The Minneapolis Institute of Arts has returned a $2.8 million Fernand Leger painting to the French heirs of the Jewish art collector Alphonse Kann. The Associated Press reports that after researching the claim on the 1911 work, Smoke Over Rooftops, for a decade, the museum established that the painting was stolen by the Nazis during World War II.

Minneapolis businessman Putnam Dana McMillan, a General Mills vice president, bequeathed the work to the museum in 1961. McMillan had purchased it from New York's Buchholz Gallery ten years prior. But in 1997, the institute received a letter claiming that the painting had been taken from Kann by the Nazis.

Investigators looked into the work's provenance between 1939, when Kann fled Paris, and 1949, when the Buchholz Gallery bought it from France's Galerie Leiris. Ultimately, they found that after Kann fled to London, the Nazis confiscated the bulk of his extensive art collection and moved it to the Jeu de Paume museum in central Paris. Smoke Over Rooftops, however, stayed in Kann's house until November 5, 1942, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. France's German-controlled government then auctioned the house's contents, and Galerie Leiris bought the painting.

The Minneapolis Institute initially hoped that Kann's heirs would lend or donate Smoke Over Rooftops back to the museum, but they have decided not to do so.

"Having researched this to the end of the road," said Kaywin Feldman, director of the institute, "we decided we had to return the painting; it was the right thing to do."