
1880 4 Gustave Caillebotte, Man on a Balcony, 1880 The rue de Rivoli, May 1871 5. However, it took three long years to put that all together and recover the treasured paintings. Title: Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise, 1872 1 Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise, 1872 2 Caillebotte, Floor Scrapers, 1875 3 Caillebotte, Oarsmen, c.

Somehow the paintings were taken from Paris to Japan and then sent to Corsica where they were discovered in an empty villa in Porto-Vecchio. It didn’t help that they found the Marmottan museum catalog where he had circled each of the 9 paintings that were stolen.
#HISTORY OF MONET IMPRESSION SUNRISE 1872 SERIES#
The Cortots were recovered and a series of investigations of his phone records found some odd details. Locked away he met two other French prisoners locked away for art thefts, Philippe Jamin and Youssef Khimoun, and hatched a plan.įast forward to 1987 and Balestrazzin paying him a visit in Japan. Fujikuma had his hands in everything and in 1978 he was caught with over 7 kilos of heroin in France and sentenced to five years in a French prison. Stolen from Eastern France in 1984 the paintings were linked to the head of the Japanese crime syndicate Yakuza, Shuinichi Fujikuma. Two Renoirs, a painting by Berthe Morisot, and five Monets that also included Impression, Sunrise, and was gone in a matter of minutes.įor two years there wasn’t a single lead until the commissioner of the art theft department Mirielle Balestrazzin tracked down four stolen Cortot paintings in Japan. A few minutes later, three masked men with guns pushed their way in, forced everyone to the ground, and quickly searched out 9 specific paintings they ripped from the wall. It was an early Sunday morning just after 10 am on October 27, 1985, two ticket-holding gents strolled into the museum. In 1985 Nelly Duhem, daughter of artist Henri Duhem bequeathed her father’s vast Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings of the French masters.Īnother event happened that same year that made headlines around the world. In 1966, Michael Monet, the only surviving child of the great artists gave his entire collection which is the largest concentrated catalog of Monet in the world. In 1934 it was opened as a museum and over the years would be greatly enhanced by two generous donations. His son Paul expanded the collection and upon his death, the home and collection were gifted to the Academie des Beaux-Arts.

Originally a hunting lodge to the Duc de Valmy it was purchased in 1882 by Jules Marmottan who had a large collection of items from the First Empire. The Musee Marmottan Monet is a gem of a museum on the edge of Paris. Georges de Bellio was the lucky winner of such a bargain and passed it down to his daughter until she left it to the Musée Marmottan Monet in 1940 after her death. It hung in the Chateau de Rottembourg until it was seized by the authorities in 1877 and sold at auction for just 210 francs. One day Ernest Hoschede walked in and saw Monet’s Impression and purchased it for 800 francs. The exhibit was held from April 15 to May 15, 1874, in the studio of photographer Nadar on the Boulevard des Capucines.
