A federal appeals court has ruled that an 89-year-old Californian may sue Spain and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation for the restitution of a Camille Pissarro painting taken from his Jewish grandmother under the Third Reich. Currently on display at Madrid's Museo Thyssen-Bornemisz, the painting, "Rue St Honoré Après-Midi, Effet de Pluie" (1897), entered Nazi hands when Claude Cassirer's grandmother was forced in 1939 to sell the work for $360 to ensure her safe passage out of Berlin. Today the Pissaro is valued at as much as $20 million.

First filed in 2005, Cassirer's suit has been tangled up in the 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which limits the kind of lawsuits against foreign governmental bodies that can be tried in United States courts. The issue of jurisdiction became even more complicated in this case, as the plaintiff is suing Spain, although it was German forces that originally seized the painting. The foundation’s legal team sought to prove that Cassirer had not sufficiently persued legal action in Spain or Germany before filing in the U.S., but the appeals court invoked an exception to the law that allows for suits in the event of illegal expropriation.

The ruling was handed down in a 9-2 decision, with the two dissenting judges arguing that "two wrongs do not make a right," and that suing Spain would in no way remedy the injustice caused by the Nazi seizure. That argument has not dissuaded Cassirer, who will continue to seek the restitution of the Impressionist work, which changed hands many times before ending up in the collection of Swiss steel magnate Baron Hans-Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza in the 1970s, which was then sold in its entirety to the Spanish government in 1993.

"I'm getting older every day," Cassirer told the Los Angeles Times, "and I really hope that for justice and other reasons that my wife Beverly and I would survive and once again see this beautiful painting."