24 Facts About Antoine Seilern

Antoine Seilern was considered, along with Sir Denis Mahon, to be one of a handful of important collectors who was a respected scholar.

Antoine Seilern was the youngest of the three sons of Count Carl Seilern und Aspang and the American heiress Antoinette "Nettie" nee Woerishoffer.

Antoine Seilern therefore enjoyed citizenship of both Austria and the United Kingdom.

Antoine Seilern's ancestors had been ennobled after successful involvement with the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713.

Antoine Seilern had two older brothers, Count Charles Hugo, born 1899, and Count Oswald Seilern, born 1900.

Antoine Seilern's mother died five days after he was born.

Thereafter the three Seilern boys divided their time between their grandmother, Anna Woerishoffer, in New York City, and their father in London and Vienna, in the company of nannies and governesses, though until America entered the First World War Mrs Woerishoffer spent 1912 to 1916 with her grandsons in Vienna.

Antoine Seilern then worked briefly for a Yugoslavian lumber company, and in Vienna in finance.

However, in 1933, Count Karl Wilczek, another family friend who was an art historian, recommended Antoine Seilern take private lessons with the great Hungarian art historian Johannes Wilde, very soon a mentor who was to become a lifelong friend.

Antoine Seilern wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Venetian influences on the ceiling paintings of Sir Peter Paul Rubens which he completed in 1939.

Meanwhile, Antoine Seilern had started to collect seriously, and was being advised by Wilde, and Ludwig Burchard, the great Rubens scholar.

At the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938, and because of his British citizenship, Antoine Seilern decided in 1939 to return to England, bringing with him his already large art collection and his library.

Antoine Seilern then enlisted in the ranks of the British Army, serving in the Royal Artillery, and in 1940 immediately volunteered for the disastrous Russo-Finnish campaign, only escaping from occupied Norway.

Antoine Seilern returned to London at the end of the war to live in a great gloomy house he had acquired at 56 Princes Gate, South Kensington, where he rarely opened the blinds and electric light was largely eschewed as he said it distorted colours in pictures.

Antoine Seilern possessed fine Chinese bronzes, Greek vases, Limbourg brothers manuscripts, Holbein manuscripts, and German and Austrian paintings.

Antoine Seilern is recorded as owning a three-quarter length pastel of his mother by Clemens von Pausinger as well as a signed and dated bust-length portrait of himself as a boy by Muller-Ury, which was unframed and stored in a cupboard.

The heirs of Curt Glaser, a Jewish art collector persecuted by Nazis, requested the return of eight drawing by Lovis Corinth, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Giuseppe Bernardino Bison, Giovanni Battista Crosato, Domenico Fossati and Domenico Piola that Antoine Seilern had gifted to the Courtauld in 1978.

Antoine Seilern had acquired them at the Berlin auction on May 18 and May 19,1933.

Antoine Seilern died in hospital in London in the early hours of 6 July 1978; he was 76.

Antoine Seilern never married, was extremely reserved, and his private life is undocumented although he had many women friends, and was evidently fond of his brother Charles's four children, his cousin Paul Methuen, and enjoyed long friendships with scholars like Wilde, Ludwig Burchard, Anthony Blunt, Michael Kitson, and unusually, as he was perforce a dealer, James Byam Shaw.

Antoine Seilern was a large man with quite a booming voice, and according to James Byam Shaw possessed something of a dual character, being business-like and intellectual with his male friends, but with women of all ages had all the charm and manners of an aristocrat from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Antoine Seilern was painted at least twice as a boy by Adolfo Muller-Ury, who was a close friend of his mother and father and who had acted as an usher at their wedding in New York in February 1898, and who, along with the other ushers, had been given a gold cigarette box by 'Carlo' Seilern by way of thanks.

Between 1955 and 1971 Antoine Seilern published an illustrated catalogue of his collection in seven parts; he was assisted by Fritz Grossmann.

Antoine Seilern dedicated the catalogue to his grandmother, Mrs Charles Woerishoffer.