{"id":128464,"date":"2025-09-08T19:56:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-08T19:56:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/128464\/"},"modified":"2025-09-08T19:56:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-08T19:56:09","slug":"banking-familys-treasures-go-on-show-at-baths-holburne-museum-the-art-newspaper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/128464\/","title":{"rendered":"Banking family\u2019s treasures go on show at Bath\u2019s Holburne Museum – The Art Newspaper"},"content":{"rendered":"

A golden ship stands proudly on an ornate foot, its sail a rippling flash of silver. At the front stand five men, their coats glistening, one banging a drum. Behind them a group sits rowing in the gloom, while a gunman watches nervously from his crow\u2019s nest.<\/p>\n

The Schwarzenberg Nef (around 1580), as it is known, is one of nearly 200 Old Master treasures on display in two dedicated galleries opening on 10 September at the Holburne Museum<\/a> in Bath, UK. The works are on long-term loan from the Schroder Collection, built by the late banker and billionaire Bruno Schroder (1933-2019) and his predecessors across more than a century. It will be the first time many of these objects have been seen in public.<\/p>\n

The Holburne initially borrowed nine paintings from the Schroder Collection before hearing that Bruno\u2019s daughter, Leonie, was interested in sharing the rest with the public. \u201cShe had two requests: one was that it would have to stay in the UK and the second was that preferably it should go to a regional museum, because she felt that London is already full of beautiful art,\u201d says the collection\u2019s curator, Caterina Badan.<\/p>\n

The bulk of the loan will be shown in the Schroder Gallery, a modern \u201cSchatzkammer\u201d, or treasure chamber, created on the lower ground floor. Silver, maiolica and paintings by the likes of Lucas Cranach the Elder and Hans Holbein the Elder\u2014and much more\u2014will help, Badan says, to tell a multi-faceted story of the Renaissance defined by trade links, wars, looting and cultural exchange.<\/p>\n

A common thread is a sense of \u201cintellectual systems\u201d mixing together, says Timothy Schroder, Bruno\u2019s cousin and a silver historian. The Calvary Salt (1550), for example, is dominated by a sculpted crucifixion scene that was made\u2014like the other figures\u2014by torching enamel powder onto a wire armature. The work features imagery relating to the Old and New Testament, nature and antiquity, with a depiction of Hercules holding two snakes at the base.<\/p>\n

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A detail of The Calvary Salt (1550)<\/p>\n

The Holburne Museum, Bath, permanent loans from the Schroder family collection. Photo: Jo Hounsome Photography<\/p>\n

Badan hopes that showing the collection will lead to fresh insights. Mysteries linger, for example, over where parts of objects such as the nef\u2014which has a fascinating backstory involving the Knights of St John, the Ottomans and Napoleon\u2014were made.<\/p>\n

Sometimes a more general attribution is in question: Portrait of a Lady in a Red Feathered Hat (1528\u201335), for instance, is attributed to Cranach and his workshop. \u201cWhen you see it in the flesh, you realise it\u2019s really a Cranach, but in my research I haven’t found any example from his repertoire where you find the same type of folds in the dress. I hope someone comes up and says they know one.\u201d<\/p>\n

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An installation view of the new Schroder Gallery with Portrait of a Lady in a Red Feathered Hat (1528\u201335), attributed to Cranach and his workshop, on the left<\/p>\n

Photo: Jo Hounsome Photography<\/p>\n

The Holburne is also opening a gallery upstairs housing a rotating selection of 17th-century, mostly Dutch paintings. The entire initiative has cost \u00a32.5m, funded by the Bruno Schroder Trust.<\/p>\n

The history of the collection began with John Henry Schr\u00f6der, who was born in Hamburg in 1825 and later moved to London from his hometown, Hamburg, to join what would become the family\u2019s investment bank. His estate, and notable holdings of silver, were passed on to his nephew, Baron Bruno Schr\u00f6der (1867-1940), who together with his wife Emma accumulated most of the masterpieces going on view in Bath\u2014many of which adorned their Renaissance Revival-inspired house Dell Park, located in the village of Englefield Green, UK.<\/p>\n

The Holburne works derive from the estate of their grandson, Bruno Lionel Schroder, whose father Helmut dropped the umlaut in 1930. Alongside his critical role in furthering the success of the Schroder firm\u2014Forbes estimated<\/a> the Schroder family fortune at $6.2bn in 2018\u2014Bruno had other passions, including reimagining the 18,000-acre Dunlossit Estate he inherited on the Scottish island of Islay.His house on island\u2014where he also helped to revive a whisky distillery and supported bagpipe playing\u2014featured a purpose-built room of Renaissance objects. One of several colourful anecdotes about his life on Islay is in The Times obituary,<\/a> which refers to him flying pigs there from Dorset on his private jet.<\/p>\n

The opening of Bath\u2019s Schatzkammer is, Timothy Schroder says, an important moment for the UK. \u201cOne has many such collections on the continent, particularly in Germany\u2014but in this country, other than the Waddesdon Bequest [at the British Museum], there is very little of such material at all,\u201d he says. \u201cWe have endless wonderful public collections of domestic silver, but the sense of the cumulative, the layers of meaning that were intended to be conveyed by a Schatzkammer\u2014that’s what the public will get an idea of in this place.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A golden ship stands proudly on an ornate foot, its sail a rippling flash of silver. At the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":128465,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[449,458,459,64,63,460,134,89620,26917,1562],"class_list":{"0":"post-128464","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment","15":"tag-holburne-museum","16":"tag-museums-heritage","17":"tag-renaissance"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128464\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/128465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}