The heirs of a lady who was pressured to give up a portray to the Nazis have been dealt a blow on Tuesday in a decades-long authorized feud between them and the Spanish museum that now owns the work, when a California appellate court docket dominated that the museum ought to retain possession.

The ruling, in one of many longest-running Nazi restitution circumstances, entails a Camille Pissarro portray titled “Rue Saint-Honoré Après-midi, Effet de Pluie” (“Rue Saint-Honoré in the Afternoon, Effect of Rain”) that’s estimated to be value thousands and thousands of {dollars}. The portray was surrendered by a Jewish lady, Lilly Cassirer, to get an exit visa from Germany in 1939. The work was purchased by the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation, and ultimately ended up in a museum owned by the Spanish authorities.

On Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit dominated that Spanish regulation, not California regulation, applies to the case, and that the museum has “prescriptive title” to the portray after shopping for it in 1993.

Sam Dubbin, a lawyer for David Cassirer, Lilly’s great-grandson and the principal plaintiff within the case, wrote in an e-mail to The New York Times that the court docket’s choice was incorrect and that Cassirer can be in search of an en banc assessment by a panel of 11 judges.

“The Cassirers believe that, especially in light of the explosion of antisemitism in this country and around the world today, they must challenge Spain’s continuing insistence on harboring Nazi looted art,” Dubbin wrote. “This decision also gives a green light to looters around the world.”

Lawyers for the museum mentioned in an e-mail that the ruling was “a welcome conclusion to this case.”

Cassirer’s heirs, who now dwell in Southern California, have been locked within the authorized battle in opposition to the museum since 2005, when Claude Cassirer, David’s father (who has since died), initially filed a lawsuit. The heirs contend that the museum ought to return the portray to the unique homeowners. The museum’s legal professionals have argued that its curators didn’t know the portray was stolen and beneath Spanish regulation bear no accountability for returning it, whereas Cassirer’s legal professionals have argued that the museum’s curators would have found the theft if that they had executed their due diligence in researching the historical past of the portray.

The key authorized difficulty has been whether or not Spanish or U.S. regulation ought to govern on this scenario. The Cassirer household confronted a sequence of setbacks after a number of courts discovered that Spanish regulation ruled the case, and the museum retained possession of the portray.

The Cassirers then petitioned the Supreme Court, which took the case. In a unanimous choice in 2022, the court docket despatched the case again to the appellate degree, ruling that the decrease court docket ought to evaluate Spanish regulation with California regulation, as an alternative of federal regulation, in evaluating the case.

Neither occasion to the lawsuit disputes the info of the case surrounding Lilly Cassirer’s give up of the work. And in 1958, Germany paid her compensation of about $265,000 in at the moment’s {dollars}.

The portray was later offered at a Nazi authorities public sale and handed by way of the fingers of quite a lot of collectors, together with ones within the United States, earlier than being bought by Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza in 1976. The Spanish authorities purchased the baron’s artwork assortment, together with the portray, in 1993 and it has been on show on the museum ever since. In 2000, Claude Cassirer found that the portray was on the museum.

In a concurring opinion for the Ninth Circuit Court, Judge Consuelo M. Callahan wrote that whereas she agreed with the court docket’s choice that the Spanish museum was not legally obligated to return the portray, she believed the museum nonetheless had an ethical obligation to take action.