Goldschmidt, Jakob

Biography

German banker, financier, and leading collector of late 19th-century French art, Jakob Goldschmidt had been the head of the Darmstadt Bank in pre-Hitler days. The Matthiesen Gallery, then in Berlin, often acted as his advisor in collecting. Goldschmidt fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and came to New York, where he may have become a naturalized American citizen. Goldschmidt had been forced to abandon his collection, some of which was sold by the Nazis at the Lange auction house in Berlin on 25 September 1941. Goldschmidt's son, Irwin, an insurance agent in New York and Connecticut, later tried to trace these pieces, which Irwin believed had fallen into Soviet hands. In the U.S., Goldschmidt was a generous lender to exhibitions and a patron of New York's Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. Sotheby's of New York held a sale of Goldschmidt's estate in November of 1956. In October of 1958, some of his Impressionist paintings were sold through Sotheby's in London.

Bibliography

1955

Art News 54 (November 1955): 68 [obituary]

1955

The New York Times. 25 September, 1955: 92, col. 5. [obituary]

1957

The Connoisseur 139 (March 1957): 42.

1958

NGA Vertical Files, clipping from Washington Star, 16 October 1958

1970

Towner, Wesley. The Elegant Auctioneers. Completed by Stephen Varble. New York, 1970: 588-590, 606.

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