Rothschild collection until 1978, when the current owner bought it at auction.
That anonymous owner offered the work for sale at Christie’s “Maîtres Anciens: Peintures, Dessins, Sculptures” sale in Paris on November 21,
“This highly symbolic lot attracted numerous bidders for a very active bidding battle,” Christie’s said in a news release after the sale.
In its lot essay ahead of the sale, the auction house wrote that “there are some works of art whose historical significance surpasses their aesthetic quality,” like the Largillière portrait.
“Its image seems familiar to us, as it appears in a photograph that has been reproduced many times, immortalizing the immense task undertaken by the Monuments Men … to recover throughout Europe the many works of art despoiled under the Third Reich,” the essay reads.
Largillierre was one of Europe’s leading portrait artists from the late 1600s into the early 1700s. According to the Artnet Price Database, the artist’s auction record stands at €1.57 million ($1.85 million) and was set at Christie’s Paris in 2020.
