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Claude Cassirer of San Diego claims that the artist's Rue Saint-Honore, Afternoon, Rain Effect was stolen from his Jewish grandmother through a forced sale and now is on display at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, Spain.

"This painting was in my family for four decades before the Nazis stole it," Cassirer, his grandmother's sole heir, said in a statement. "They took it because they were determined not just to kill Jews but also to kill Jewish culture."

The Spanish government and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation are "continuing the Nazi legacy instead of going out of their way to repudiate it," Cassirer said.

Spain is a defendant because the foundation is "an agency and instrumentality" of the country, according to the lawsuit, which was filed Tuesday.

The Spanish government declined to comment on the lawsuit. An official at the Culture Ministry said the government had not received formal notification that it was being sued.

The painting has an estimated value of about $20 million, partly because of Pissarro's historical significance, according to David Cassirer, the son of the plaintiff and a family spokesman.

It depicts a wide Parisian boulevard lined with dark carriages, a few bare trees and a scattering of people braving the weather.

The suit was bolstered by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last June that allowed California resident Maria Altmann, 88, to sue the government of Austria to retrieve $150 million worth of Gustav Klimt paintings stolen by the Nazis, said Stuart Dunwoody, one of Cassirer's attorneys.

An estimated 600,000 works of art were stolen by the Nazis during Adolf Hitler's rule in Germany.

The Pissarro painting was bought by Claude Cassirer's great-grandfather and then inherited by his grandmother, Lilly Cassirer, in 1926, the suit said. As Nazi oppression against Jews mounted, she had remarried and was then known as Lilly Cassirer Neubauer.

She fled to England. As a precondition of leaving Germany, she was forced to sell the Pissarro painting for about $360 at 1939 exchange rates, the suit said.

The painting changed hands several times since the war and its whereabouts was a mystery to the Cassirer family until a friend spotted it in the Madrid museum.

It had been bought in 1976 by Baron Hans-Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, who owned one of the largest art collections in the world, the suit said.

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Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum

By Paul Chavez Associated Press Writer, Copyright 2005, AP