Page 22 - Joseph Wright of Derby: Virgils's Tomb & The Grand Tour.

chastened papa was compelled to telegraph the Berlin gallery for funds…..there followed a trip round south-
western France and the Pyrenees which is described thus in 1950 by Göttfried Benn, the nihilist and later
existentialist and expressionist writer and poet …’I made a substantial journey…with an art dealer who had a famous
gallery.We travelled in an enormous Horch7 from Berlin, via Paris to Biarritz, all over France and across to the Pyrenees into
Spain. It was a business trip. We visited small towns and correspondingly small establishments but also castles and chateaux.
Once we visited a cloister and heard the Litany. My companion would say “Nous cherchons des antiquités surtout des Primitifs
et des tableaux de grand valeur.” 8 I believe he had made great discoveries in the past and he would wander from room to room
commenting on this and that, turning to and fro and after that demanding to see what was in the tower.Then he would apologise
for the time he had taken, say he did not wish to forget anything and please to take this object to my car – and as I have said
many a time – he was a renowned expert who in Berlin maintained a collection of the finest and rarest things anywhere.9

By 1933 my father had, in anticipation of most, realised the way things were going to go in Germany so that by 1934
he had left his private Berlin residence at Hohenzollernstraße, 35 and travelled to Switzerland, Zurich at first and
then London.While travel was safely possible he went to and fro and, from Switzerland, arranged for the safe passage
of Jewish friends and relations out of Germany including his mother Anna and Sister Ellen10 the sculptress. In 1935
under the new anti-Jewish laws he had to give up his position as chairman of Matthiesen Gmbh. putting in his place
Mansfeld and his PA, Margerete Noelle. The ownership register showed the dealer Gottfied Tanner in Zurich, my
sister Maren in Geneva and P. & D. Colnaghi as procurators. As National Socialism progressed so was the gallery
‘Arianised’, the Library and all my father’s possession sequestered along with much of the stock. (After the war my
father lodged a claim for return as these possessions were reputedly taken to Linz.They were never found. My father,
too much the gentleman, never made a claim for restitution to the Federal Government though he was clearly entitled
to do so11). In November 1938 my father gave his shares in the Berlin gallery to Mansfeld and Noelle and on the 29th
May 1939 the gallery was forcibly closed by the Nazis and put into sequestered liquidation.12

7. Horch were the first to introduce and design production eight cylinder engines. From 1923 Paul Daimler worked for the company as an engineer.The cars
were a by-word for luxury and design the equivalent or even superior to Bentley.The company after a split and row with associates was to become Audi.

8. In this he was following a great tradition.As a child I befriended Edward Hutton (1875-1969), our next door neighbour at 114 Clifton Hill, NW8 and
a close acquaintance of my father’s.As a small child I had been encouraged to go and keep the old widower company in his vast garden.There was a
garden house beneath a giganticTree of Heaven, the perch of many an owl whose nocturnal mournful hooting song accompanied my infantine dreams.
This was used to store equipment and apples from the extensive orchard that had once, beforeWWII, stretched to Carlton Hill and was a place of
incomparable mystery scented of cider. Edward’s wife, née Charlotte Miles, as an even smaller boy seemed to me the re-incarnation of QueenVictoria.
I was terrified of her in her black crinolines and silks topped with lace as she was of ferocious mien. Edward went into publishing with the Bodley Head
in the 1890s and upon gaining an inheritance travelled to Italy and was the publisher of many guide books making his way around by donkey.A friend of
Berenson he recounted to me how on a Sunday they would sit together in someTuscan village partaking of the local vintage until the Mass ended,
whereupon Berenson would leap onto a chair, waive or tap his cane and roar in Italian to the cowed populace “ Bring out your Madonnas, bring out your
Madonnas to see.”Thus was the exciting art trade then.To my certain knowledge, Edward, who adored primitives and had an uncanny ability to ferret
them out on the Pimlico Road, was at various times possessed of three works by Simone Martini as he was in effect also a capable marchand-amateur.

9. Göttfired Benn, SämtlicheWeke, Stuttgart AusghabeinVerbindung mit Ilse Benn, herausgegeben mit Gerhard Schuster, Bd.V: Prosa 3, Stuttgart 1991, S.173f.
10. Ellen Bernkopf (1904-1992) some of whose works are housed in the Jewish Museum, Israel.

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