The House of Rothschild, Volume 1

by Niall Ferguson

  In truth, for the Rothschilds themselves these occasions continued to be more a duty—an early form of corporate hospitality—than a pleasure. “Here we have stinking balls night after night,” complained Nat to his brothers in 1843; “you have no idea how sweaty the old French ladies smell after a long waltz.” Nor were the nightly dinners for diplomats and politicians much more enjoyable: on April 30, 1847, when the guests included the Prince of Holstein-Glücksburg, the Duke of Devonshire and Lord and Lady Holland, Apponyi could not help noticing the “affreuses douleurs névralgiques à la tête” from which Nat’s wife was all too plainly suffering. As for the incessant games of whist which were such a characteristic feature of nineteenth-century elite socialising—and which seem to have been the main form of entertainment at Naples—these too palled after a time. Most members of the family also had decidedly mixed feelings about the time they spent each year “taking the waters” at spas like Aix, Gastein, Wildbad and Kissingen, a practice first adopted by James in the early 1830s. Though this was the “done” thing, James rarely enthused about taking a Kur; indeed, he appears to have regarded it primarily as a medical necessity and often took the waters after illnesses or periods of intense and exhausting work. As he grew older, he tended to spend longer and longer periods of the summer recuperating in this way, but he generally continued to bombard his nephews or sons in Paris with peremptory letters, and insisted on being kept informed of any business developments. Salomon enthused about “the air and the mountains, the waterfalls [and] the good bath water” at Gastein in 1841, and Anthony joked that the waters were good for James’s libido; but Mayer’s reaction to Wildbad was more typical. “You have no idea,” he complained to Lionel in 1846, “how dull this place is and if I had not determined on taking the number of baths prescribed, how soon I would bolt.”

  The image of bolting, however, was a hint at more enjoyable pastimes which, by the 1830s, James and his nephews were discovering. Of these, hunting was an early favourite. It is necessary to distinguish here between three separate, though related activities, all of which were to become staple Rothschild hobbies. Firstly, there was shooting, mainly of pheasants, which James was doing at Ferrières by the early 1830s. Secondly, there was stag-hunting, which was one of the things which attracted his English nephews to Buckinghamshire in the 1840s. Finally, there was horse-racing, an enthusiasm related to hunting, though requiring more carefully bred and trained horses—not to mention professional jockeys.

  Of these pastimes, shooting was the most closely related to the pattern of social activity established in the 1820s. In September 1832, with the aftershocks of the July Revolution still reverberating, Lionel “accompanied Montalivet & Apponyi out shooting which in any other times than the present would be very amusing, but now one goes with these great personages to hear what is going on more than for the sake of the amusement.” That instrumental approach continued to inform his uncle James’s attitude throughout the decade, most obviously in 1835, when he staged an immense slaughter of 506 partridges, 359 hares and 110 pheasants in honour of the duc d’Orleans. This was corporate hospitality at its most grotesque, with the unfortunate birds and beasts being bought in specially for the occasion, and each of the eminent guests being provided with a servant, a dog and a gun. Inevitably, more discerning huntsmen looked askance at such carnage. Capefigue is quite vehement on the subject of the sport at Ferrières: “Bad kennels, bad hounds, horses dead-beat after the first gallop, greedy gamekeeper, game sold off, venison scrawny, servants scoffing and lacking in intelligence.” And even James’s own nephews were conscious that there was room for improvement. In 1843, in an ambitious bid to re-educate their uncle, they invited him to shoot grouse with them in Scotland. “The shooting is different to what we are accustomed to see and particularly to that which our good Uncle has at Ferrières where all the game is driven to him and he has but to fire away,” Lionel observed acerbically.

  Here we have to walk after the dogs and to seek for the game, which is a much greater excitement and at the same time more fatiguing. In the beginning the Baron was very eager and followed the dogs very well, and was rather lucky in killing about 15, but he soon got tired, when I was then able to shoot a little and killed about as many . . . [T]he walking is a little fatiguing, as the heath in most places is nearly up to one’s knees.

  The younger generation evidently relished the discomfiture of “the Baron”: both Nat and Anselm gleefully visualised James returning to Paris clad “as a real highlander, in a tartan dress, the claymore in his hand and exhibiting a flourishing view of stout legs and calves.”

  The hunting preferred by James’s English nephews was stag-hunting on horseback with hounds. Probably at Mayer’s instigation, they began hunting with a pack of staghounds in the Vale of Aylesbury in 1839, renting stables and kennels at Tring Park. It was this new enthusiasm, more than anything else, which prompted the purchase of Mentmore three years later. By 1840, “turning out the stag” was a recreation attracting not only the male Rothschilds but their wives to Buckinghamshire, though it was not until five years later that they felt ready to hold a public hunt. The most passionate Rothschild testaments to the pleasures of the chase come, poignantly, from Nat, the exile in Paris, whose early letters abound with allusions to hunting. “What magic there is in a pair of leather breeches,” he wrote home in 1842. “I have half a mind to put a pair on and gallop round the bois de Boulogne—old Tup [Mayer] would exclaim, “Go it, you cockney!” Write more about hunting & whether old Tup manages to tumble into the dirty black ditches, how H. Fitzroy was induced to go out with the staghounds—everything is of interest to us poor fellows who can only hunt through the columns of Bell’s Life.” And in the same year: “We are going to Lady Ailesbury’s tonight. I’d sooner have a run for 40 minutes across the vale than look at her ugly face without a veil.” In 1841 Sir Francis Grant was commissioned to paint all four brothers at full tilt on their hunters, resplendent in matching scarlet coats and top hats. In fact, it was seldom that all four were able to ride to hounds together.

  It is tempting to conclude from such evidence that the fad for stag-hunting was nothing more than the hedonism of wealthy youth, the stuff which would later be immortalised by Surtees and Siegfried Sassoon. Yet there is a phrase of Nat’s which hints at something more. “Ride like trumps,” he exhorted his brothers in 1840, “and do not let the Queen’s people fancy we are all tailors.” As in Paris, hunting inevitably had a social significance: it meant mixing with members of the aristocracy, including courtiers, men who would tend to be accomplished riders. It mattered to the sons of the textile merchant Nathan Rothschild to prove that they were not “all tailors” by acquitting themselves well over the hedges and gates of Buckinghamshire. And of course it was good exercise: something which their grandfather, confined in the Judengasse, had been denied and their father had scorned. It is not inconceivable that the older Rothschilds’ very sedentary lifestyles made them susceptible to the kind of ailment which killed Nathan. On the other hand, the fact that Nat suffered a serious injury as a result of a riding accident bore out his father’s warnings many years before about the incompatibility of bankers and horses.

  The same was true of the brothers’ first forays into horse-racing. We know from Buxton that Nathan had whetted his sons’ appetites for Arab horses, and Lionel was self-confessedly “extravagant” in his expenditure on horses while serving his apprenticeship in Paris. It was not until around 1840, however, that Anthony began to own and compete racehorses: in that year one of his horses won the Champs de Mars in Paris. This was in some ways the height of Rothschild social pretension in the period, as the pre-eminent owner of the day in Paris was none other than the duc d’Orléans. His death in a carriage accident in July 1842 left the field to some extent open: as Disraeli wrote that October, “Anthony succeeds the Duke of Orleans in his patronage of the turf & gives costly cups to the course wh[ich] his horses always win.” Nat, still fondly dreaming of the Vale, was disappr
oving, and warned his youngest brother: “Race horses are ticklish things, very pleasant to have a lot when they win, quite the contrary when they lose . . . Dear Tupus stick to the scarlet coat, instead of the silk jacket, it is more beneficial to the health and less expensive.” But Mayer, evidently inspired by Anthony’s success, shortly afterwards established a racing stable at Newmarket; it was he who in 1843 (after toying with the more garish combination of amber, lilac and red) registered the Rothschild colours as dark blue and yellow.

  Investing in Art

  The pleasures of the field were not the only ones discovered by James and his nephews after 1830. An even more important new source of enjoyment—and prestige—was patronage of the arts; and here we see clearly that Rothschilds were doing much more than merely “aping” aristocratic mores.

  Of course, there were those who erroneously took James de Rothschild for a philistine. “If only I had Rothschild’s money!” exclaims Gumpelino in a draft of “The Baths of Lucca” written by Heine in around 1828, three years before he left Germany for Paris:

  But what use is it to him? He lacks culture and understands as much about music as an unborn calf, about painting as a cat, about poetry as Apollo—that’s the name of my dog. When men like that lose their money, they cease to exist. What is money? Money is round and rolls away, but education endures . . . But if I—God forbid—were to lose my money, I would still remain a great connoisseur of art, painting, music and poetry.

  Fifteen years later, by which he time he knew James pretty well, he took a rather different view, though the compliments were—as so often with Heine—strictly back- handed. James, he now admitted, had

  the capacity of finding (if not always of judging) the leading practitioners in every other sphere of activity. Because of this gift he has been compared with Louis XIV; and it is true that in contrast to his colleagues here in Paris, who like to surround themselves with mediocrities, Herr James von Rothschild always appears in association with the notabilities of any subject; even if he knew nothing about it himself, he still always knew who most excelled in it. He does not, perhaps, understand a single note of music; but Rossini was always a friend of the family. Ary Scheffer is his court painter . . . Herr von Rothschild knows not a word of Greek; but the Hellenist Letronne is the scholar he favours most . . . Poetry, whether French or German, is also very eminently represented in Herr von Rothschild’s affections; although it seems to me as if . . . the Herr Baron is not as wildly enthusiastic about the poets of our own day as he is for the great poets of the past, for example, Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe—pure, dead poets, enlightened geniuses, who are free from all earthly dross, removed from all wordly needs, and do not ask him for shares in the Northern Railway.

  As we shall see, this last remark was a pointed allusion to Heine’s own relationship with James; but leaving that aside—and making due allowance for Heine’s satirical hyperbole—it is obvious that the above passage (published in 1843 in the Augsburger Zeitung) could hardly have been written of a man with no interest in the arts. Even if James himself was no expert, he admired expertise—and that is a very different thing from being a philistine. When another ambitious young man of letters (also, like Heine, a converted Jew) first met James at a dinner in Paris the year before, he hit the nail on the head. “I found him,” Benjamin Disraeli told his sister, “a happy mixture of the French Dandy & the orange boy. He spoke to me with[ou]t ceremony with ‘I believe you know my nephew.’ ” The “orange boy” in James was most strongly evident in the strong Frankfurt accent with which he spoke French, and in the peremptory manner which he shared with his brother in London; but the “French Dandy” was the man within, who always enjoyed the company of artists, musicians and writers. An English visitor to Paris in the 1850s noticed this too, when she called on “Mme. de Roth . . . whose poetic abode has more the air of the palace of a wealthy artist than the hôtel of a millionaire.” For all his rough manners, James was, in his heart, something of an aesthete—even a Bohemian—though he indulged this trait vicariously, surrounding himself with beautiful objects and introducing one or two of their more entertaining creators into his otherwise stuffy social round. Something similar could be said of his English nephews, whose love of hunting was only one facet of their wide-ranging activity beyond the walls of the counting house.

  It was on other walls that the “acculturation” of the Rothschilds was perhaps most immediately obvious—specifically, on the walls of their houses, which gradually became covered with paintings of the very highest quality. The first picture of note bought by a Rothschild was French artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s The Milkmaid —a typically rustic-romantic work of the late rococo—which James acquired as early as 1818. Greuze was a favourite Rothschild artist: James bought another of his paintings—Little Girl with Bouquet—from the auction of Cardinal Fesch’s estate in 1845, and his nephew Lionel began his collection by buying his Virtue Faltering at Phillips’ auctioneers in 1831; he later acquired four other works by the same artist, among them The Parting Kiss. His brother Anthony owned another two, including The Nursery. Such pictures complemented the numerous items of ancien régime furniture and ornamentation acquired by the family, like the Marie Antoinette secretaires and Sèvres porcelain owned by James. Another favourite artist was the seventeenth-century Spanish artist Bartolomé Estebán Murillo, whose work Lionel may have discovered when he went to Madrid in 1834, where, as he freely admitted, he spent “all my leisure time . . . in running about after pictures which are in very great number but few good ones.” By the end of the 1840s he, his uncle and his mother all owned Murillos.

  But it was the art of seventeenth-century Holland which the family found most attractive. In 1840 James bought Rembrandt’s The Standard Bearer from George IV’s collection, which he hung in the grand salon at the rue Laffitte; he also owned the same artist’s Portrait of a Young Man (which was in the sitting room) as well as Franz Hals’s Portait of a Nobleman and works by Anthony van Dyck, Peter Paul Rubens, Jacob van Ruisdael and Philips Wouwermans. In 1836 Lionel bought Gerard ter Borch’s Young Lady with her Page in Frankfurt, and a year later added four paintings by Wouwermans from the sale of the duchesse de Berry’s collection as well as three by Jan van der Heyden, including Rosendaal Castle and his View of Haarlem . He bought two more Wouwermans works and a Pieter de Hooch from George Lucy’s collection in 1845. By the time the German art expert Gustav Waagen visited him in Piccadilly in around 1850, his collection included three paintings by Meindert Hobbema, three by van Ruisdael, a Paulus Potter, a Karel du Jardin, an Adam Pynacker, two Jan Wynants and an Isaac van Ostade. He later added two pictures by Nicolaes Berchem, five works by Aalbert Cuyp—including his View on a Frozen River—six paintings by the van Mieris, father and son, two by Gaspar Netscher, three by Gerard ter Borch and seven by David Teniers the Younger, as well as still-lifes by Jan David de Heem, Jan van Huysum, Rachel Ruysh, Jan Weenix and Peter Gysels. This taste was evidently shared by his brother Anthony: in 1833 he bought a picture of a nurse and child playing with a goat which appeared to bear Rembrandt’s signature (it was later reattributed to Nicolaes Maes when the signature was shown to be a forgery) and by 1850 had acquired works by Wouwermans, Teniers, Van Dyck, Rubens and van Ostade.

  That something resembling a collective “Rothschild taste” developed in this period is not surprising, as to a large extent the family acted in concert, alerting one another to major sales and acting for one another in different markets. In 1840 James asked Anthony “to dispose of the Rembrandt if it could be done with advantage,” but “on reflection” decided against buying a Murillo through his nephew. He and his nephews sought to ensure that a major Roman collection was auctioned in Paris rather than London in 1841. “We want to do it together,” wrote James. “Perhaps we will get some nice paintings.” Typically, when two Murillos were offered for auction in Paris in 1843, Nat considered buying them for his mother, though in the end he left them to Salomon’s wife Caro
line. By the time of her death, Hannah owned works by Murillo, Cuyp and Teniers, all probably bought for her by her sons. There was also a natural shared tendency to favour secular subjects over religious works—perhaps the best explanation for the over-representation of Dutch artists—though this was far from being a rule. Interestingly, the Rothschilds bought not only Old Testament scenes (such as Paul Delaroche’s Moses in the Bullrushes) but also some works of explicitly Christian iconography. In 1840 Lionel acquired Murillo’s Infant Christ as the Good Shepherd from a London dealer and he later purchased Domenichino’s Head of a Magdalene and Andrea del Sarto’s Madonna and Child; while James owned Jan van Eyck and Petrus Christi’s Chartreux Madonna and a Luini Virgin and Child. In 1846 Anthony was given Van Dyck’s The Abbot Scaglia Adoring the Virgin and Child by his father-in-law.

  It would be wrong, however, to exaggerate the homogeneity of Rothschild collections even at this early period. When Nat bought Velazquez’s Lady with Fan, he observed that “pictures are something like ladies, everyone must please himself and select according to his taste . . . It would not please everyone as the face is not a pretty one, although very well painted.” His brother Lionel’s enthusiasm for eighteenth-century English artists was not shared by James (and was in many ways ahead of its time in Britain too). In 1846 he acquired Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Portrait of Master Braddyl at Christie’s, the first of several Reynolds works (the others were his Portrait of Mrs Lloyd, Portrait of Miss Meyer as Hebe and Snake in the Grass: Love Unbinding the Zone of Beauty). Later he turned to Thomas Gainsborough, buying his Portrait of the Hon. Frances Duncombe for £1,500 in 1871 and his Portrait of Mrs Sheridan the following year at Christie’s. He also owned George Romney’s Portait of Emma, Lady Hamilton and works by Sir William Beechey and John Hoppner. This enthusiasm for relatively recent portraits of individuals quite unrelated (and in all probability unknown) to the Rothschilds is especially surprising, though later in the nineteenth century such works were all the rage. Lionel’s youngest brother Mayer owned a Gainsborough too—a fox-coursing scene—but he also bought works by Cranach and Titian, who are not represented in other Rothschild collections of the period.