Art and
cultural property

Every object in this practice has already outlived at least one argument about it. A drawing leaves Vienna in a suitcase in 1938 and is hung in a Basel dining room for fifty-one years. A bronze is lifted from a Tuscan church in 1979, is sold twice in Switzerland, and appears in a London saleroom with a provenance that begins in 1994. A hoard comes out of a Suffolk field and, within a fortnight, three museums, a landowner and a metal detectorist all have a view. Our work is to decide what the law can still do about any of it.

Three bodies of law meet in every file. The first is ordinary property law, which asks who owns the thing and cares very little about how beautiful it is. Title in England is not cured by the passage of time alone, and a thief transfers nothing; but limitation, laches and the good-faith purchaser rules of other jurisdictions can and do intervene, which is why the itinerary of an object matters as much as its authorship. The second is the growing body of soft law that governs restitution: the Washington Principles of 1998, the Terezín Declaration, the codes of the museum associations, the practice of the Spoliation Advisory Panel. None of it is binding. All of it is what a trustee board will read before it decides.

What the argument is really about

The third is the law of the sale itself: the description in a catalogue, the warranty in a consignment agreement, the guarantee that a house has taken from a party who is also bidding. It is remarkable how often a dispute presented as a question of history turns out to be a question of what clause 9 says about rescission, and how long the buyer has to invoke it.

Attribution cases sit awkwardly across all three. A claimant who says a picture is not by the hand on the label is not usually alleging fraud; they are saying that a matter of opinion was stated as a matter of fact. The evidence is technical — pigment analysis, dendrochronology, infrared reflectography, the compiler of the catalogue raisonné who has changed their mind twice — and courts are properly cautious about deciding connoisseurship. We have found that the cases which succeed are the ones that identify a specific representation and a specific reliance, and leave the scholarship to the experts.

How we work

We begin with the object’s itinerary: every hand it has passed through, every photograph of it, every mention in a stockbook, an insurance schedule, a customs form. That research is often the most valuable part of the retainer, and it is frequently the part that ends the dispute, because a party with a gap between 1933 and 1945 in its provenance behaves differently once the gap is written down. We instruct provenance researchers in Vienna, Munich and Amsterdam and we read German.

Then we advise on where the argument should happen. Litigation is rarely the best forum for a restitution claim: it is slow, it is public, and it forces a binary answer onto a question that usually has a negotiated one. Mediation, panel reference and simple correspondence between institutions have all produced better outcomes for our clients, including two settlements in which the object stayed exactly where it was and the label changed. Where proceedings are necessary, they are usually in the Chancery Division, and we plead them narrowly.

We act for collectors, dealers, auction houses, foundations, national and regional museums, and for families. We do not act for both sides of the market in the same season, and we say no to any instruction that requires us to argue that a provenance gap does not matter.