John Hilary’s compelling book tells the story of the Jewish art collectors who arrived in Britain during the 19th century and who established themselves by their philanthropic dealings
November 28, 2025 16:12
John Hilary’s beautifully illustrated and superbly researched book “tells the story of a group of German Jews who arrived in Britain during the 19th century, established themselves in high society by means of their wealth and philanthropic dealings, and left their mark on the art world of the Edwardian era”. They made an extraordinary contribution to cultural life in Britain in the first half of the 20th century and yet became curiously forgotten. Magnates & Masterpieces is a superb piece of reclamation and is one of the outstanding books of the year.
These super-rich art collectors were all Jews but interestingly they did not consider themselves defined by their Jewish faith. Half of them married non-Jewish women and only five of the 15 collectors at the heart of this book were buried in Jewish cemeteries. Above all, they were a very distinct group, quite separate from the established families of Anglo-Jewry or the new immigrants from Eastern Europe.
Many were ‘Randlords’, men who made their fortunes through diamonds and gold in South Africa or from banking. But what is striking is what they spent their money on: huge properties in the grandest parts of London, acts of philanthropy and, above all, by building up extraordinary art collections, many of which were later bequeathed to the nation. In this sense, they are very different from their American counterparts whose collections were housed in famous museums named after them like the Frick in New York, The Huntington in LA and The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. According to Hilary, this perhaps explains why these German Jewish collectors have faded from history. They gave their collections to already existing art museums rather than founding their own. There is another reason, he argues. Two World Wars with Germany led to tremendous anti-German feeling.
The book consists of two parts. The opening chapters put this generation of collectors in context. First, they represented “new money”: capital not land. Second, they left Germany as young men and found that “England in those days … threw her doors wide open to all comers”. Third, it was the heyday of the British imperial project and a new world of international finance. Crucially, their wealth helped them to enter high society. If you had the money, Britain was a more open society than the Kaiserreich, still ruled by antisemitic Junkers and generals.
Second, there are the individual chapters on the collectors – Mond, Beit (perhaps the richest man in the world at the time), Hirsch, Ernst Cassel (Edward VII’s closest male friend) and Speyer, among them. These chapters tell the life stories of these men and their wives, who were often important philanthropists and cultural figures in their own right. And then each chapter moves on to tell the story of the extraordinary collections these millionaires built: Renaissance paintings, 17th-century Dutch and Spanish art, 18th-century French and English art, ceramics, antiquities, and much, much more. They were often advised by dealers and scholars and themselves became experts in art history.
But there was something else. They weren’t just rich, they were deeply cultured. In Britain as in Germany, “Jews were more intensively involved in the cultivation of their Bildung than were their Gentile counterparts. They were more avid readers of literature; they frequented theatres and concert halls…, and they were similarly overrepresented in all cultural activities”.
Above all, they built these extraordinary art collections, the central subject of the book, brought to life by so many wonderful reproductions. If you are interested in Jewish history, the history of art or the social history of modern Britain, this is a compelling and absolutely fascinating book.
Magnates & Masterpieces: The German-Jewish Collectors of Edwardian Britain, by John Hilary
Yale University Press
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