The Louvre
The Louvre will have to relinquish several hundred works that it acquired against the express wishes of their previous owner.
Adèle de Rothschild was born into the Frankfurt branch of the famous banking family, later marrying her French cousin Salomon. She assembled an impressive art collection during her lifetime, with perhaps the most prominent work being Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein’s 1787 painting Goethe in the Roman Campagna. Rothschild passed away in 1922, leaving her mansion and its contents to the French state. The works of fine and decorative art from her estate now belong to the Louvre, the National Library, the Musée de Cluny, and other French cultural institutions. However, Rothschild specified that one part of her estate would not be turned over to the government. Her cabinet of curiosities is a collection of items kept at her mansion, the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild. Alongside works by Delacroix and Rodin, the cabinet includes Chinese enamels and porcelains, stained glass, a jade Buddha sculpture, a seventeenth-century Venetian writing desk, an Ottoman rifle, and a vase made from a First World War artillery shell. None of the items should have been removed from the cabinet’s designated rooms. And yet, some of the objects now at the Louvre entered the museum collection as early as 1923. The French newspaper Le Monde reported last week that during a year-long inventory inspection starting in 2019, the Louvre discovered that two hundred fifty-eight works from Adèle de Rothschild’s cabinet of curiosities are part of the museum collection.
The Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild is now operated by the Fondation des Artistes, an organization that supports contemporary artists with funding and residency. Laurence Maynier, the organization’s director, said that the museum put up a fight during the negotiations. Louvre representatives first brought up legal objections before resorting to the same argument the British Museum frequently relies on: that the items won’t receive the attention they deserve should they turn them over. However, Maynier was quick to point out that many of the items from the Rothschild collection were not on display at the Louvre but kept in storage. As part of the agreement between the museum and the Fondation des Artistes, the thirty objects that are on display will remain at the Louvre for five years, giving the museum the time to find suitable replacements. Maynier commented, “If we are unable to respect the conditions of a bequest, we sabotage any possibility of creating others.”