Content Warning: This section mentions murder and the Holocaust.

At the center of A Death in Cornwall is the painting that Charlotte was killed for researching: an “[u]ntitled portrait of a woman in the surrealist style, oil on canvas” by Picasso (45). She investigated the provenance of this work and discovered that it had once belonged to Bernard Levy and that it was sold by his lawyer after he died in Auschwitz. His grandson Emanuel Cohen was hoping to reclaim this painting for their family, but he was murdered by the same assassin who killed Charlotte. Because of the painting’s history, it symbolizes how the Holocaust impacted collections of art. This stolen painting is a reference to the “Paris Roundup of 1942” (170), when art was stolen from many Jewish people.

The painting also functions as a way of revealing Harris Weber’s strategy of using art to launder money. Robinson hired the assassin who killed Charlotte and Cohen to protect the owner of the painting, a shell company called OOC, which is maintained by the law firm Harris Weber. Robinson also sends the assassin to kill Ricard when he goes against the wishes of OOC to sell the stolen Picasso to Anna.