Finally the long and expensive court case fought by Andrew Lloyd Webber over the sale of Picasso’s ‘Portrait de Angel Fernandez de Soto’ a.k.a. ‘The Absinthe Drinker’, has been concluded with an out of court settlement with the heir of Paul Von Mendelssohn Bartholdy, a Jewish banker from Berlin. The painting was bought by Webber in 1995 for £19.3million and subsequently exhibited at various prominent art galleries until the composer decided to auction it through Christies to raise funds for his art charity, The Andrew Lloyd Webber Art Foundation. The auction process was dramatically disrupted when a prof Julius Schoeps revealed that the Jewish owner Bartholdy, sold the painting in 1934 under duress by the Nazis in a slumped art market. However after much legal wrangling, an out of court undisclosed settlement saw the heir of the Jewish owner Bartholdy relinquish his claims over the painting.