From France 24.
The town of Ornans helped to raise 4 million euros to repatriate Courbet’s The Oak of Flagey back to France after a century overseas in private hands. The town’s Courbet museum will display the painting free of charge on the last three Sundays of this month (March 2013).
Excellent news, congratulations to them.
It reminds me of another story I read recently. There is a current project in the UK to track down all the publically owned works of art and put them online. In doing so one particular painting was noticed by an expert. It was orignally considered to be a copy of a Van Dyck painting. But the expert recognised it as an original. What was thought to be worth about £3-5,000 is now worth about a million!
That’s terrific. I just wish I had one of those at home so I could have sold it for a bundle.