Click on A Private Place: the Musée Nissim de Camondo entry to view:
The (TRAGEDY) in the Musée Nissim de Camondo (my bracket).
This is an exquisite Paris museum artfully highlighted in the recent blog of the historian of design and decorative arts, Osborne Grey. Open it and feast. But be sure to read the part about the fate of the collector’s daughter, Beatrice and her two children. And wonder why the historian leaves out the historical fact that the collector was a Jew.
“The museum maintains the property essentially as Camondo left it when he died in 1935. The house and contents were formally given to Les Arts Décoratifs in 1936, an arrangement he had decided in 1917, upon news of the death of his only son, Nissim, in arial combat. Nissim gave his life to the country; Camondo gave his life's work. His marriage had ended in 1902 and his only other child, Béatrice, had married and begun a family of her own, though they continued to live at the family home. Not much is known of her immediately following her father's death, though she and her husband, and their two children, died at Auschwitz only a few years later. Camondo's brother Isaac, also an avid collector, had no children. It was the end of the family line and Isaac's collection, in turn, was left to the Louvre.
If Camondo would have known that just several years after his death his French daughter and his two French grandchildren Fanny and Bertrand Reinich would be rounded up, deported to Poland and gassed in Auschwitz, would he have willed his priceless possessions to the French?
