La Bretonnerie in the Department of Indre

In April 1941, in occupied France, the ERR, a Nazi agency for seizing art, confiscated part of the stock of the Paris dealer Paul Rosenberg from a bank in Libourne, near Bordeaux. This landscape was among it. That September, at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, where the Germans sorted the seized pictures, Hermann Göring chose it for his own collection. After the war it was recovered at Berchtesgaden in Bavaria, returned to France in January 1946 and handed to the Rosenbergs that May. Their New York gallery sold it in 1947 to the diplomat Averell Harriman and his wife Marie, whose foundation gave it to Washington in 1972. Courbet had painted it in 1856 in the Indre département and given it to his friend Clément Laurier, a lawyer. The signature and the date, 56, are still there in red in the lower left corner, beside the stream.