Furious, he says, at receiving no response, he is taking up the "unpaid invoice" with Basel's prosecution office, has hired a PR manager to launch a campaign accusing Christie's of "selling stolen goods", and is suing the auctioneers in New York.

The work's rightful owners are heirs of French collector Alfred Lindon, né Lindonbaum. When the Germans invaded Paris, he fled after placing the works in a Chase Bank safe, which the Nazis forced open in 1940.

Göring, Adolf Hitler's right-hand man, requisitioned the entire collection of "the Jew Lindenbaum", including the Sisley. He later exchanged the impressionist painting, along with 17 other works, for a Titian to a corrupt dealer.

After the war, Mr Lindon recovered most of the looted works, but not the Sisley. Yet none of this was common knowledge when Christie's New York sold Mr Dreyfus the work in 2008 for $US357,000 ($470,000), along with a Renoir and Boudin. It was only in 2016 that Canada-based looted art experts Mondex contacted Lindon's heirs to inform them that they had positively identified the Sisley as coming from the family collection. They had found the painting in an inventory of artworks confiscated from Jewish people by Hitler's "Special Task Force", and matched it to a photo from the Swiss gallery.

Mr Lindon's grandson, Denis, filed a legal complaint to recover the work last August, telling a Paris court: "It is not serious to claim that Christie's, which possesses a service specialised in research into looted art, could have ignored the origin of such a painting."

In a statement to The Sunday Telegraph, Christie's said: "All the known provenances and accessible history about the painting at the date of its sale a decade ago were extensively researched and referenced in Christie's catalogue."

At the time of sale, it argued, there was "no active claim on the work and no discoverable information that would directly connect this specific work with the claimant family".

Telegraph, London