The painting, View of the Sea from Haut Cagnes (ca. 1910), was originally owned by Jakob Goldschmidt, one of the most influential bankers in Weimar Germany and a major collector of Old Masters and Impressionist art in the 1920s. He was also a major patron of Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie. Nazi persecution forced Goldschmidt to flee in 1933 to Switzerland, before emigrating to the United States, where he died in 1955.

Some of Goldschmidt’s art collection stayed behind in Berlin, however, as collateral for a loan. In 1941, the Nazis seized the collection, which included the Renoir painting. The work was sold at the Berlin auction house Hans W. Lange later that year. It came up for sale again in 1960 at Galerie Nathan in Zurich. It was later purchased by Fritz Berg, the first president of the BDI association of German industry; after the passing of Berg’s widow, in 1989, their collection went to the Osthaus Museum in Hagen, where it has remained.

The city restituted the painting to the banker’s heirs and then repurchased it so it can remain on view at the Osthaus Museum. The painting will be displayed with information about Goldschmidt.

“The heirs of Jakob Goldschmidt are happy to have reached a satisfactory agreement for both sides in this matter after more than 15 years of intensive discussions,” their lawyer Sabine Rudolph said in a statement. “The restitution of the painting is a recognition of the fact that their grandfather suffered great wrongs under the Nazi regime, including huge financial losses.”

The repurchase was funded by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, the German culture ministry, and the Cultural Foundation of the States.

The work in question is Pissarro’s 1903 harbor scene painting The Anse des Pilotes, Le Havre, painted in the final year of the artist’s life. According to the suit, the work was purchased by German collector Ludwig Kainer in 1904 from the artist’s son. It was most recently displayed at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta in 2014.

The group of heirs—who are residents of Massachusetts, Florida, Australia, Chile, the Netherlands, Germany, and Bolivia—consist of grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Kainer, as well as the descendants of cousins of his wife Margaret, who was Jewish.

In the suit, the Kainers’ heirs claim that the Pissarro work could be held by the couple Gerald D. and Pearlann Horowitz, their son Scott, or their family foundation, and that the work may be somewhere in or around Atlanta. “Upon learning of the Horowitzes’ possession of the Painting, the heirs of the Kainers demanded the immediate return of the Painting. The Horowitzes have refused to acknowledge the Plaintiffs’ claim or to return the Painting,” the complaint reads.

The Kainers owned over 400 artworks, much of which Margaret had inherited from her father, Norbert Levy. Ludwig Kainer purchased the Pissarro prior to his marriage to Margaret. In 1932, Margaret and Ludwig Kainer traveled to Switzerland to receive medical care. Because of how quickly the Nazi party rose to power, they never returned to Germany. Instead, they moved to France, where they lived until their deaths (Ludwig in 1967 and Margaret in 1968). At some point in the years following their relocation from Germany, the Kainers’ art holdings were seized by the Nazis and subsequently auctioned. The Pissarro work that the Kainers’ heirs are attempting to reclaim was sold at auction in 1935.

After World War II, the Kainers registered the Pissarro work with the French Department of Reparations and Restitutions, which included it in a 1948 directory of stolen art. The Kainers didn’t have children together, and both died without a will.

The suit claims that Gerald purchased the painting in 1995 from Achim Moeller Fine Art, a New York–based art dealership, and that Horowitz and Moeller allegedly were aware of the painting’s status as a looted artwork at the time of the sale. Joseph A. Patella, a lawyer for the Horowitz family, told the Times that the family had no comment on the new lawsuit.

In emails to the Times, Moeller said, “I can say that my gallery did exercise care and due diligence into the provenance of artworks at that time and has since then,” adding, “I would never have knowingly sold a work of art that had been stolen in Germany during that time.”

According to the Times, others have also claimed to be the heirs of the Kainers. A Swiss family foundation, founded by Margaret’s father Norbert Levy in 1927, has received “proceeds from the sales of some artworks that had belonged to the Kainers as well as war reparations from the German government,” according to the Times report. The heirs disputed this, telling the publication the foundation in its current form is a “sham.”

Attributed to Pierre Louis Goudreaux, A Loving Glance, n.d.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan will seek the return of an undated painting attributed to Pierre Louis Goudreaux, a 18th-century student of the Rococo painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard that was looted during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine.

The painting in question has gone through various name changes throughout its history, according to an investigation by the FBI. When it first entered the collection of the Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko National Museum of the Arts in Kiev in 1924, as a bequest by collector Vasilii Aleksandrovich Shchavinskii, the work was titled A Family Portrait and attributed to Fragonard. (After it entered the Khanenko’s collection, the museum’s deputy director conducted further research into its creation and reclassified it as being made “after Fragonard.”)

While many artworks were removed from museums and displayed in private residences for top Nazi officials during World War II, the painting, which was on display throughout the 1930s, was never listed in any ledgers as being among those transported from the Khanenko, the FBI claims. And while the Khanenko moved some works in order to protect them from wartime damage, the painting was allegedly not among those transported for that reason. After the occupation of Ukraine ended in 1944, the work was listed as missing under the name An Amorous Couple. In 1998, it was included in a catalogue of looted works and added to the German Lost Art Foundation’s database.

In January of 2013, Doyle Auctions in New York catalogued the work with the title A Loving Glance. It was said to have been in a London private collection before entering a Massachusetts private collection in 1953. It then became property of the Spanierman Gallery in New York, according to a provenance listing in Artnet’s price database. Sometime around early 2013, the Khanenko requested the restitution of the work.

According to the lawsuit, which was filed on Thursday in U.S. District Court, the work is currently in the possession of an unnamed New York auction house, but the suit is being filed in rem, meaning that the lawsuit is against the asset in question (the painting, in this case), and that no legal action is being taken against the owner of the property.

“The occupying forces during World War II believed they had the right to surround themselves with the spoils of their invasion, to include art work that didn’t belong to them,” William F. Sweeney Jr., of the FBI, said in a statement. “The FBI New York Art Crime Team works diligently to restore these paintings and artifacts to their rightful owners because the some of the wounds of that dark time can be mended even decades later.”

Stephan Templ.

©TINA WALZER

“The Republic of Austria made a mistake and this is my fault,” Templ wrote in an e-mail after the high court ruled. “They made a mistake and I have to go to jail.”

Understandably, Templ is incredulous and heartbroken. He is also out of legal options. Barring some sort of presidential pardon—which President Heinz Fischer has granted in the past to alleged perpetrators of nonviolent crimes—Templ will soon be jailed. That he should spend a single second incarcerated is unjust and morally offensive.

In brief, here is Templ’s story: In 2001, along with Tina Walzer, he wrote Unser Wien: “Arisierung” auf österreichisch (Our Vienna: “Aryanization” Austrian Style), which documented in a detailed and critical way the extent to which the Nazis and their Austrian collaborators appropriated properties in Vienna—apartment buildings, cinemas, pharmacies, even a Ferris wheel—from their Jewish owners.

One of the buildings the Nazis stole was a sanatorium near the Ringstrasse owned by Lothar Furth and his wife, Templ’s relatives. The Nazis “did not pay a penny for it,” Templ wrote me. After the Anschluss, in 1938, the Furths were made to clean the sidewalk in front of their building on their knees with toothbrushes. In utter despair, a month later they injected themselves with a lethal dose of poison. They had no children.

In 2005, Templ learned that the local Hoerner Bank—which was to receive a success fee—was searching for the Furths’ heirs in order to make a restitution claim on their behalf for the confiscated sanatorium. Templ filed a claim for his mother, Helene, a descendant of the Furths’ grandparents. By then, of course, Austria had made a big show of being a signatory to the 1998 State Department–sponsored Washington Principles, which encouraged European governments to pave the way for the return of art and property stolen during World War II.

In 2010, the sanatorium was returned to 39 heirs of Lothar Furth. Together they agreed to sell the building to developers, who are in the process of turning it into upscale condominiums. Templ’s mother, herself a Holocaust survivor, received €1.1 million for her share of the building.

Then things got bizarre. In 2011, a notary at the Hoerner Bank contacted Elisabeth Kretschmer, Templ’s aunt, whom he and his mother had not spoken to in some 30 years, and informed her that she had missed out on her share of the sale proceeds because, although she was a descendant of the Furths, she had not filed a claim. Kretschmer, now 84, then complained to Kurt Hankiewicz, a Viennese prosecutor, that she had been misled. Incredibly, the prosecutor indicted Templ on the charge that because he had not listed his estranged aunt as a potential heir of the Furths when he made the claim on behalf of his mother, he had somehow defrauded the Austrian Republic—because Kretschmer might have given up her inheritance to the state. Adding to the absurdity, Kretschmer later testified that she would never have given up her share of the proceeds of the sale of the sanatorium because she needed the money.

Nevertheless, the judge in Templ’s case, Sonja Weis, ruled that Templ had committed a crime. She said that Templ should have included his estranged aunt in his mother’s claim. To which Templ replied that his only obligation was to his mother and not to his aunt and that—incidentally—none of the other 39 descendants of the Furths had mentioned Kretschmer in their restitution claims either. None of them have been prosecuted. It was Weis’s decision that Templ appealed and has now lost.

The only logical explanation for Templ’s outrageous treatment at the hands of the Austrian justice system is that it is payback for his criticism of the state.

The sentence cannot be allowed to stand. Those who care about justice, fairness, and equity should be deeply offended by the pettiness and the cruelty of the Austrian court’s decision, and should immediately petition President Fischer for a reversal of it.

William D. Cohan’s latest book is The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite and the Corruption of Our Great Universities (Scribner).