Banks of the Loing, Autumn Effect

Sisley had moved to the Loing valley near Moret the year before he painted this, and he stayed in that country of shallow hills and slow water for the rest of his life.

The canvas surfaces again on a German index card. Staff of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the Nazi unit that seized art from Jewish owners, catalogued it at a customs depot in Neuwied on the Rhine as a landscape with a river, a village at the far bend, bare trees in front, oil on canvas, gold frame, signed at the lower left. The card names no owner, and no owner was ever found. American officers logged it into the Munich Central Collecting Point in 1946, and in 1949 it went to Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, the body that placed heirless Jewish property with institutions. It has been in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem since.