Alfred Lindon

Alfred Lindon (born Abner Lindenbaum; c. 1867 – 1948) was a Polish jeweller from a poor Jewish background who became an expert on pearls.

He married into the Citroën family and built an important collection of modern art that was looted by the Nazis in occupied Paris during the Second World War.

[7] In 2006, his grandson Denis Lindon (Raymond's son) remembered visiting Alfred at his home in Paris (Avenue Foch[8]) when he would have been in his 60s or 70s: "He was a bon vivant, we should call him.

Presumably unknown to the Lindons, the manager of the Paris branch, Carlos Niedermann, had close links with the Nazi regime.

[5][12] These were later transferred to the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), the chief looting organisation of the regime, whose job was to trawl occupied territory for art and antiques to transport back to Germany for Hitler's planned Führermuseum and the collections of top Nazis such as Hermann Göring.

[7] Among the paintings taken by the Nazis was Édouard Vuillard's Le Salon de Madame Aron (1911–12) an important intimisme work that provides an insight into middle-class life in France in the early 20th century.

[13] The painting was not returned to Lindon's heirs until 2006 after the National Gallery of Canada identified it as a work with an incomplete provenance and advertised its existence.

[16] Vincent van Gogh's, Flowers in a Vase, also from the Lindon collection, was one of 25 pictures from various sources exchanged by Göring for old master works from Galerie Fischer in 1941.

[17] Lindon and his wife returned to Paris after the end of the Second World War in time to see some of their paintings recovered.

According to Denis Lindon, who lived with his parents and siblings at his grandfather's home after the war, the contents were intact as the Gestapo had set up office in the building.