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Porcelain Miles: How chinoiserie Meissen porcelain once stolen by the Nazis has made its way home to a Dutch museum
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 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 W 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.
The Oppenheimers, who made their money in Silesian coalmining, were connoisseur collectors, determined to build a magnificent Meissen collection by acquiring important pieces as they were deaccessioned from the royal collections in Dresden.
Much of their collection, the majority of which reflected their penchant for chinoiserie, originated from the collection of Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, and founder of the Meissen porcelain factory.
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, they commissioned a private catalogue of their collection to be written by Professor Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, curator of the nearby Berliner Schlossmuseum. At the time the professor catalogued 240 sets and individual pieces of porcelain, much of which made up the recent sale.
RISE OF THE NAZIS
On the rise of the Nazis, 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
Right Nicolas de Largillière (1656-1746) Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, 1715
Below left A rare pair of Meissen hexagonal cases and covers, c. 1735-1740, likely to be the only pair of Meissen vases of this type recorded in literature, sold for $378,000 (against an estimate of $80,000$120,000)
Below right Elevation of room four of the Japanese Palace in Dresden, c. 1735, designated for Meissen pieces
Augustus the Strong and his Japanese palace
Many of the Meissen pieces collected by the Oppenheimers were commissioned to decorate the interiors of Augustus II (1670–1733), Elector of Saxony and King of Poland’s colossal ‘porcelain palace’ on the banks of the river Elbe in Dresden-Neustadt.
Just as the king was known as Augustus the Strong, so his palace took the name ‘Japanese’ and was the fulfilment of the king’s obsession with discovering the recipe for true porcelain first developed in China in the sixth century.
Such was his desire to understand its secrets, he imprisoned a young alchemist, Johann Friedrich Böttger, who perfected the recipe in 1709. Augustus the Strong went on to found the Meissen Porcelain Manufactory— the first porcelain manufactory in Europe.
By 1719 he had amassed more than 20,000 pieces of Chinese and Japanese porcelain, growing to 29,000 pieces on his death in 1733. Meissen porcelain destined for his court bore his monogram: ‘AR’ or ‘Augustus Rex’ (used prior to Meissen’s famous crossed sword mark adopted in 1722).
When Saxony became a republic in 1918, parts of the king’s Meissen collection went to the Dresden Porcelain Collection (Porzellansammlung) where it can still be seen today, other pieces remained with the royal family, while others were auctioned at sales from which the Oppenheimers grew their collecion.
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, when German troops entered Austria on March 12, 1938 and Hitler proclaimed the Anschluss of Austria into Germany, the Oppenheimers fled to Budapest with hand luggage only.
From Hungary they travelled via Sweden and Colombia to New York, where they arrived in December 1941. By then, their wealth was diminished, owing to another tranche of emigration taxes that was the cost of being able to leave Austria. The couple, by then in their 60s, spent the rest of their greatly reduced lives in a modest apartment on East 86th Street in Manhattan.
SMUGGLED OUT
Exactly what happened to their porcelain during this time is unclear. But it is possible that the Oppenheimers arranged to have it smuggled from Berlin to the Netherlands with a considerable portion of it ending up in the care of another collector, Fritz Mannheimer, a German who had established the Amsterdam branch of the Berlin-based Mendelssohn Bank in 1920, and was an active Nazi opponent.
Like the Oppenheimers, he commissioned a scholar, Otto von Falke, late director of the Berlin Kunstgewerbemuseum, to catalogue his collection. After Kristallnacht in November 1938, the bank was closed down by the Nazis, and Mannheimer was driven to bankruptcy, suffering a fatal heart attack in August 1939.
The liquidation of his remaining assets including his art collection was seized on as an opportunity by a member of Hitler’s SS based in Holland who acquired the 3,000-piece collection, including the Oppenheimers’ porcelain, in 1941.
It was intended for the Nazi leader’s so-called Führermuseum, a vanity project to turn the Austrian city of Linz into a cultural capital of Nazi Germany, which was never realised.
A key sentence in the wartime Mannheimer sales contract between the Dutch legal expert Korthals Altes and the German Reich, was that the sale was ‘not entirely voluntary’. This proved to be the key legal phrase allowing post-war recuperation.
Above The yellowground baluster vases and covers in the display of the Mannheimer Collection (middle shelf)
Left An extremely rare Meissen blue-tinted beaker vase, c. 17271730, sold for $806,500 (against an estimate of $50,000-$70,000)
Above right A pair of Meissen yellow-ground baluster vases and covers, c. 1735, the unusual leaf-form cartouches can be seen on Chinese Kangxi vases, examples of which were in Augustus the Strong’s collection, now in the Porzellansammlung, Dresden. The pair sold for $685,000 (against an estimate of $150,000-$250,000)
Below left A celadon ground vase, c. 1735, likely one of five large Meissen porcelain bottle vases listed as delivered to the Japanese Palace in December 1737, sold for $625,000 (against an estimate of $50,000$70,000) Below right A rare pair of Meissen underglaze blue-ground beaker vases marked Augustus Rex, c. 1725, sold for $1.23m against an estimate of $80,000-$120,000
Below left A rare pair of Meissen underglaze blue-ground beaker vases marked Augustus Rex achieved $867,000 against an estimate of $70,000-$100,000
Right Both pairs of vases on display in Mannheimer’s collection, 1940
ALLIED BOMBING
As Allied bombing placed the Führer’s art holdings in peril, the Meissen acquired from Mannheimer’s estate was moved for safe keeping first to Vyšší Brod Monastery in south Bohemia and later to the salt mines in Bad Aussee. Towards the end of the war, a group of US and UK art experts and museum curators was tasked with recovering Hitler’s stolen art before it could be destroyed by the Germans. Their story hit the big screen in the 2014 film The Monuments Men, starring George Clooney and Matt Damon. Among the treasures they uncovered was the Oppenheimer’s collection of 117 pieces of 17th and 18th-century Meissen porcelain.
Using US military trucks, officers transferred the collection to the central collecting point in Munich in 1946, from where it was sent back to the Netherlands. The collection was held in three museums in the Netherlands including the Rijksmuseum for 70 years.
RETURNED TO OWNERS
Top left The Vyšší Brod Monastery now in the Czech republic
Above left George Clooney on the set of The Monuments Men
Above right The clock case was the sale’s top seller going for close to $1.6m
Below A Meissen armorial waste bowl, c. 1735, one of only five or six pieces of Meissen porcelain painted in this distinctive style that appear to be recorded sold for $600,800 (against an estimate of $40,000-$60,000) At least five clock case models were produced at Meissen in the late 1720s and early 1730s. Among the most ambitious and successful of the factory’s early pieces, the clocks were likely intended for Augustus the Strong’s Japanese Palace. According to the 1733 Specification von Porcilan – a listing of the Meissen porcelain ordered for the palace – a total of 14 clocks were ordered, with five of this model appearing to have survived into the 20th century.
Of the five, two are in museum collections: in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Hetjens-Museum in Düsseldorf.
So it was no surprise this 44cm high clock case topped the Rijksmuseum’s shopping list for which they paid $1.2m (£923,000) or close to $1.6m, including premium.
Modelled by George Fritzsche and decorated with chinoiserie vignettes, it includes a group of figures attributed to Johann Gottlieb Kirchner, fashioned as Minerva with Arachne. It is inscribed ‘Meissen’ over its crossed swords mark and dated 1727. The movement, signed Barrey à Paris, dates to c.1700 while the bronze mount is a mid-18th-century addition.
Prior to its acquisition by the Oppenheimers, the clock case had a 19th-century provenance to two notable English collections. It was owned by politician and art collector Ralph Bernal (1783-1854) and was included in the 32-day auction of his collection held by Christie’s in 1855 when it was acquired by Sir Anthony de Rothschild (1810-1876) in April 1855 for £120. It was subsequently sold by his daughters at Christie’s in 1923 when it made £294.
In 2015, the Oppenheimer’s heirs submitted a claim to the Ministry for Education, Culture and Science for more than a hundred objects in the Dutch National Collection, 92 of which were managed by the Rijksmuseum. The Restitutions Committee advised the minister to return the objects to the heirs, which formed the basis of the recent sale at which the Rijksmuseum was the biggest buyer claiming more than half the lots that will now return to its display cabinets.
Rijksmuseum director, Taco Dibbits, said: “It is important to be able to contribute in this way to the restoration of justice to the relatives of the Oppenheimers. This major collection of Meissen porcelain will now be able to be displayed in perpetuity, enabling us to devote attention in the museum to the personal story of this family and the fortunes of their collection during and after WWII.”
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