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Page Number: 5.0

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CASSIRER v. THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA COLLECTION 
FOUNDATION 
Opinion of the Court 

century later, Lilly Cassirer inherited the painting and dis-
played it in her Berlin home (as also pictured in the appen-
dix).  But in 1933, the Nazis came to power.  After years of 
intensifying persecution of German Jews, Lilly decided in
1939 that she had to do anything necessary to escape the 
country.  To  obtain  an  exit  visa  to  England,  where  her
grandson Claude Cassirer had already relocated, she sur-
rendered the painting to the Nazis.  The underlying ques-
tion  in  this  case—which  this  opinion  will  not  resolve—is
whether the Cassirer family can get the painting back.

The post-war search for Rue Saint-Honoré was a long one. 
Lilly  and  Claude,  who  both  eventually  ended  up  in  the 
United States, had no success tracking down the painting.
After being legally declared the rightful owner, Lilly agreed 
in 1958 to accept compensation from the German Federal 
Republic—about $250,000 in today’s dollars.  (The painting
is now thought to be worth tens of millions.)  In fact, Rue 
Saint-Honoré was nearby: Like the Cassirers, the painting
had also arrived in the United States after the war, and sat 
in  a  private  collection  in  St. Louis  from  1952  to  1976.  In 
that  year,  the  Baron  Hans  Heinrich  Thyssen-Bornemisza 
(descended from the founder of a German steel empire) pur-
chased  the  painting  and  brought  it  back  to  Europe.    Rue 
Saint-Honoré hung at his residence in Switzerland until the 
early 1990s.  At that time, the Baron sold much of his art 
collection,  including  Rue  Saint-Honoré,  to  an  entity  the 
Kingdom  of  Spain  created  and  controlled,  called  the 
Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation.  In addition to 
financing the $300 million-plus purchase, the Spanish Gov-
ernment provided the Foundation with a palace in Madrid 
to serve as a museum for the collection.  The museum, as 
museums do, published a catalogue of its holdings.  An ac-
quaintance of Claude’s saw the catalogue and made the con-
nection, telling him in 1999 where Rue Saint-Honoré was 
now located.  (Lilly had by then long since died, with Claude 
as her sole heir.)