Property Restituted to the Heirs of Baron Maximilian Von Goldschmidt-Rothschild
Baron Maximilian Von Goldschmidt-Rothschild, among his many business achievements, was a partner of the Frankfurt bank founded by his father, Benedikt Hayum Goldschmidt as well as being a partner with his sons of the Berlin bank A. Falkenberger (later Goldschmidt-Rothschild & Co.). Yet like many of his Rothschild in-laws, his true passion, and perhaps his most lasting legacy, was his collecting. Baron Maximilian Von Goldschmidt-Rothschild adopted the Rothschild name in 1901 after his father-in-law died, as Baron Wilhelm Carl von Rothschild (1828-1901) was the last male of the Frankfurt Rothschilds.
While the collections of Baron Maximilian Von Goldschmidt-Rothschild contained paintings by Rembrandt, Hals and other Dutch masters, it is the decorative arts, Limoges enamels, Italian maiolica, Meissen and Vienna porcelain and, above all, silver, that was the nucleus of his collection. On the occasion of Baron Maximilian’s 80th birthday in 1923, the celebrated art historian and art critic Dr. Adolph Donath wrote of Baron Maximilian’s Kunstkammer that ‘…only at Waddesdon, the British Museum, the Wallace Collection, Schloss Rosenborg [the Royal Danish collections] and the Green Vaults in Dresden can be found pieces of similar quality.’ Donath further noted that Baron Maximilian’s collection of silver animals was ‘unvergleichlich’ – unrivaled or without equal. It is not clear if the Silvered Bronze, Enameled Silver and Gilt-Bronze Elephant Automaton Clock, had belonged to Hannah Mathilde Baroness von Rothschild and Baron Wilhelm Carl von Rothschild, the parents of Baron Maximilian’s wife Minna Karoline (Minka) von Rothschild, as there are unconfirmed reports from the 1920s of the clock in the collection. But this seems unlikely, not only because this is undocumented, but it is much more probable that the Elephant Clock was purchased by Baron Maximilian himself over his many decades of intense collecting as he was specifically interested in this period of German Baroque silver and metalwork. And, as Donath mentions, particularly in figures of animals.
Immediately following the Nazi-sanctioned Novemberpogrome, better known as Kristallnacht, Baron Maximilian was forced to ‘sell’ his entire collection to the City of Frankfurt. The collection was purchased for just over 2.5 million Reichsmarks and, adding insult to injury, the funds were paid into a frozen account inaccessible to the family. A large part of the purchase price for the art collection went directly to the respective responsible tax offices, partly for the Judenvermögensabgab [the Jewish tax] to be paid by Maximilian himself and partly for the Judenvermögensabgabe as well as the Reichsfluchtsteuer [Reich Flight Tax] imposed on his son Albert.
After the war, the heirs of Baron Maximilian requested the return of the collection, the 1938 forced sale was eventually voided and much of the collection was returned to his heirs by February of 1949. Some of these restituted pieces were then sold at auction a year later in New York on March 10-11, 1950 – as described in a New York Times article “Art Nazis ‘Bought’ Will be Sold Here”. The Elephant Clock, was not among these treasures as it had left the collections of the Frankfurt Museum in an odd exchange that took place in the middle of the war. In 1943, a Frankfurt dealer, Carl Müller-Ruzika, traded to the Frankfurt Museum a ‘Louis XV Bronze Wall Clock‘ for von Goldschmidt-Rothschild’s clock. The von Goldschmidt-Rothschild clock then presumably entered the murky art market of the war and post-war period, these few years remain un-documented, and by the late 1940s the Elephant Clock was purchased the Dr. Baroness Irmgard von Lemmers-Danforth. The Dr. Baroness von Lemmers-Danforth was a legendary figure in the Hessian city of Wetzlar who amassed an outstanding collection of decorative arts which were all eventually gifted to Wetzlar’s Städtische Museen and exhibited in the Palais Papius.
The Elephant Clock was in the collections of the Städtische Museen from 1963 until 2021 when it was restituted to the heirs of Baron Maximilian, eighty-three years after it was seized from his collection, and sold at Christie’s in October 2021.
