Poussin story

The Musée des Beaux Arts in Lyons, France, has just three more months to try to raise E15m ($18m), to buy a saleroom sleeper, Poussin’s Flight into Egypt, 1657-58, after it failed to find the sum by its February deadline.

From the Art Newspaper. What I find interesting is this:

The painting was discovered in a sale organised by Olivier Perrin in Versailles in 1986 by the art dealers Robert and Richard Pardo. They had a hunch the grimy “school of Poussin” work was genuine, and bought it for FFr1.6m, ($288,000 at the time). But after Pierre Rosenberg, then director of the Louvre, attributed the work to Poussin, the original owner, Mme Jeanne Barbier de la Serre, went to court, seeking return of the painting. The Pardos fought the case all the way to the Cour de Cassation, France’s highest court, but lost in 2003.

The French are very big on this sort of thing, as everyone in the art and antiques business there knows. Make a really big find, and the odds are very good that you'll end up with nothing in the end, and no compensation for expenses -- let alone legal fees. This has sometimes happened even without the original seller filing suit, the government itself taking the initiative. In this case, the buyers took a considerable risk in buying the painting. If sellers should be allowed to take back paintings if they prove to be worth more than they were sold for, shouldn't buyers be given the same privilege in case a painting should prove to be worth less?

Posted by David on March 23, 2007 10:03 AM