• Rose Valland, at the Jeu de Paume museum, colorized by me.
- Rose Valland, whose real name was Rosa Antonia Valland, was born on November 1, 1898 in Saint-Étienne-de-Saint-Geoirs (Isère). In the 1920s, she took art history courses at the École pratique des hautes études, the Ecole du Louvre and the Institut d'Art et d'Archéologie. From 1932, as a volunteer attaché at the Museum of Foreign Paintings and Sculptures at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in the Tuileries, in Paris, she enriched the catalog of the collections.
From 1940, when the Nazis occupied her museum to store the works looted from Jewish families, she meticulously recorded the list of these first-class trinkets. Her investigations, conducted secretly and at the risk of her life, would lead to the repatriation and restitution of at least 45,000 works.
Finally, she hid several hundred works and informed the resistance fighters of the timetables of trains leaving for Germany, allowing the railway workers to stop the convoys and in particular to save more than 900 paintings by Gauguin, Degas, Modigliani and Renoir as well as 64 works by Picasso.
After the liberation of Paris in 1944, Rose Valland continued her work, helping to find and restore works of art. She was appointed heritage curator and worked for the Commission de récupération artistique (CRA). She also wrote a book, “Le Front de l’art”, published in 1961, which recounts her experiences during the war. She also met Joyce Heer, a secretary-interpreter at the United States Embassy, who became her companion until her death. The two women shared an apartment at 4 rue de Navarre in the 5th arrondissement of Paris. Rose Valland would reserve a place for her next to her in the family vault.