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INTRODUCTION
In 2013, a forgotten Cézanne watercolor resurfaced at the National Gallery of Canada after languishing in the museum for more than half a century, tucked away and unfamiliar to virtually all museum staff. At the time of its rediscovery, a local newspaper revealed that the watercolor, Trees, had been held by the National Gallery since 1940 and was never formally acquired by the museum, which begged the question: if the National Gallery did not own the watercolor, who did?1And why was it taking the museum so long to solve the mystery?
The quandary may be traced to an extraordinary story that began during the Second World War. In 1940, the British Admiralty intercepted a passenger ship sailing from Lisbon to New York and escorted it to Bermuda, where customs officers seized several hundred artworks by Impressionist and modern masters. The trove, most of which had belonged to the renowned art dealer Ambroise Vollard, was packed into four crates and shipped to New York aboard the SS Excalibur by the French art dealer Martin Fabiani. British intelligence suspected Fabiani of sending the collection to neutral America to sell on the New York art market for the economic benefit of German-occupied France, and captured the collection as a prize of war. All four crates were sent on by British authorities from Bermuda to Ottawa, Canada, for wartime safekeeping. The National Gallery of Canada stored the collection from 1940 to 1949, when British courts ordered the collection's joint release to Fabiani and to Vollard's sisters; the Cézanne watercolor was inadvertently left behind in the melee of papers strewn about when the collection was divided among the parties. Thus concluded, for a time at least, a notable and intriguing chapter in the collection's saga.
Many provenance researchers and historians are familiar with a version of this story that is both incomplete and often characterized incorrectly as an incident of Nazi-era spoliation. In this paper, I contest the standard version of this account by charting the voyage of the Vollard-Fabiani collection from 1940 to 1949 through a close examination of official correspondence and court records from the U.K., Bermuda, and Canada. The evidence reveals a nuanced story long overshadowed by the startling upheaval of the European...