During the 19th century, the Rothschild family built a banking empire and became one of the wealthiest and most influential families in Europe. With the growth of the family and changing politics on the continent, their fortunes started to decline in the 20th century. In Vienna, Austria, the Rothschild’s bank, Creditanstalt, suffered after the defeat of the Habsburg Empire in World War I. Mergers and restructuring during the 1920s didn’t help matters, and Creditanstalt collapsed in 1929. The outwardly opulent lifestyle of the Rothschild family, coupled with the failure of their Jewish bank, fueled antisemitic conspiracy theories promoted by the Nazi Party in Germany. On March 12, 1938, Nazi Germany annexed Austria—an event known as the Anschluß. Almost immediately, the assets of the Viennese branch of the Rothschild family were seized, including the residence of Alphonse (1878–1942) and Clarice (1894–1967) de Rothschild at 14–16 Theresianumgasse.
At the time of the Anschluß, Alphonse and Clarice were out of the country, but Alphonse’s younger brother Louis (1882–1955) was arrested in Vienna. Louis was held by the Nazis until the entirety of the Rothschild family’s assets were signed over to the Reich. On July 13, 1939, a contract was signed between Louis de Rothschild and the Reich Ministry of Economics. Apart from financial and racial motivations, the Nazis were also after the great art collections of the Rothschilds.
One of the works owned by Alphonse and Clarice de Rothschild was a François Boucher design for a clock, now in the collection of the Carlos Museum (1998.007). To trace the provenance of the Boucher, I visited the online card files of the Central Depot for Confiscated Collections in Vienna. The cards document objects confiscated by the Nazis from Austrian private Jewish collections which were subsequently distributed to various museums in Austria. Searching for “Boucher” in the collection of “AR: Alphonse Rothschild” led me to entry AR_714. The cards, along with information supplied by the Lexikon der österreichischen Provenienzforschung allowed me to trace the history of the Boucher after the collection of Alphonse de Rothschild was officially seized on July 13, 1939.
The Boucher was moved from Palais Rothschild to the Central Depot housed in the Neue Burg, Hofburg in central Vienna to await distribution. The Albertina Museum laid claim to the Boucher, but German art historian and curator Hans Posse (1879–1942) overruled them and selected the work for the Kunstmuseum in Linz. Linz was Adolf Hitler’s adopted hometown, and he planned to turn it into the cultural capital of Europe. One component of his plan was a monumental art museum, sometimes known as the Führermuseum, which was to be stocked by Nazi looting.
On June 26, 1941, the Boucher was in the last shipment from the Central Depot in Vienna to the Reich Art Depot in Kremsmünster, where works intended for Linz were being gathered. When the war began to turn against the Nazis, the Reich Art Depot was evacuated to safeguard the art. The Boucher and other works from Alphonse Rothschild’s collection were sent to the Altaussee salt mines near Salzburg between January and September 1944. As Allied troops advanced in Austria, Nazi Gauleiter August Eigruber (1907–1947) ordered the mines to be destroyed and moved four crates of bombs into the tunnels on April 10 and 15, 1945. Nazi cultural officials and mine employees worked to stall the destruction until the Americans gained control of the area on May 8, 1945. Most of the works from Altaussee were transferred to the Munich Central Collecting Point to begin the process of repatriation. However, objects that obviously came from Austria, like the Alphonse Rothschild works, were kept in the mines. In March 1946, the mines and the remaining contents were turned over to Austria.
Alphonse didn’t live to see the end of the war, having died in 1942. It was left to Clarice, who was living in New York, to reclaim family assets. As part of her efforts, Clarice traveled to Altaussee to identify pieces from the family's art collection. The Boucher was returned to the family on October 16, 1947. Reclaiming art was one thing, but getting it out of Austria was another. The Austrian government refused to allow Clarice to remove the Rothschild art collection from Austria, citing the 1918 Austrian Export Prohibition Act and the 1923 Monument Protection Act. These were the same laws the Nazis used to prohibit Jews from taking their collections with them as they fled Austria after the Anschluß. For Clarice to take any of the Rothschild family collection to New York, she was forced to “donate” 200 pieces to Austrian museums. Once home in New York, Clarice kept some of the collection and sold other pieces through the firm Rosenberg & Stiebel. The Boucher was sold by Rosenberg & Stiebel (inventory #1088) to Siegfried Kramarsky in 1949, and the Kramarsky family would ultimately donate the work to the Carlos in 1998.
