Exhibition | The Jewish Past of Strawberry Hill
From the exhibition press release, via Art Daily,
The Unexpected Jewish Past of Strawberry Hill House
Online, starting in 2021
Grant of Arms to John Braham, detail, 1817, “Rinasce piu gloriosa” (It rises again more glorious).
As part of the events and activities celebrating the European Jewish Days of Culture festival, Strawberry Hill House has a free online exhibition exploring the lives of two of the historic west London villa’s former owners: Frances, Countess Waldegrave (1821–1879) and Herbert Stern, 1st Baron Michelham (1851–1919).
For many, Strawberry Hill House is synonymous with Horace Walpole, who built the neo-Gothic villa (1749–76), and filled it with his collections. However, following his death in 1797, the house was passed to a succession of owners, including the formidable Frances, Lady Waldegrave, the daughter of the internationally famous Jewish opera singer, John Braham, and later to Herbert Stern, the scion of a Jewish banking dynasty. As visitors will discover in Strawberry Hill’s comprehensive online exhibition, the House’s Jewish owners brought it back to the centre of the social and artistic milieu of their respective eras.
Through a variety of images and objects, online visitors can explore the aspects of Jewish culture and sociability that characterised the lives of Lady Waldegrave and the Stern Family. With themes including family ties, cosmopolitanism, art patronage, social status, religious identity, anti-Semitism, and different forms of philanthropy, the exhibition shines a spotlight onto the lives and activities of two very different chatelaines, whose time at Strawberry Hill has often been overshadowed by the presence of Walpole.
Visitors to Strawberry Hill House will be able to explore two objects on loan that complement the online exhibition: the Grant of Arms to John Braham (1817) and the Louis William Desanges painting Strawberry Hill: The Drawing Room (1865). Lady Waldegrave was very proud of the coat of arms granted to her father in 1817—a symbol of his success, and his patronage by important figures such as the Duke of Sussex. Appropriately enough for a poor orphan from the East End, who had sold pencils on the street as a young boy, he chose a phoenix rising from the ashes as his crest. The phoenix holds a lyre in its beak—a suitable symbol for a musician (the lyre was the crest of the Worshipful Company of Musicians), and the Grant is inscribed ‘Rinasce piu gloriosa’ (it rises again more glorious). One of the stained-glass windows in the Round Drawing Room at Strawberry Hill shows Braham’s Grant of Arms, and it can also be seen above the entrance gate. Lady Waldegrave became known as one of the foremost political hostesses of Victorian Britain. She, along with her last husband Chichester Fortescue, managed a wide circle of political friendships, both nationally and internationally. Whilst she was deeply involved with the fortunes of the Liberal Party, for which Fortescue was an MP and cabinet minister, the parties she hosted at Strawberry Hill were deliberately bipartisan. Lord Russell, Gladstone and Disraeli were all regular visitors to Strawberry Hill. The Desanges painting Strawberry Hill: The Drawing Room shows such a glittering gathering.
To coincide with the online exhibition, author and curator Nino Strachey will share her personal reflections on the life of her ancestor, Frances Waldegrave, with a talk on 29 September. Drawing on her research into the Braham family, Nino will share new insights from the papers recently acquired by the British Library.
Strawberry Hill House Curator, Silvia Davoli, says: “Our collaboration with the Jewish Country Houses Project has led me to develop a more in-depth documentary research on Lady Waldegrave and the Sterns. With this exhibition my hope is to engage our visitors with a new exciting dimension of the history of the house, a story full of surprises and yet to be told!”
Derek Purnell, Director, Strawberry Hill House & Garden, says: “I am delighted that by displaying these items we are able to begin to share some of the lesser-known stories of Strawberry Hill House’s illustrious history, and we are grateful to Nino Strachey for her contribution to making this project possible.”
Since 2018 Strawberry Hill House has collaborated with the Jewish Country Houses Project, a 4-year research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, you can find more information about the project and the ongoing initiatives here.
This exhibition is curated by Silvia Davoli (Curator, Strawberry Hill), in collaboration with Nino Strachey (Writer and former Head of Research for the National Trust), Tom Stammers (Associate Professor in Modern European Cultural History, University of Durham), Michele Klein (Independent Researcher), Chris Jones (Curator, Salomons Museum), Bethan Wood (Marketing and Communication Manager, Strawberry Hill), and Carole Tucker (Hon Librarian at Strawberry Hill).
230th Anniversary of Robert Carter’s ‘Deed of Gift’
Staggered over time, the manumission took decades to complete. A certificate of freedom for one of the freedmen reads, “Dennis Johnston, a Male Negro aged about twenty seven years of dark Complexion five feet ten or eleven inches, stout and well made liberated By Benjamen (sic) Dawson, trustee for Robert Carter by Deed dated the 3rd day of November 1799, and duly recorded in the County Court of Frederick. Registered this 2nd day of February 1809.” (Winchester, Virginia: Stewart Bell Jr. Archives, Handley Regional Library).
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As reported by Eliott McLaughlin for CNN, yesterday was the 230th anniversary of the start of the largest liberation of enslaved people in the United States prior to 1863.
Eliott C. McLaughlin, “Like Washington and Jefferson, He Championed Liberty. Unlike the Founders, He Freed His Slaves,” CNN (5 September 2021).
It was 230 years ago Sunday that Robert Carter III [1728–1804], the patriarch of one of the wealthiest families in Virginia, quietly walked into a Northumberland County courthouse and delivered an airtight legal document announcing his intention to free, or manumit, more than 500 slaves. He titled it the “deed of gift.” It was, by far, experts say, the largest liberation of Black people before the Emancipation Proclamation more than seven decades later.
On September 5, 1791, when Carter delivered his deed, slavery was an institution, a key engine of the new country’s economy. But many slaveholders—including founding fathers George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who knew Carter—had begun to voice doubts. That was the extent of their umbrage. . . .
Today, descendants of both Carter and the men and women he freed say more must be done to propel the largely uncelebrated deed of gift into the national conscience.
Meriwether Gilmore, who grew up in Westmoreland County, where Carter’s Nomini Hall estate once spanned 2,000 acres, is related to Carter on her mother’s side. Her sister is named after his mother and oldest daughter, Priscilla. Her father worked with Black churches in the area to commemorate the deed of gift’s bicentennial in 1991.
“I think the story of Robert Carter III is incredibly important,” she said, “and not just to glorify another rich, White man, but to show how personal convictions can be stronger than the status quo, that doing the right thing is often hard but important and that people matter—that people are more important than the work that they perform.” . . .
A religious wanderer drawn later in life to integrated churches, Carter III was not the first to free his slaves. Others, middle-class Quakers and Baptists among them, had released a few slaves here, a few there, but none rivaled Carter’s deed, which established a schedule to free 511 slaves, starting with the oldest and later their children.
Carter also allowed the freedmen to choose their last names so they could keep families together and pass down wealth. He ensured they had salable skills, arranged for them to buy or lease land, and bought their wares. He also spent a great deal on transporting them from his plantations to the Northumberland courthouse, and on lawyers to guarantee his heirs—some none too happy he was paring their inheritance—didn’t undo his wishes. . . .
The full article is available here»
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As noted in the article, the Nomini Hall Slave Legacy Project works to chronicle the descendants of the enslaved Africans who were freed by Robert Carter III from his Nomini Hall estate.
For Carter’s biography, see Andrew Levy, The First Emancipator: The Forgotten Story of Robert Carter, the Founding Father Who Freed His Slaves (New York: Random House, 2005).
Frick Announces Its Most Significant Gift of Drawings and Pastels
Press release (30 August 2021) from The Frick:
Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Head of a Woman, 1784, pastel on paper, 12 x 10 inches (New York: Frick Collection, promised gift from the Collection of Elizabeth and Jean-Marie Eveillard; photo by Joseph Coscia Jr.).
The Frick Collection announces the largest and most significant gift of drawings and pastels in its history, thanks to the generosity of Elizabeth ‘Betty’ and Jean-Marie Eveillard. Over the past forty-five years, the Eveillards have assembled an outstanding collection of European works on paper, ranging in date from the end of the fifteenth century to the twentieth century and representing artists working in France, Britain, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. The Eveillards have made a promised gift to the Frick of twenty-six of these works—eighteen drawings, five pastels, two prints, and one oil sketch—among them some of their finest acquisitions. Along with preparatory figurative sketches and independent studies and portraits are two vivid landscape scenes. Fittingly for the Frick, artists represented include François Boucher, Edgar Degas, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Thomas Lawrence, and Jean-François Millet. The group also introduces to the Frick’s holdings works by artists not yet represented in its primary collecting areas, including Gustave Caillebotte, Maurice Quentin de La Tour, Jan Lievens, John Singer Sargent, and Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun. In the fall of 2022, at its temporary Frick Madison location, the museum will present an exhibition of these extraordinary works, to be accompanied by a catalogue and public programs.
François Boucher, Reclining Shepherdess (La bergère au Coeur), ca. 1753; black, red, and white chalk and blue, light blue, red, pink, and yellow pastel with touches of grey watercolor washes and possibly some traces of graphite on paper; 16 × 19 inches (New York: Frick Collection, promised gift from the Collection of Elizabeth and Jean-Marie Eveillard; Photo by Joseph Coscia Jr.).
Comments Xavier F. Salomon, the Frick’s Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator, “It has been a pleasure studying and selecting from this remarkable collection of two longtime supporters of the Frick, assembled just as our own holdings have been, according to criteria of beauty, quality, and condition. Each of the twenty-six works either appreciably deepens our holdings of a familiar artist or brings to us the work of one who is not—but should be—represented within our core areas of European Old Master art. In adding five pastels and an oil sketch, the gift also strengthens our examples of these media. We very much look forward to sharing these works with the public next year.” Betty and Jean-Marie Eveillard have been deeply involved with the Frick for many years, both having served as Trustees. Betty is currently the Board’s Chair.
The Eveillards acquired their first important work in 1975, John Singer Sargent’s Virginie Amélie Avegno, Mme. Gautreau (Mme. X), and have been active collectors ever since. This drawing is the most modern work in the promised gift to the Frick and is a particularly satisfying addition to the museum’s holdings: It is known from archival correspondence that Henry Clay Frick desired a portrait by Sargent but did not succeed in securing a sitting with the artist. Dated to about 1884, Sargent’s Mme. Gautreau is one of some dozen studies produced for the famous painted portrait Madame X, a highlight of the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. This sheet shows the artist working out the figure’s pose, representing her lithe figure kneeling on a sofa and looking out a window. Sargent was captivated by Gautreau and strived in studies like this and in the final painting to capture her “unpaintable beauty and hopeless laziness.”
Other later nineteenth-century drawings coming to the Frick are by Degas and Caillebotte, selected to complement the collection’s Impressionist paintings. While the institution owns a quintessential Degas canvas of dancers, the Eveillards’ early drawing of Adelchi Morbilli, created in Naples in 1857, will be the first work on paper by the artist in the Frick’s collection. It is one of—and arguably the best of—his series of drawings of his cousin. When it was drawn, Degas was particularly interested in the work of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and the portrait reflects this affinity. Gustave Caillebotte is best known and perhaps most celebrated for his 1877 painting at Chicago’s Art Institute, Paris Street, Rainy Day. A man of wealth, Caillebotte was also a patron and supporter of fellow Impressionist colleagues. His works only rarely appear on the market, most still being in the possession of his descendants. The promised gift includes a preparatory drawing for the iconic Paris street scene.
François Boucher, Reclining Shepherdess (La bergère au Coeur), ca. 1753; black, red, and white chalk and blue, light blue, red, pink, and yellow pastel with touches of grey watercolor washes and possibly some traces of graphite on paper; 16 × 19 inches (New York: Frick Collection, promised gift from the Collection of Elizabeth and Jean-Marie Eveillard; photo by Joseph Coscia Jr.).
Eighteenth-century French art is one of the Frick’s strengths, with holdings by Boucher, Fragonard, Greuze, and Watteau. The gift brings to the museum works in chalk and pastel on paper by these four artists, media in which none of them is currently represented. Among these is a pastel drawing lauded by the influential writers Edmond and Jules Goncourt as one of the most beautiful by Boucher. The image of a reclining woman is associated with a pastoral painting now at the Louvre. Young Woman (La Coquette) by Fragonard is one of a series of spectacular drawings of female models standing outdoors. These were made in the early 1770s, contemporaneous with his creation of the four original canvases of The Progress of Love that today are a highlight of the Frick. The most renowned—and arguably the best—pastelist in eighteenth-century France was the eccentric Maurice Quentin de La Tour. The Eveillards have the finest pastel by him in private hands in the United States, the portrait of Madame Rouillé. It too comes to the Frick along with a sheet by De La Tour’s near contemporary Nicolas Lancret, neither of whom is currently represented at the museum in any medium. Widely traveled and celebrated during her life, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun was a highly accomplished portraitist and writer. Her work also enters the collection with Head of a Woman, a sketch signed and dated 1784 and likely made in preparation for a history painting that was never executed. The scope of the institution’s French works is broadened further with sheets by Pierre-Paul Prud’hon and Jean-Baptiste Wicar.
Painter Eugène Delacroix was among those artists to herald French Romanticism. In 2010, former Frick Director Charles Ryskamp left to the Frick the artist’s Moroccan Interior, a delicate and personal drawing from one of the sketchbooks Delacroix made in 1832 during a visit to North Africa. The Eveillard gift includes a pastel by the artist depicting two North African figures in a landscape, based on sketches made two decades later. Of the twenty known Delacroix pastels of such subjects, only a dozen can be located today; the Eveillard sheet is the only one in private hands, making this acquisition a particularly rare occurrence.
The Frick is also celebrated for Spanish art, including five works by Goya: four paintings and one drawing, The Anglers. The Eveillards’ Tambourine Player will deepen the institution’s holdings by the artist. This depiction of a dancing Spanish man comes from the same album as the aforementioned drawing and likewise exemplifies the artist’s use of everyday people as subjects, as is also the case with the Frick’s large Goya painting of laborers, The Forge.
Other works in the gift enrich the Frick’s celebrated collection of Italian works, with sheets ranging from a rare anonymous fifteenth-century Venetian drawing to Italian Renaissance and Baroque sheets by Federico Barocci, Guido Reni, and Salvator Rosa and eighteenth-century works by Giovanni Battista Piazzetta and Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo. The group includes two remarkable portraits by Jan Lievens, the Dutch contemporary of Rembrandt, and by Sir Thomas Lawrence, the leading British portraitist of his age. As a young collector, Henry Clay Frick was particularly interested in the Barbizon school, and a drawing by Jean-François Millet, one of the movement’s founding members, will also enter the collection through this generous gift. The landscape joins a genre scene by Millet already in the collection. Crowning this remarkable group of works is an oil sketch by John Constable, made in preparation for the last of the artist’s famous series of ‘six-footer’ paintings, of which The White Horse at the Frick was the first.
Exhibition | Virginia Lee Montgomery: Sword in the Sphinx
Virginia Lee Montgomery (VLM), Sword in the Sphinx, 2018, resin, steel, rust, concrete, enamel. As installed at Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, New York in 2018.
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Opening this month at Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park:
Virginia Lee Montgomery: Sword in the Sphinx
Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 16 September — 31 October 2021
The figure of the sphinx originated as an ancient Egyptian and Greek mythological monster. The sphinx with a female head and upper body and with lion’s legs became a popular garden statue in 18th-century Europe. Its features resembled that of Madame Pompadour, the French patron of the arts and chief mistress of King Louis XV. In Sword in the Sphinx, VLM adopts the Pompadour-style sphinx with a shocking twist: her back is pierced with a steel sword. Known for combining surrealism and feminism, VLM asks provocative questions about the representation of female power in art, adding another layer of meaning to a mythical figure with a complex history. Sword in the Sphinx is VLM’s official entry in the 2021 ArtPrize competition.
Marble Ponytails, the smoothly carved and polished marble ponytails, installed in the Courtyard Level, are named after ancient deities, among them Aurora, Andromeda, and Medusa. VLM asks us to dissociate these forms from masculine phallocentric readings, shifting perspective toward what she calls “feminist metaphysics.” VLM carved these sculptures by hand at the historic West Rutland Marble Quarry, on a fellowship through The Vermont Carving Studio and Sculpture Center.
Two of VLM’s short films are also being screened in the O-A-K Theater.
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Virginia Lee Montgomery (VLM), CUT COPY SPHINX, 2018, digital video, 3minutes 30seconds. “A surreal, sculptural short art-film about metaphysics, myth, and destruction. A feminist twist on the classical myth of Oedipus and the Sphinx, CUT COPY SPHINX recasts the sphinx as the uncanny hero who endures ‘cuts’ across time. Shot en plein aire on a miniature prop-set with a Dewalt drill and a gallon of honey, CUT COPY SPHINX syncs philosophy, feminism, and image theory. The film is directed, edited, scored, and performed by the artist, VLM” (description from Vimeo).
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Responding to a 2018 installation of Sword in the Sphinx at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, New York, Wendy Vogel describes the video CUT COPY SPHINX:
“A video for the park’s website dramatizes how an eighteenth-century sculpture of Madame de Pompadour as a sphinx, the authorship of which is disputed, has been copied for centuries in decor and knickknacks. A response to the #MeToo movement, Montgomery’s work upends the masculine bravado of the tales of King Arthur and Oedipus. ‘In the myth, Oedipus kills the sphinx’, Montgomery says, ‘but in my version she just keeps replicating’.”
–Wendy Vogel, “First Look: Virginia Lee Montgomery,” Art in America (October 2018).
Symposium | Everyday Rococo: Madame de Pompadour and the Arts
Tray and Tea Service (déjeuner ‘Courteille’, four gobelets ‘Hébert’ et soucoupes, pot à sucre ‘Bouret’), Manufacture de Sèvres, soft-paste porcelain, painted and gilded, lapis and green ground painted with children in landscapes by André-Vincent Vielliard, date letter F for 1759; probably bought by Mme de Pompadour in December 1759 (London: The Wallace Collection, C401-06).
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From The French Porcelain Society:
Everyday Rococo: Madame de Pompadour and the Arts
The Wallace Collection, London, 3–4 December 2021; rescheduled for 1–2 July 2022
The French Porcelain Society is pleased to announce its forthcoming symposium Everyday Rococo: Madame de Pompadour and the Arts to be held at the Wallace Collection, London, on 3–4 December 2021. With two days of papers, which we hope will also be available online, this will be the first reassessment of Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson’s artistic patronage since the landmark exhibition Madame de Pompadour et les Arts of 2002.
Commemorating the tercentenary of her birth, and marking the publication of Rosalind Savill’s book Everyday Rococo: Madame Pompadour and Sèvres Porcelain, this conference will welcome international experts discussing her interests in the fine and decorative arts from pets to porcelain and from prints to religious paintings. Further details will follow in the autumn, but please save the dates: Friday 3rd and Saturday 4th December.
New Book | Everyday Rococo
Scheduled for publication in October:
Rosalind Savill, Everyday Rococo: Madame de Pompadour and Sèvres Porcelain (London: Unicorn Press, 2021), 704 pages, ISBN: 978-1916495715, £200.
Jeanne Antoinette Poisson (1721–1764), Marquise de Pompadour, the 300th anniversary of whose birth will be celebrated on 29 December 2021, became the official mistress of Louis XV of France in 1745, and for the rest of her life their patronage of Vincennes/Sèvres helped to make it one of the greatest porcelain factories in history. Everyday Rococo: Madame de Pompadour and Sèvres Porcelain is a year-on-year richly-illustrated chronology of her daily life and purchases. Although also partly a social history revealing Madame de Pompadour as a major player in the art and politics of eighteenth-century France, Rosalind Savill’s diligent research has concentrated on the everyday details of Madame de Pompadour’s life for which Vincennes/Sèvres catered so perfectly.
Rosalind Savill, DBE, FBA, FSA, was Director of the Wallace Collection in London from 1992 until 2011, and is a specialist in French decorative arts, especially Sèvres porcelain. Her major publication, The Wallace Collection: Catalogue of Sèvres Porcelain, 3 vols, 1988, was awarded the National Art-Collection Fund prize for Scholarship in 1990. She was appointed CBE for Services to the Study of Ceramics in 2000, won the European Woman of Achievement Award (Arts and Media) in 2005, was appointed DBE for Services to the Arts in 2009, and was appointed an Ocier dans L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France, in 2014. She co-curated the exhibition The Art of Love: Madame de Pompadour at the Wallace Collection in 2002.
Online Tour | European Porcelain at Villa Cagnola
Online this Sunday from the French Porcelain Society:
Alessandro Biancalana, European Porcelain at Villa Cagnola
FPS Living Room Lecture, 5 September 2021, 18.00 (BST)
The French Porcelain Society is delighted to continue its online lectures with a very special private tour of Villa Cagnola, north of Milan. Alessandro Biancalana will discuss some highlights from the vast collection of European porcelain in the villa, including Doccia, Meissen, and Capodimonte. He will be joined during the Q&A session by director Don Eros Monti and curator Andrea Bardelli. We hope you can join us. For free links, please email FPSmailing@gmail.com.
“I would define Villa Cagnola not as a house museum in the strictest sense of the term, but rather as a Wunderkammer. Among its numerous treasures, including naturalia, porcelain plays a leading role: it is a composite collection, which has the eighteenth century as leitmotif, bringing together pieces from different manufactories all of them of high quality. Walking along Villa Cagnola’s rooms and looking at the showcases full of objects fascinates the visitor who travels between decorative systems and shapes that are different from each other: the most important European centres of production are represented with Meissen, Doccia, and the most relevant Venetian factories. I hope our journey is stimulating and a source of curiosity.” –Alessandro Biancalana
At Sotheby’s | Oppenheimer Meissen Collection
Lot 78: A unique Meissen armorial waste bowl from the service made for Clemens August, Elector of Cologne, ca. 1735, 18 cm diameter.
Estimate: $40,000–60,000.
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From the press release, via Art Daily (27 August 2021) for the Oppenheimer sale:
Sammlung Oppenheimer | Important Meissen Porcelain
Sotheby’s New York, 14 September 2021
Sotheby’s announces highlights from one of the greatest pre-war collections of Meissen porcelain to appear at auction in more than 60 years. Meticulously assembled by Dr. Franz and Margarethe Oppenheimer in the early decades of the 20th century, this exquisite group of 117 lots is among the most significant ensembles of early 18th-century Meissen porcelain from Europe’s first porcelain manufactory—many of which are distinguished by illustrious royal and noble provenance, including pieces from the collection of Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, and founder of the Meissen porcelain factory. Presented in a dedicated live auction on 14 September in New York, the collection is poised to achieve more than $2 million, with individual estimates ranging from $300 to $400,000 and approximately one third of the lots offered without reserve.
All of the works on offer will be on view in Sotheby’s York Avenue galleries beginning 7 September, ahead of the live auction.
The Collection
Franz and Margarethe Oppenheimer were connoisseur collectors, determined to build a magnificent Meissen collection at a time when it was still possible to acquire important pieces as they were being deaccessioned from the royal collections in Dresden. Dr. Franz Oppenheimer, a native of Hamburg, was a lawyer and became part owner and CEO of Emanuel Friedlaender und Co, a private company that dominated the Silesian coal industry before World War II. Margarethe, whom he married in 1902, was born in Vienna and was his partner in building their porcelain collection.
An Oppenheimer family portrait from the mid-1930s (Sotheby’s).
The couple lived in a grand apartment block on Regentenstrasse in Berlin, immediately next to the Tiergarten—the heart of Berlin’s collecting community in the early 20th century. In 1927, like many serious Berlin connoisseurs, the couple commissioned a private catalogue of their collection to be written by Professor Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, curator of the nearby Berliner Schlossmuseum. Professor von Carolsfeld catalogued 240 sets and individual pieces of porcelain, a number of which are featured in the September sale. The couple continued to collect after the 1927 catalogue and added at least 126 objects to their holdings, each of which were marked with red inventory numbers.
Once the Nazis came to power Franz Oppenheimer was persecuted because of his Jewish origins. As a consequence, in around December 1936, he and Margarethe fled from Berlin to the comparative safety of Vienna, having paid punitive emigration taxes to the Nazi Government. They rented an apartment close to the Belvedere in Vienna’s third district and were able to take some possessions, including part of their Meissen collection, with them.
The couple’s exile in Vienna did not last long. German troops entered Austria on 12 March 1938, and Adolf Hitler proclaimed the Anschluss of Austria into Germany the following day. The Oppenheimers escaped to Budapest the day before the Anschluss carrying only hand luggage. From Hungary they travelled via Sweden and Colombia before finally reaching their new home in New York three and a half years later—in December 1941. By 1941, their resources had been further eroded by another tranche of Flight Tax that they had to pay to emigrate from Austria. The couple chose to spend the remainder of their lives in an apartment on East 86th Street in Manhattan, just a few blocks from Sotheby’s present-day headquarters.
The Nazi authorities confiscated everything that they found in the Oppenheimers’ Vienna apartment but discovered that the collectors had succeeded in removing at least two crates of their most valuable porcelain before their flight. It is likely that some of the porcelain in this sale was smuggled out of Vienna to keep it out of Nazi hands. It is not known precisely when the objects in this sale were lost to the Oppenheimers, however they were with their next owner, another great connoisseur-collector and an active opponent of the Nazi regime, Fritz Mannheimer, before his premature death in 1939.
Mannheimer was born in Germany in 1890 and moved as a young man to Amsterdam where he established the Dutch branch of the Berlin based Mendelssohn Bank in 1920. In less than 20 years, he built both a thriving bank and an art collection of outstanding breadth and quality. Like the Oppenheimers, he commissioned a scholar, Otto von Falke, late director of the Berlin Kunstgewerbemuseum, to catalogue his collection. The porcelain in this sale was all acquired after von Falke completed his work in March 1936.
After Kristallnacht, on 9 November 1938, the Mendelssohn Bank was shuttered by the Nazis and Fritz Mannheimer lost its collaboration, and its balance sheet, for his Amsterdam bank. While Mannheimer kept trading, his last major deal was the refinancing of a part of the French National debt in 1939; this failed—partly due to the deteriorating political situation in Europe—and the young banker was obliged to buy back unplaced French bonds at his own expense. This triggered a severe liquidity crisis for his bank and for himself. On 8 August 1939, in the midst of the bank’s crisis, Mannheimer left for a break in France. Upon his arrival in Vaucresson, he suffered a massive heart attack and died only a few hours later.
Mannheimer’s bank stopped its operations immediately after his death. An audit showed the bank carried a large debt of over 42 million guilders, for which the collector’s personal estate was jointly liable. Experts from the Rijksmuseum were brought in and valued the art collection at six and a half million guilders and Mannheimer’s executors decided to liquidate it as a contribution to the Bank’s losses. A member of the SS based in Holland acquired the collection for Adolf Hitler in 1941.
As Allied bombing placed the Führer’s art holdings in peril, the Meissen that had been acquired from Mannheimer’s estate was moved for safe keeping first to Vyšší Brod Monastery in Bohemia and later to the salt mines in Bad Aussee. The porcelain was eventually discovered by Allied Monuments Officers and was transferred to the Central Collecting Point in Munich in 1946. The collection was sent back to the Netherlands between 1945 and 1949. After the recovery of the Mannheimer Collection, the collector’s executors did not seek restitution, as they would have been obligated to refund the price paid by the Führer’s curators, and the collection passed into Dutch State holdings. Of the porcelain, some was held as property available for restitution and some was transferred to the Rijksmuseum.
Earlier this year the Restitution Commission of the Netherlands accepted that the porcelain in this sale that had belonged to the Oppenheimers must be restituted to their heirs.
Auction Highlights
The collection of Franz and Margarethe Oppenheimer exemplifies their penchant for chinoiserie taste, an all-encompassing term from the Victorian era that was applied to pseudo-Asian forms and decorations invented in Europe from the 17th century onward, in response to the exoticism and novelty of contemporary Asian imports. The origins of many of the pieces collected by the Oppenheimers can be associated with royal commissions for Meissen porcelain to decorate the interiors of Augustus the Strong’s colossal ‘porcelain palace’, conventionally known as the Japanese Palace, on the banks of the river Elbe in Dresden-Neustadt.
Meissen mantel clock case, 1727, the gilt-bronze mount probably German, mid-18th century, the movement signed Barrey à Paris, ca. 1700, 44 cm. high.
The September auction is led by an important Documentary and Dated Meissen Mantel Clock Case from 1727 (lot 64)—undoubtedly the rarest piece in the Oppenheimer Collection and illustrative of the Chinoiserie style they so loved (estimate $200–400,000). This magnificent Meissen clock case can be counted among the most ambitious and successful of sculptural models produced at the factory at this early date. The Oppenheimers were able acquire the clock case after it had passed through two prestigious 19th-century English collections, at some point between 1923 and 1927. The present clock was originally owned by Ralph Bernal, a politician and discerning art collector, who later became president of the British Archaeological Society in 1853 and whose collection garnered the attention of prestigious museums and connoisseurs alike, including the Rothschilds, the Marquess of Hertford, Marlborough House, the South Kensington Museum, the Tower Armory, and the British Museum. Sir Anthony de Rothschild acquired this particular clock in April 1855 for £120.
At least five varying clock case models were produced at Meissen in the late 1720s and early 1730s, and one can presume that Meissen clocks from this date were intended for the royal industry’s principal client and patron, Augustus the Strong, and were to be included in the rooms of the Japanese Palace. According to the 1733 Specification von Porcilan—a listing of the Meissen porcelain ordered for the Japanese Palace, though not necessarily produced—a total of fourteen clocks were ordered. The dating of this compilation—the year of Augustus the Strong’s death—is largely a reflection of the initial orders of the late 1720s. The fourteen clocks were allocated to four rooms in the piano nobile, and it is even known exactly where on the walls the clocks were intended to be placed. Only five clocks of this model appear to have survived by the early 20th century, each with slight variations in the modeling, rendering all of them unique. Of the five, two are in museum collections: in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Hetjens-Museum in Düsseldorf.
Lot 104: Pair of Meissen Augustus Rex yellow-ground baluster vases and covers, ca. 1735, 47 cm and 46.2 cm high.
Estimate $150–250,000.
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A Pair of Meissen Augustus Rex Yellow-Ground Baluster Vases and Covers further distinguishes the offering (estimate $150–250,000). According to the 1733 Specification, ‘Hoch-Gelb-Couleur’, or deep-yellow-color, Meissen porcelain was allocated to so-designated Room 3 of the Japanese Palace, in between rooms for seladon, a shade of green, and dark-blue-ground Meissen porcelains. This large order of yellow-ground porcelain included approximately 267 vases, bottles and beakers, including six garnitures formed of seven vases and two garnitures formed of five vases, among other pieces. A yellow-ground ogee vase decorated in the same manner and formerly in the Royal Collections of Saxony, Dresden, may once have formed a garniture with the present vases. That vase, missing since 1945, was originally installed in the tower room of the Royal Palace. In addition, the somewhat unusual leaf-form cartouches seen on the present vases are recorded on Chinese Kangxi vases, examples of which were in Augustus the Strong’s collection, now in the Porzellansammlung, Dresden.
A very rare Pair of Meissen Augustus Rex Underglaze Blue-Ground Beaker Vases are also in the sale (estimate $70,000–100,000). An unusual feature of the present pair of vases is the use of two alternating different green enamels on the cartouches, the significance of which is uncertain and invites further research. One possibility is that painters worked in their own personalized enamel palettes which could indicate two different hands painted these vases. The same feature is seen on a smaller underglaze blue-ground vase of this form, in the collection of the Porzellansammlung, Dresden.
An extremely rare and probably unique Pair of Meissen Augustus Rex Hexagonal Vases and Covers, likely to be the only pair of Meissen vases of this type recorded in literature, also highlights the September sale (estimate $80,000–120,000). While the 18th-century provenance of these vases remains unknown, the survival of at least three rare red-anchor Chelsea porcelain vases, ca. 1752–56, which appear to be direct copies, suggests a possible English ownership by the mid-18th century. Whilst it cannot be proven with certainty, it seems probable that the Chelsea porcelain factory had access to the present vases. A potential 18th-century owner of the vases is Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, who was British Envoy to the Saxon Court between 1747–49 and 1751–54.
An extremely rare Pair of Meissen Augustus Rex Underglaze-Blue-Ground Beaker Vases round out this spectacular group (estimate $80,000–120,000). After the death of Augustus the Strong, beaker vases of this type were sent to the Dresden residence to be installed in the Turmzimmer. A remarkable early series of photographs show how the Meissen porcelain was displayed in Turmzimmer and shows surviving vases of this form. A powder blue beaker vase of this form and size, which features the same painted floral band at the center, remains in the Porzellansammlung, Dresden, while another is in the Reiss-Museum, Mannheim. The Oppenheimers acquired these vases separately and only owned one by 1927.
Additional highlights from the sale include: a very rare Meissen Augustus Rex Large Seladon-Ground Vase (estimate $50,000–70,000), likely one of five large Meissen porcelain bottle vases in this color that were listed as delivered to the Japanese Palace in December 1737; a unique Meissen Armorial Waste Bowl from the Service Made for Clemens August, Elector of Cologne (estimate $40,000–60,000), a smaller version of which is now in the Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Cologne, together with other pieces from the service; and an extremely rare Meissen Famille Verte Goblet (estimate $50,000–70,000), one of only five or six pieces of Meissen porcelain painted in this distinctive style that appear to be recorded.
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