The painting is currently inalienable by law, as it belongs to the national collections but “the government will present a bill as soon as possible” to allow this restitution, said French Culture Minister Roselyne Bachelot.

France has announced that it is to return a painting by Austrian Gustav Klimt to the heirs of an Austrian Jewish family that was forced to sell it by the Nazis.

“Rosebushes under the Trees”, was acquired by France in 1980 and exhibited at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. The state was reportedly unaware of its provenance.

The painting will be returned to the family of Nora Stiasny, a victim of the Holocaust, who was dispossessed of it during a forced sale in August 1938. Stiasny was deported to Poland in 1942, where she is thought to have died in either the Izbica ghetto or the Belzec extermination camp.

The beneficiaries are the descendants of Stiasny’s sister, Hermine Müller-Hofmann, who escaped the Holocaust in Bavaria.

The painting is currently inalienable by law, as it belongs to the national collections but “the government will present a bill as soon as possible” to allow this restitution, French Culture Minister Roselyne Bachelot said.

It is “the only painting by Gustav Klimt that France owned”, the minister said at a press conference at her ministry.

She said that restoring the painting to its rightful owners was “an ardent obligation.” “The recent opening of archives in Austria and the work of historians have made it possible to trace precisely the origin of this painting, long hidden by those who have erased all traces of this affair,” she added.

“Thank you very much for your extraordinary gesture. It is incomparable,’’ said Ruth Pleyer, an Austrian researcher who has been working for more than twenty years on the spoliations suffered by the family of the Jewish industrialist Victor Zuckerkandl, the first buyer of the painting, and that of his niece Nora Stiasny, who inherited it.