The FBI is holding a Renoir painting while a federal judge decides who the rightful owner is.

Last fall, Baltimore police uncovered a 60-year-old report of a stolen Renoir that matches a rediscovered painting picked up for $7 at a flea market.

Reportedly painted en plein air for his mistress in 1879, Renoir's 5½-by-9-inch piece, "Paysage Bord de Seine" (On the Shore of the Seine,) was loaned to the Baltimore Museum of Art by art patron Saidie A. May, who donated many other works to the museum. On Nov. 17, 1951, the museum reported the painting missing.

The Fireman's Fund paid an insurance claim of $2,500 on the work.

Marcia "Martha" Fuqua, from Virginia, says she found the painting in a box of junk at a West Virginia flea market in 2009 and that she kept it in storage for two years. When she brought it in for appraisal at Virginia-based Potomack Co., she was told that it could be a Renoir.

When the auction house reasearched the work, the painting did not appear on art loss registers and no evidence of a link to the Baltimore Museum appeared.

It was expected to sell for $75,000 at auction last fall, but Potomack postponed the sale pending the investigation.

A federal judge will now determine who owns the work. The woman who found the missing painting 60 years later, and the insurance company that paid the museum $2,500 in 1951 for the loss, will make their cases in written pleas later this month.