MONTREAL — A U.S. appeals court has ruled that the estate of the late, German-born Montreal art dealer Max Stern is the rightful owner of a painting he was forced to sell in Nazi Germany, bringing to a conclusion an almost four-year legal battle and, more significantly, reversing a seven-decade-old injustice.

Detail of a 19th-century painting, Girl from the Sabine Mountains by Franz Xaver Winterhalter

“This case has its roots in one of history’s bleakest periods: the Holocaust,” wrote Judge Bruce Selya. “It began with the de facto confiscation of a valuable work of art by the Third Reich… A notorious exercise of man’s inhumanity to man now ends with the righting of that wrong through the mundane application of common law principles.”

He added: “The mills of justice grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine.”

The First Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston dismissed the appeal of Baroness Maria-Louise Bissonnette, 84, of Providence, R.I., who has been in possession of the painting since 1959, upholding a lower court ruling in December 2007.

The plaintiffs were Robert Vineberg, Michael Vineberg and Sydney Feldhammer of Montreal, trustees for the estate of Stern and his late wife, Iris. The couple were childless.

Stern, who died in 1987, named Concordia and McGill universities and Hebrew University of Jerusalem as the beneficiaries of his estate, including the hundreds of pieces of art from his Düsseldorf gallery that he liquidated under state duress between 1935 and 1937 and was never able to recover.

Concordia’s Clarence Epstein, who heads the Stern art restitution project, said the judgment is “a vindication of everything the Stern project has stood for.

“We’ve travelled a long road filled with many steps by the baroness, but it has now been confirmed her arguments had no substance. This is moral justice, and the judgment is poetic.”

The painting, the 19th-century Girl from the Sabine Mountains by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, was bought by Bissonnette’s stepfather Dr. Karl Wilharm at an auction of about 200 of Stern’s remaining inventory of paintings in November 1937 at the Lempertz auction house in Cologne. It has been reported that Wilharm was a member of the Nazi Party, as well as the Sturmabteilung, a Nazi paramilitary force.

Bissonnette formally inherited the painting from her mother in 1991. Today, the oil has been appraised at $67,000 to $94,000 (US).

Selya wrote that there is no dispute over the fact that Stern “became the object of Nazi persecution” and that the Reich Chamber for the Fine Arts directed him to get out of the art business because, as a Jew, “he was not a suitable exponent of German culture.”

Furthermore, he wrote that Lempertz was a “government-approved” auction house, which put Stern’s holdings on the block for “prices well below their fair market value.”

The court also said Stern exercised “reasonable diligence” after the war to find the art.

Stern fled Germany for France and then England shortly after the sale, and was deported to Canada as an enemy alien early on in World War II. Eventually, he became the owner of the landmark Dominion Gallery on Sherbrooke Street in Montreal.

The Stern art restitution project first learned of the Winterhalter’s whereabouts in January 2005, when Bissonnette put it up for sale with a Rhode Island auction house.

The Stern estate immediately filed a claim for the painting with the New York Holocaust Claims Processing Office. After out-of-court talks with Bissonnette failed, she shipped the painting to Germany and asked a German court to determine ownership, at which point the Stern estate went to Rhode Island’s federal district court. Judge Mary Lisi made a summary judgement that the painting belongs to the estate.

Epstein said the estate took possession of the painting at that point and it remains in storage in Berlin. In about three weeks, he will hold a public event in that city highlighting the legal victory and underlining the beneficiaries’ determination to continue to track down the rest of Stern’s art.

The intention, he said, is to eventually exhibit the painting at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.