Rijksmuseum buys major collection of Meissen porcelain at auction

Meissen porcelain

The development of Meissen porcelain represents one of the most important moments in the history of European applied arts. This very first European true porcelain was made at the Royal Court in Dresden in 1708, under the patronage of Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony. The secret method for manufacturing this ‘white gold’ was previously known only in Asia. The Oppenheimers collected almost exclusively objects featuring the very highest quality decoration and gilding, and many were made for the palaces of Augustus the Strong. It is partly because of this that the Rijksmuseum’s Meissen collection is world famous, and regarded as the most important collection alongside the Porzellansammlung in Dresden. It is thanks to this collection that there is nowhere else in the Netherlands that European art of such an excellent standard can be seen.

The provenance of the Oppenheimer collection

Under the threat of persecution by the Nazi regime, in 1936 the German-Jewish couple Franz and Margarethe Oppenheimer fled from Berlin to Austria, and then in 1938 – just before the Anschluss –to the United States. The couple took part of their collection with them on their flight from Germany to Austria, and between 1936 and 1939 they sold a large portion of it as a single group to Fritz Mannheimer, a German-Jewish banker living in Amsterdam who assembled an all-but unparalleled collection of European works of applied art. His collection reflected the great Royal European collections from the 16th to the 18th century.

When Mannheimer died, his estate was declared bankrupt and the executor, under pressure from the Nazis, sold the collection to pay the bank’s creditors. After the war, the collection was recovered and placed with the Dutch State. In 1952, a large part of this collection was incorporated in the Rijksmuseum’s collection of applied arts.  

Restitutie

Restitution In 2015 Franz and Margarethe 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. Following a thorough investigation, the Restitutions Committee advised the minister to return the objects to the heirs, and the minister agreed to this in December 2019.

The Rijksmuseum has been conducting its own investigations since 2012 into the provenance of its collection, with respect to the Second World War. The website ‘Museale Verwervingen vanaf 1933’ (‘Museum acquisitions from 1933 onwards’) classifies the Oppenheimer collection as a ‘collection of uncertain origin'.