The heirs live in the United States.

According to the Times, their Berlin lawyer Gunnar Schnabel wrote on Nov. 12 to Marco Toracca, head of Sotheby's restitution department, demanding the house prove beyond doubt that the 1936 sale was at market value and that the family "would have wanted to carry out the sale even without Nazi rule."

Otherwise, he wrote, "no auction may take place." The heirs say they are prepared to pursue a fair solution under the 1998 Washington Principles.

The painting carries an $180 million estimate — the highest for any lot in this season's art auctions and higher than any price ever paid at auction for a Van Gogh, the Times reports.

SSBCrack News adds that the artist's current auction record was set in 2022 at Christie's, when a painting sold for $117.2 million, about $133 million in today's dollars.

The work is the centerpiece of the marquee fall auctions next week, backed by a financial guarantee from Sotheby's that reduces the house's risk if bidding falls short.

Sotheby's has not said whether it will pull the lot, which the SSBCrack account says is scheduled for Wednesday evening in Manhattan.

SSBCrack News reports the claim centers on the painting's sale in Amsterdam in 1936, three months after the Fischer family left Berlin for Vienna. That lawyer's research indicates, per SSBCrack, that the family was required to pay the "Reich flight tax," a levy imposed on people leaving Germany.

According to SSBCrack, Sotheby's says Fischer acquired the work in 1909 from a Paris gallery, and the family deposited the Van Gogh and two Cézannes with dealer Walter Feilchenfeldt at the Paul Cassirer gallery in Amsterdam in 1932 or 1933.

The painting was shown at the Museum Boymans in Rotterdam in 1933 and the Kunsthalle in Bern in 1934, then sold by Feilchenfeldt to a Parisian collector in 1936, later reaching Argentine collectors Carlos Pedro Blaquier and Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier in 1975.

SSBCrack News reports that after the war, Fischer's son-in-law Gottfried Bermann Fischer regained control of the Berlin publishing house and sought compensation for confiscated assets, but did not pursue a claim for paintings sold in Amsterdam — at the time there was no legal basis for compensation for sales outside Nazi-controlled territory, and the Netherlands was not under Nazi rule in 1936.

In recent years, however, claims over sales outside Nazi-controlled territory have increasingly led to settlements or returns: SSBCrack cites the Bern Museum of Fine Arts agreeing last year to return an Alfred Sisley to the heirs of Carl Sachs, using the term "Nazi-persecution-related loss" for transactions made under unfavorable conditions beyond the Nazi sphere of control.

Sotheby's, per SSBCrack News, says it has researched the painting's ownership history and is in discussions with the Fischer heirs' representatives: "While our research to date has not established that the painting was sold under duress," the house said, it is committed to working with the family toward a "mutually satisfactory resolution."

SSBCrack also notes the family's claim has a precedent: in 2007, Christie's offered a Cézanne portrait of the artist's wife that had followed a similar path, and Gisela Bermann Fischer said she did not oppose that sale while reserving the right to claim other works sold by her father under duress.

The current challenge to the Van Gogh, the publisher reports, reflects that reservation. The painting, unseen publicly for more than 60 years, headlines twelve works from the Blaquier-Arrieta collection expected to bring about $450 million.