A £1.5 million painting by Camille Pissarro which was looted by the Nazis has been withdrawn from auction at the last minute because of infighting between the descendants of its original Jewish owners.

Le Quai Malaquais by French impressionist artist Camille Pissarro

Le Quai Malaquais et l'Institut, which features a view of the Seine from the French impressionist's hotel room on the third floor of the Hotel du Quai Voltaire, was due to be auctioned by Christie's in London on Tuesday.

But lawyers representing various scions of the Fischer family, which founded the German publishing house Fischer Verlag, were unable to reach an agreement about the painting's rightful owner and it was withdrawn from sale, according to The Times.

The painting, which Pissarro painted in 1903 shortly before his death, was bought by Samuel Fischer, the founder of Fischer Verlag, in 1907 and after his death, passed to his daughter Brigitte who was living in Vienna, Austria with her husband Gottfried Bermann.

Bermann abandoned his career as a surgeon and gradually took the reins of Fischer Verlag, becoming a celebrated publisher in his own right of authors including Thomas Mann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Hermann Hesse.

But as Hitler's Army approached the border, he and his family escaped to the United States, taking only what they could.

The Pissarro remained hanging in their dining room until it was seized by Gestapo agents and sold, along with an El Greco, a Cezanne and a Gaugin, at the Dorotheum in Vienna in 1940.

After the Second World War, Gottfried managed to track down many of the missing paintings through the US restitution process. But the whereabouts of the Pissarro remained unknown until his daughter, Gisela, a former actress, managed to trace it to a vault in Zurich in 2007.

It had been bought by the notorious art dealer Dr. Bruno Lohse, who worked for Hermann Goering. He was forced to return it under a court order but the battle cost Ms Bermann-Fischer 500,000 Swiss Francs.

Now 80, she told The Times that her aim had been to "put things in order" and she was selling it because she had "invested such a tremendous amount over the past 13 years, so much energy and so much of my finances that it would be frivolous to keep it".

But at the last minute, she was met with opposition from a New Yorker named Itai Shoffman, 38, the great grandson of Samuel Fischer and the grandson his younger daughter, Hildegard.

According to Shoffman, the nephew of Gisela Bermann-Fischer, Hildegard was the "black sheep of the family", having had a daughter, his mother, out of wedlock.

"On the see-saw of life this side of the family has been more on the down side than the up," Mr Shoffman said.

But a lawyer in Berlin specialising in inheritance cases has unearthed a letter written in 1946 that indicates that Samuel's wife Hedwig wanted the now dead Hildegard to inherit the Pissarro if it was ever found.

According to Mr Shoffman, Ms Bermann-Fischer knew his side of the family well but had deliberately sought to exclude them from the Pissarro issue. "It feels like such a deceitful act. She's taking away the last remaining legacy of the family and holding it for her own benefit," he said.

His lawyers had sought a 50-50 split of the proceeds of the Pissarro sale but up until the deadline for the Christie's auction, Ms Bermann-Fischer's lawyers had only offered 20 per cent.

"It made a mockery of the whole journey," he said. "I'm disappointed but in God's hands it will work out. It's been a rocky road and there has been so much pain."