Seated Man with a Cane

Modigliani painted this seated gentleman in 1918. He had left Paris for the south of France to escape both the war and his own worsening tuberculosis, and he had only about two years left to live. We do not know for certain who the sitter was. What we do know is what happened to the picture afterward. By the late 1930s it belonged to Oscar Stettiner, a Jewish art dealer in Paris. When the Germans occupied the city he fled, leaving the painting behind, and in 1944 the occupation authorities sold it off. It surfaced again decades later on the international market, and Stettiner's heirs spent years in court trying to recover it. After a long legal battle a New York court ruled that it had indeed been taken from him under the occupation and ordered it returned to his estate.