THE EXPERT COLLECTOR Returned Meissen porcelain
Right A rare Meissen armorial tea and coffee service, made for the noble Morosini family of Venice, acquired by the Rijksmuseum for $1.4m (against an estimate of $120,000-$180,000)
Porcelain W MILES
Chinoiserie-style Meissen porcelain once seized by the Nazis has been restored to a Dutch museum after an extraordinary tale of smuggling, bankruptcy and salt mines. Antique Collecting reports
Left A portrait of the Oppenheimer family from the mid-1930s, with Margarethe and Franz Oppenheimer in the front row, all images unless otherwise stated courtesy of Sotheby’s
58 ANTIQUE COLLECTING
ith much of it created to satisfy the “maladie de porcelaine” of the Polish king Augustus the Strong, the makers of the delicate Meissen porcelain, which recently sold at auction for $15m, could have had no idea of the extraordinary journey their work would undertake. After traversing the globe in everything from US military trucks to suitcases, some 50 pieces from the “greatest pre-war collections of Meissen porcelain to appear at auction in more than 60 years” have returned to Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, the place where they had been on display until 1952. Lucian Simmons, the worldwide head of Sotheby’s restitution department, said: “One of the most astonishing aspects of the odyssey the artefacts have undergone is that they have remained intact. Porcelain is a tough substance, but it is incredible that these intricate pieces remain in such a perfect condition. They were, after all, repeatedly packed up and unpacked, placed in a monastery and a mine, then transported along Alpine roads in army trucks. They have been on a huge and extraordinary road trip.”
CONNOISSEUR COLLECTORS The 117 pieces sold at Sotheby’s New York this autumn represented just a quarter of the entire collection assembled by the Hamburg lawyer Franz Oppenheimer and his Viennese wife, Margarethe, in the early decades of the 20th century.
