How Rose Valland helped the Monuments Men to recover Nicolas de Largillierre’s Portrait of a woman

Rose Valland was a humble administrative functionary at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris — or so believed the German forces who occupied the city during the Second World War. In fact, she was a curator at the museum in question, which was being used by the Nazis to warehouse the tens of thousands of artworks they were looting from French collections, particularly those with Jewish owners.

Unbeknownst to them, she was also fluent in German, a meticulous note-taker, and a member of the French Resistance. Risking her life in the process, Valland performed the remarkable feat of keeping track of work after work that came into the Jeu de Paume, and work after work that subsequently left it.

‘Almost everything I saw and heard ended in my notes,’ she said. At the war’s end, these actions would prove crucial when it came to discovering repositories of looted art and returning myriad items to their rightful owners.

One painting tracked down and returned in this way was Portrait d’une femme, à mi-corps (Portrait of a woman, half-length) by Nicolas de Largillierre, which is being offered in the Maîtres Anciens: Peintures — Dessins — Sculptures sale at Christie’s in Paris on 21 November 2024.

With propitious timing, Valland’s wartime memoir, Le front de l’art: Défense des collections françaises 1939-1945, originally published in French in 1961, has just been translated into English for the first time. It is being published on 22 November 2024 under the title of The Art Front: The Defense of French Collections 1939-1945, with a launch event in December at Christie’s in New York.

Born in Paris in 1656, Nicolas de Largillierre was one of Europe’s leading portrait painters in the final decades of the 17th century and the initial decades of the 18th. He spent much of his early career in England, as assistant to Sir Peter Lely, Principal Painter to King Charles II.

He executed Portrait d’une femme, à mi-corps around 1700, after his permanent return to France. It depicts a now unknown woman from the aristocracy or haute bourgeoisie. Boasting porcelain skin and wrapped in a shimmering red and silver cape, she is elegantly integrated into an outdoor setting, with some trees on the left and a rock face on the right. The picture showcases many of the gifts for which Largillierre is renowned, including sumptuous surfaces and gorgeous colours.

Fast-forward to the late 1930s, and the painting was in the collection of Baron Philippe de Rothschild, a successful Jewish winemaker who — through management of the family vineyard, Château Mouton Rothschild — was helping popularise Bordeaux wines worldwide.

Aware of the antisemitic measures being adopted by the Nazis in Germany, and also the threat posed by Hitler’s expansionist foreign policy, Rothschild packed up his artworks (including the Largillierre) in crates and put them into storage.

Upon the Nazi occupation of France in 1940, however, Rothschild was arrested by the Vichy government and stripped of his French citizenship. His assets were seized — vineyard and art collection included. His crates were found in a bank vault outside Bordeaux and removed to the Jeu de Paume in February 1941.

There, the works were processed by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), a task force specially created by the Nazis to appropriate art from Jewish dealers, gallerists and collectors, alongside other cultural property from across occupied Europe. The ERR decided to transfer Portrait d’une femme and the rest of Rothschild’s collection to Neuschwanstein Castle in south-east Germany.

Located in the foothills of the Alps, this fairytale-like fortress had been the brainchild of King Ludwig II of Bavaria in the 19th century. Now it was being used as a depot for thousands of paintings and other items (such as furniture, sculptures and jewellery) that were among the nearly 22,000 objects stolen by the Nazis in France.

The ERR established a number of such repositories in Germany and Austria between 1941 and 1945, the one at Neuschwanstein foremost among them. In the words of Lynn H. Nicholas, in her 1994 book The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War, their plan was ‘the complete rearrangement of Europe’s entire patrimony in accordance with Nazi ideology’. This was to include the building of a super-museum in Hitler’s name in his home town of Linz in Austria.

There was a war to fight first, though. And the Nazis had no idea that Valland, the quiet, bespectacled employee at the Jeu de Paume, was eavesdropping on their conversations and taking secret notes on the destinations of train and truck shipments. The ERR gave each work an inventory number, and Valland also recorded these — in the case of Portrait d’une femme, à mi-corps, ‘R437’, a number still marked on the stretcher of the canvas.

When Paris was liberated in 1944, Valland shared her information with Lieutenant James Rorimer, one of some 350 members of the Allied forces’ Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives programme. Colloquially known as the ‘Monuments Men’, these were museum curators, art historians, architects, artists and librarians tasked with finding and protecting as many looted items as possible. Their story was told in a 2014 movie starring and co-written by George Clooney, The Monuments Men.

Armed with Valland’s information, Rorimer — a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who would later go on to become its director — set out for Neuschwanstein. There, on 4 May 1945, in the war’s final days, he and a small number of troops at his disposal found the vast trove that Valland had told him about. In the nick of time, too, before the Germans had had the chance to move the items on again, or worse, destroy them.

The Monuments Men’s whole operation is immortalised in a now iconic photograph of Rorimer, together with a trio of US Seventh Army soldiers, on the steps of Neuschwanstein. Standing to the rear with a notebook, he looks knowingly at the camera, while the other three men each hold a rescued painting — including, on the far right, Portrait d’une femme, à mi-corps by Largillierre, now being offered at Christie’s.

The photograph has been reproduced countless times over the years, having featured on the original cover of The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel and Bret Witter — the million-selling 2009 book on which Clooney’s film was based.

The Largillierre portrait was returned to Paris in November 1945, before being officially restituted to the Rothschild family six months later. It remained in their collection until 1978, when it was acquired by its current owner.

Edsel recently described the painting as ‘a piece of history that takes us to ground zero of the greatest theft in history’.

After the war, Valland worked for many years with the Monuments Men, helping to restore looted items to their original owners. It’s estimated that, thanks to her, more than 60,000 items were recovered for France. She also served as a witness at the Nuremberg Trials.

For her heroic efforts, she received multiple honours in later life, including a Resistance Medal. The French government named her both an Officer of the Legion of Honour and a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters. She was awarded the Medal of Freedom by the United States, too.

Valland died in 1980, aged 81. She had always longed for an English translation of Le front de l’art, in the hope of making the book accessible to a wider public. That wish is, posthumously, now coming true. Tellingly, and poignantly, she dedicated her book ‘to all those who fought during the last war to save some of the beauty of the world’.

Christie’s is proud to support the Monuments Men and Women Foundation’s publication of Rose Valland’s memoir, The Art Front: The Defense of French Collections 1939-1945, the very first translation into English of Rose Valland's memoir, translated by Ophélie Jouan, Rose Valland expert and art historian, and with an introduction by Foundation founder and chairman Robert M. Edsel. Learn more about Christie’s Restitution