LOS ANGELES — For decades, Beverly Cassirer and her husband chased after the elusive Impressionist painting that had been taken from the family by the Nazis during the dawn of World War II, a maddening hunt that came up empty again and again.
The evocative Parisian street scene by Camille Pissarro had vanished into the mists of the war and then resurfaced decades later in Madrid, hanging for all the world to see in the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, a treasured work by an Impressionistic master valued at roughly $30 million.
Cassirer and her husband, Claude, pursued the painting in the courts of Los Angeles, arguing that it had essentially been stolen by the Nazis, who had forced his grandmother to trade it for her own freedom as she tried to flee Germany. The painting ultimately made its way to Spain when the Madrid museum purchased it and hundreds of other paintings from a Swiss art collector.
When the couple asked, the museum refused to return it and the two turned to the courts for relief.
Neither lived long enough for that day to come.
On Feb. 13, Cassirer died at her home in San Diego at 99, the third family member to die since the international legal fight over the rightful owner of the oil painting began, a court skirmish that has dragged on since 2005. Her husband died in 2010 and a daughter, Ava, in 2018. Her son David now carries on the pursuit of the painting.
“It’s been an odyssey of pain and frustration for the family,” said Sam Dubbin, one of the attorneys working with the family to retrieve the painting.
Beverly Bellin was born Feb. 19, 1920, and raised in Cleveland, where as a young Jewish woman, she felt the stings of the war. She worked as a secretary during the waning days of the Depression, helping support her family so her brothers could go to college. Years later, after her own children were grown, she graduated from John Carroll University in Cleveland.
She and her husband met on a train and both became active in their synagogue in Ohio. In 1980, the two moved to San Diego where they kept a copy of the lost Pissarro on the living room wall.
