Fritz Mannheimer - Demise of Bank, Dispersal of Art Collection

Demise of Bank, Dispersal of Art Collection

The entire Mendelssohn firm was forcibly liquidated by the Nazis later that same year—its assets were transferred to Deutsche Bank—and much of Mannheimer's art was purchased by Adolf Hitler in 1941, after the German invasion of the Netherlands. Other works from the collections were stored in England and Vichy, France, by Mannheimer's widow until the end of the war.

The lion's share of Mannheimer's collection was acquired by the Rijksmuseum in 1952, when it was repatriated from Germany; the museum was forced to sell half of the collection by the order of the Dutch Ministry of Finance. Coincidentally, Mannheimer's Amsterdam residence now is used for some of the Rijksmuseum's offices. The Metropolitan Museum of Art owns one of the masterpieces of Mannheimer's collection, "Young Man Blowing Bubbles" (a.k.a. "Soap Bubbles"), a circa-1734 painting by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin; it was sold in 1949 to the museum by Wildenstein & Co., the art dealers, who had acquired the painting after it was repatriated to France in 1946.