It appears, memorably, in a snapshot taken in May 1945 of American soldiers on the steps of Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria — a painted portrait of a woman in a shimmering gown with porcelain skin and curly silver hair.
The portrait and two other old master paintings are held by American soldiers in combat fatigues who have just liberated them from a Nazi storehouse of looted art.
The G.I.s were helping the Monuments Men, a special U.S. Army unit that tracked down millions of works of art stolen by the Germans during World War II.
The image became a resonant depiction of the unit’s role in undoing Nazi evil and restoring part of European heritage to its rightful place.
Now the portrait, by the French court painter Nicolas de Largillièrre from the era of Louis XIV, is to be auctioned next month at Christie’s.
Marc Porter, chairman of Christie’s Americas, said he expected the connection to the historic photograph to attract potential buyers. “The Monuments Men photographs taught the world about the Nazi spoliation,” he said. “This is not the story of a restitution of a work that’s enormously valuable, but it has the depth of the story and the history.”
Christie’s has estimated the value as between 50,000 and 80,000 euros (or about $55,000 to $88,000). It has not disclosed the name of the seller.
Robert Edsel used the photograph on the cover of a 2009 book that he wrote with Brett Witter: “The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History.” (The book was adapted in 2014 into a film directed by and starring George Clooney.)
“Someone recognized a photo op and took it,” Edsel said of the image, which shows James Rorimer, the Army captain who led the Monuments Men and who was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, scribbling notes behind the troops.
The Largillièrre portrait, “Portrait de femme a mi-corps” (“Portrait of a woman, half length”), was looted in France from the Rothschild family in 1941, put on a train and stored in the German castle. Meticulous note taking by a curator at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris led to its retrieval.
Baron Philippe de Rothschild, a Grand Prix racecar driver, theater producer and winemaker, likely inherited the painting from his father, Henri de Rothschild. In 1922, Philippe began managing the family vineyard, Château Mouton-Rothschild, helping to popularize Bordeaux wines.
In the late 1930s, recognizing the threat of Adolf Hitler’s antisemitic Third Reich, Rothschild, who was Jewish, packed up two crates of artworks, including the Largillièrre, and placed them in storage in Bordeaux, according to research from the Christie’s restitution department.
After the Nazis invaded France, he tried to escape to North Africa, but was arrested in 1940 by the Vichy government, which stripped him of his French citizenship and seized his vineyard, assets and art collection.
His art crates were discovered and moved to the Jeu de Paume, where a special Nazi task force, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, or E.R.R., sorted through art taken from French museums and French Jews and selected items to loot.
Unbeknown to the Germans, the Jeu de Paume’s curator, Rose Valland, was working for the resistance. She secretly copied the E.R.R. art confiscation inventory and photograph archive, keeping track of each work’s destination.
For the Largillièrre, Valland jotted down its E.R.R. inventory number, R437 — still marked on the stretcher of the canvas — and its shipment destination: the Schloss Neuschwanstein, a 19th-century Gothic castle in Füssen, in the foothills of the Alps.
The portrait and other looted works from the Rothschild collection left Paris in March 1941, stored in the heated cars of a first-class passenger train, according to Héctor Feliciano’s book, “The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art.”
The following month, Philippe de Rothschild was released from jail and fled to London, where he joined the Free French Forces. His wife, Élisabeth, was arrested later in 1941 by the Gestapo and was sent to a concentration camp, where she died.
When Paris was liberated in 1945, Valland provided her information to Rorimer, whose unit was formally known as the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives program, and included participants from 14 nations. Rorimer’s team made it to Bavaria in the nick of time, Edsel said.
“It was a race to get to Germany and to get to these locations before these most hard-core Nazis start destroying not only the art but also the records of the theft,” he said.
A year after the snapshot of the Largillièrre recovery was taken, the painting was back with the Rothschild family in Paris. It remained with family members until 1978, when it was sold to its current owner.
“She’d been rescued along with thousands of other compatriots thanks to Rose Valland, at risk of her life,” Edsel said. He called the portrait “a piece of history that takes us to ground zero of the greatest theft in history.”
The post For Sale: A Painting the Monuments Men Rescued From the Nazis appeared first on New York Times.