In 1968, the Royal Library of Belgium, the predecessor of the KBR, purchased the painting La buveuse d’absinthe in good faith from the Parisian art dealer Marcel Lecomte. This painting by Félicien Rops had previously been owned by Armand Dorville. The French lawyer, who was unmarried and childless, owned a rich collection of 450 paintings: works by Bonnard, Degas, Delacroix, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Pissarro and Félicien Rops… When he died in Cubjac, in the Dordogne, in 1941, the Vichy government barred his sisters and nieces from claiming his inheritance. Most of his relatives were deported and murdered in Auschwitz. Meanwhile, in 1942, the General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs ordered the liquidation of Armand Dorville’s assets.
After the liberation, his rightful heirs received symbolic compensation that fell far short of the actual value of the sold assets. In 2019, with the help of the French Mission for Restitution, they began demanding the return of paintings held at the Musée d’Orsay, the Louvre or the Château de Compiègne. Two years later, the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin symbolically returned a Pissarro to them, only to buy it back, with their consent, at a fair price. The same ethical approach now underpins the decision by the Belgian Minister for Science Policy, Vanessa Matz (Les Engagés), to return La buveuse d’absinthe to the descendants of Armand Dorville’s family.
The case is not actually new. The issue had already made the headlines in 2020. The ball started rolling when Geert Sels reported in De Standaard in early 2020 that the Royal Library had acquired a watercolour by Félicien Rops from a forced auction in Nice. The then Minister for the Budget and Civil Service, the Liberal David Clarinval, had already expressed his support for restitution at the time. At the end of 2022, following the publication of the book Art for the Reich (available in English soon), claims arose concerning works in the Fine Arts Museums of Brussels, Ghent and Antwerp.
More info:
- Koninklijke Bibliotheek geeft geroofde Félicien Rops terug (De Standaard)
- La Bibliothèque royale de Belgique restitue un tableau aux descendants d’un collectionneur spolié sous Vichy (Le Monde)
- « C’est la décision la plus importante de mon mandat » : un tableau spolié par les nazis, symboliquement restitué par la Belgique (Le Soir)
