La fée des roses

In this charming painting, Marie Laurencin depicts Micheline Rosenberg, age nine, on the left, and Alexandre Rosenberg, age five, on the right. These were the children of renowned Parisian art dealer Paul Rosenberg, with whom Laurencin was the first artist to sign an exclusive contract. Laurencin transports the children into an enchanted world: Micheline, dressed in blue with a rose-colored sash, extends a hand toward the winged Alexandre, while white birds gather beneath them. The elongated figures and softly flattened planes, set against a dreamlike backdrop of green arches, exemplify the distinctive pictorial language she developed beyond the Cubist experiments of her youth. By the mid-1920s, her ethereal palette and theatrical sense of fantasy had become hallmarks of her singular contribution to the Parisian avant-garde. At the time it was painted, no one could have imagined that the younger sitter would one day fight in the Second World War or indeed recover this painting after it was stolen from his family during this conflict.¹
Paul Rosenberg’s collection would become one of the most significant targets of Nazi confiscation. As German forces advanced across France, Paul Rosenberg fled with his family, leaving behind his Paris gallery at 21 rue La Boétie and a handful of paintings at his Floirac residence, and hid the rest of his collection in bank vaults in Bordeaux and Libourne. Sadly, these hiding places would prove temporary. The vaults were discovered by German units and Rosenberg’s artworks, including Fée de Roses, were confiscated.
When the Rosenbergs reached the Spanish border in 1940, nineteen-year-old Alexandre Rosenberg was separated from his parents. Determined to fight the Nazis, Alexandre Rosenberg secretly boarded the Batory, a ship evacuating Polish troops to England, disguising himself in a soldier’s cap.² Alexandre Rosenberg subsequently enlisted in Charles de Gaulle's Free French Forces and fought in Normandy as a lieutenant in the Second Armored Division.
By the summer of 1944, Alexandre Rosenberg’s military service would place him on the front lines of the liberation campaign. As the Allies closed in on Paris in August 1944, the Germans dispatched a train loaded with stolen paintings to a depot in Nikolsburg, Moravia (present day Mikulov, on the south-east border of Czechia and Austria), intending to sell the works to fund their faltering war effort. Following a tip-off from Rose Valland, an art historian who secretly tracked the movement of stolen artworks through Nazi repositories, Alexandre Rosenberg led a small detachment of soldiers to a railway line north of Paris. Acting on her information, they blew up the tracks and seized train No. 40,044.³
When Alexandre Rosenberg's unit pulled open the doors of the freight cars, they exposed a dazzling treasure trove of Impressionist and Modern art spoliated from Europe’s greatest collections. Alexandre Rosenberg was astounded to discover numerous artworks from his father’s lost collection onboard, many of which he had last seen on the walls of his parents’ gallery and apartment. Among the recovered works was Laurencin’s Fée de Roses.
On 14 September 1945, Fée de Roses was officially restituted to Paul Rosenberg by the Commission de Récupération Artistique (CRA), and has remained with the family since.<sup>4

1</sup> A. Sinclair, My Grandfather's Gallery: A Family Memoir of Art and War, trans. Shaun Whiteside, New York, 2014, p. 97.
² H. Feliciano, The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World's Greatest Works of Art, trans. Tim Bent and the author, New York, 1997, pp. 68-69.
³ R. Valland, The Art Front: The Defense of French Collections, 1939–1945, trans. Ophélie Jouan, ed. Robert M. Edsel and Casey L. Shelton, Dallas, p. 182.
⁴ "Liste des objets restitués à Paul Rosenberg, 14 septembre 1945," 209SUP1, Dossiers 45.1 à 45.15, Archives de la Commission de Récupération Artistique (CRA), Paris.