Bad News

A young woman has fainted over a letter, and a friend bends over her holding a small bottle of smelling salts, while a spaniel looks on. Marguerite Gérard showed the picture at the Salon of 1804 with a companion piece, a lady at her dressing table reading a letter. That second painting has not been located since 1948.

This one has a long trail with a gap in it. It went through Paris sales in 1810 and 1814, and probably again in 1916, when it was catalogued as The Attentive Friend. Then the record falls silent until 11 April 1942, when the Paris dealer Martin Fabiani sold it for 150,000 francs to Adolf Wüster, who was buying for the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld, in Germany. After the war it came back to France with the first convoy of recovered art from Düsseldorf, in March 1948.

It is one of the works marked MNR, for Musées Nationaux Récupération. The Louvre looks after it but does not own it. Its history between 1933 and 1945 is still incomplete, it has not been restituted, and it is kept for its rightful owners until they are identified. In 2008 it travelled to Jerusalem and Paris for an exhibition about art looted during the Second World War and the search for its owners.