The House of Rothschild (54 page)

This was a caricature but one based on reality, as a letter from James to his elder sons in August 1861 indicates. Offering his sons 100,000 francs apiece of new Piedmontese bonds, he explicitly ordered that Salomon should have “nothing to do with realising them and should give the matter no thought at all, as I wish to avoid at any price giving him an opportunity to speak with brokers or coming once again into contact with the open market... I do not want to allow ideas of speculation to enter his head again.” He was never admitted into the partnership as an
associé.

Just three years later, Salomon was dead—killed, so the Goncourts heard, “by the stress of speculating at the bourse—a Rothschild dead from the stress of money!” Alas for poetic justice, it seems to have been a horse rather than the bourse which precipitated his heart failure. As Charlotte reported:

The youngest son, Edmond (b. 1845), fared better; but as late as 1864 his eldest brother dismissed him as “a child, who ought not to go into the bureau for the next five or six years.” A studious young man, Edmond passed his baccalaureate “not only satisfactorily but brilliantly” (to Charlotte’s envious chagrin) and was rewarded by being allowed to visit Egypt—the beginning of a lifelong interest in the Middle East.

In part, the seeming decadence of the new generation was a reflection of the sheer number of Rothschilds there now were, only a minority of whom were required to enter the partnership and work, but all of whom had the means to live like princes. Apart from anything else, that meant a great deal of work for architects. The acquisition of country estates and the building of country houses, as we have seen, predated the 1870s and 1880s by several decades. There was therefore nothing qualitatively new about the way that Natty and his wife Emma regarded their house at Tring; indeed, having been bought by Lionel for his newly married son, Tring in many ways represented a continuation of the older generation’s aspirations. Like Ferdinand’s Waddesdon and Alfred’s Halton—the other English properties bought or built on in this period—it seemed to contemporaries to represent just another addition to the family’s territorial empire in and around the Vale of Aylesbury.
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Nor could Natty resist the family habit of altering existing buildings beyond recognition: with the assistance of the architect George Devey, he managed to turn an elegant Wren house into a rather stolid, institutional Victorian pile. Leo did something similar to Ascott, which he acquired from his uncle Mayer, using the same firm of architects to remodel the house in the mock Tudor style. Both Natty and Leo also followed the fashion for building picturesque new cottages for tenants and employees on their estates; indeed, Natty took pains to create a kind of paternalistic “welfare state” at Tring.

It was the quantity rather than the quality of such Rothschild investments in real estate which was new. The more numerous French Rothschilds acquired, modernised or built from scratch at least eight new country houses in this period, including Edmond’s S-shaped chateau d‘Armainvilliers, built in the Anglo-Norman rustic style by Langlais and Emile Ulmann in the 1880s.
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In Austria Nathaniel bought two new country estates: one at Reichenau, where the architects Armand-Louis Bauqué and Emilio Pio built the polychromatic château Penelope, and another at Enzesfeld near Vöslau, which he acquired from Graf Schönburg. His brother Albert also bought Langau, an estate in the Kalkalpen mountains in Lower Austria, and their sister Alice had two houses built: Eythrope on the Waddesdon estate and a villa in Grasse in the south of France. Finally, in the late 1880s, the remaining Frankfurt Rothschilds, Wilhelm Carl and Hannah Mathilde, built a villa at Königstein in the Taunus hills, also using Bauqué and Pio. There were at least seven new town houses too.
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Mention should also perhaps be made of the reconstruction of the original Rothschild house “zum grünen Schild” in 1884 at the time the remainder of the Judengasse was torn down: the Rothschilds consciously sought to preserve it as a monument to their ghetto origins.
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As in the past, styles and architects were swapped within the family regardless of national borders. The only real difference between the third and fourth generations, perhaps, was the preference for French architects and styles of the 1870s and 1880s, compared with the Anglophilia of the 1850s—a trend exemplified by Destailleur’s work for both Ferdinand and Albert.

Similarly, more Rothschilds meant more art collections. In fact, the previous generation had probably made more numerous acquisitions and accumulated bigger collections; but the division of these between their heirs gave each an incentive to acquire more. This was without question the period when the Rothschilds became the world’s leading art buyers, driving up prices of the artists and genres they coveted to unprecedented heights at the major sales of the 1880s. The Blenheim, Leigh Court and Fountaine sales all saw big Rothschild purchases, to the disquiet of (among others) Sir James Robinson, Keeper of Queen’s Pictures—though Charlotte herself believed that the Marlborough collection should be bought for the nation. This mania for art had its grotesque side. In 1870 Ferdinand paid £6,800 for a dam ascened shield by George de Gys which had cost barely £250 twenty-eight years before. In 1878 Edmond paid between £24,000 and £30,000 for a Sèvres-clad commode designed for Mme du Barry, a mistress of Louis XV; it had cost her just £3,200. Two years later, Mayer Carl paid the Merkel family of Nuremberg £32,000 for a parcel-gilt and enamelled standing cup made in 1550 by the Nuremberg silver-smith Wenzel Jamnitzer, making it the dearest work of art that had ever been sold. Yet by 1911, when much of his collection of silverware was sold, only fourteen out of eighty-nine lots fetched more than £1,500. Both Ferdinand and Gustave spent in excess of £7,000 on two oval enamel dishes at the Fountaine sale in 1884, while Ferdinand and Alphonse spent more than a quarter of a million pounds apiece for three (supposed) works by Rubens in the Duke of Marlborough’s collection. It was the first time any picture in history had fetched more than £20,000. Fifteen years later, Edmond went still further, spending £48,000 on the duc de Choiseul’s ludicrously ornate bureau (previous owners included Talleyrand and Metternich). Even Natty—reputedly uninterested in art—could not resist adding to the collection of eighteenth-century English works he had inherited from his father. In 1886 he paid around £20,000 for Reynolds’s
Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy
in the sale of the 2nd Earl of Dudley’s collection. Leo too added to the thirty-six paintings he inherited from his parents, though his tastes were more eclectic, ranging from Boucher to Stubbs, from Franz Snyders to Hogarth (
The Harlot’s Progress: Quarrels with her Protector).

What was qualitatively new was the priority which certain members of the new generation—Alfred, Nathaniel and Ferdinand in particular—gave their country houses, their gardens and their art collections. In itself, the house designed in the French seventeenth-century style for Alfred at Halton by William Rogers (built between 1882 and 1888) was no more spectacular than Mentmore; indeed, its main hall was smaller. It was the novelties like the private circus ring, bowling alley, ice-skating rink, indoor swimming pool and Indian pavilion which struck visitors as faintly absurd. Nor was Alfred’s collection of paintings and works of art more impressive than his father’s. The Dutch masters, the eighteenth-century English and French paintings, the Sèvres porcelain, the French furniture, the silver—these had all been to the taste of the older generation. Although he bought over 160 new paintings in all (compared with the thirty-eight he inherited), they represented variations on his father’s favourite themes (Greuze, Romney, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Cuyp). The only real shift was Alfred’s evident preference for the French eighteenth century. It was the fact that he published a lavishly bound and illustrated two-volume catalogue of the collection which was new; the fact that he accumulated such an immense amount of Sèvres (including sixty vases and objects and six full services); and perhaps also the enthusiasm for female portraits. Nor was Alfred the first Rothschild to show an interest in music (he composed six piano pieces entitled
Boutons des Roses
in honour of Mayer Carl’s daughters); but he was surely the first to conduct his own orchestra. The older Rothschilds had not been above ostentatious displays, but it is hard to imagine any of them dressing up as a circus ringmaster, complete with top hat, blue frock coat and lavender gloves, or wielding a diamond studded boxwood baton. Small wonder some guests were repelled by “the hideous-ness of the things, the showiness! the sense of lavish wealth, thrust up your nose... the ghastly coarseness of the sight.” Sir Algernon West, Gladstone’s secretary, dismissed it as “an exaggerated nightmare of gorgeousness and senseless and ill-applied magnificence”; his successor Edward Hamilton agreed. “The decorations,” he commented, “are sadly overdone, and one’s eyes long to rest on something which is not all gilt and gold.” David Lindsay was more contemptuous: Alfred, he recalled, had been “tinged with the tarnish of wealth.”

Designed by Destailleur in a style which mixed Renaissance and eighteenth-century French elements, Ferdinand’s house at Waddesdon proved far from easy to build on the sandy and poorly drained terrain he had chosen; but the result was a triumph, arguably the greatest of the Rothschild houses. It had (and has) magnificent gardens, with fifty greenhouses and at least as many staff: the gardens alone cost his sister Alice £7,500 a year to maintain when she inherited Waddesdon in 1898, and a further £10,000 to maintain the other grounds, including the farm and dairy. Inside, there was a glittering collection, including Dutch works by Cuyp, de Hooch and ter Borch as well as English paintings by Romney, Reynolds and Gainsborough (whom Ferdinand did much to make fashionable).

Yet Waddesdon—a Loire château in deepest Buckinghamshire—was not to every taste. Gladstone’s daughter Mary also felt “oppressed with the extreme gorgeousness and luxury” when she visited. The Liberal Lord politician Richard Haldane, who acted as a Rothschild legal adviser for many years, mocked the preciousness of Ferdinand’s hospitality. “I do love all seemly luxury,” he declared in 1898. “When lying in bed in the mornings it gives me great satisfaction when a lacquey softly enters the room and asks whether I will take tea, coffee, chocolate or cocoa. This privilege is accorded to me in the houses of all my distinguished friends: but it is only at Waddesdon that on saying I prefer tea, the valet further enquires whether I fancy Ceylon, Souchong or Assam.” David Lindsay remarked on the way “Baron Ferdinand[‘s] hands always itch with nervousness”:

Ferdinand’s often neurotic letters to another close friend, the Earl of Rosebery, give a similar impression. Even by the standards of the period, this was a highly charged relationship, though it seems that Ferdinand’s passionate feelings were not wholly requited. He summed his own personality up well when he told Rosebery in 1878: “I am a lonely, suffering and occasionally a very miserable individual despite the gilded and marble rooms in which I live.”
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Another friend, Edward Hamilton, wrote an ambivalent memoir following Ferdinand’s death in 1898 which deserves to be quoted at length: