Bettina "Nina" Burr (born c. 1946) is vice president of the board of trustees of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to which she and other members of her family made a major donation of Rothschild family heirlooms that is known as The Rothschild Collection.
Burr was born Bettina Looram, around 1946. [2] She is the daughter of Bettina Jemima Looram (née Rothschild) (1924–2012) and Matthew J. Looram, Jr. (died 2004), an American diplomat, who married in 1943. She is the granddaughter of Baron and Baroness Alphonse and Clarice de Rothschild, and great-granddaughter of Baron Albert Salomon Anselm von Rothschild of the Vienna branch of the Rothschild family. [3] [4] Burr is a former teacher. [2]
Burr's association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, began after she became a tour guide there. She later helped to catalog the museum's Japanese woodblock prints. She first became an overseer, then in 2006 a trustee of the museum. [5] She is now vice president of the board of trustees [6] and the Museum Representative to the Foundation for the Arts, Nagoya. [7]
Some time after 2012, Burr and other heirs of Bettina Looram donated a collection of 186 objects, originally in the collection of Alphonse and Clarice de Rothschild, that were looted by the Nazis following the Austrian Anschluss with Germany in 1938. The museum has named the gift The Rothschild Collection. It includes, paintings, jewellery, prints and drawings, furniture, and books. [8] The Nazis seized nearly 3,500 items from the Vienna Rothschilds, many intended for Adolf Hitler's planned Führermuseum that would have been located in the Austrian city of Linz had it been built. The looted items were stored in the Austrian salt mines of Altaussee where they were discovered by the Allies after the war. [9]
In order to export the bulk of the collection to the United States, where Clarice de Rothschild then lived, she was required to donate around 250 items to the Austrian government. These items were not recovered by the family until a change in Austrian law in 1999, long after Alphonse and Clarice de Rothschild had died. Many of the recovered items were then sold at auction in London in a sale that realised a record at that time of over £57m. [3] The items donated to the Boston museum come mainly from the items recovered in 1999 that were not sold because they had particular family meaning. The jewellery included in the donation was never in Nazi hands because Clarice de Rothschild and her husband had been in London at the time of the Anschluss and she had had the jewellery with her. [9]
Among the items given to the Museum was George Romney's Portrait of Emma Hart, later Lady Hamilton, mistress of Lord Nelson and muse to Romney. [10] Investigations have shown this to be the primary version of the work. [5]
The Museum of Fine Arts is an art museum in Boston, Massachusetts. It is the 20th-largest art museum in the world, measured by public gallery area. It contains 8,161 paintings and more than 450,000 works of art, making it one of the most comprehensive collections in the Americas. With more than 1.2 million visitors a year, it is the 79th-most-visited art museum in the world as of 2022.
The Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) is an arts museum located in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. Home to more than 90,000 works of art representing 5,000 years of world history, Mia is one of the largest art museums in the United States. Its permanent collection spans about 20,000 years and represents the world's diverse cultures across six continents. The museum has seven curatorial areas: Arts of Africa & the Americas; Contemporary Art; Decorative Arts, Textiles & Sculpture; Asian Art; Paintings; Photography and New Media; and Prints and Drawings.
Palais Rothschild refers to a number of palaces in Vienna, Austria, which were owned by members of the Austrian branch of the Rothschild banking family. Apart from their sheer size and elegance, they were famous for the huge collections of valuable paintings, statues, furniture, books and armour that they housed, another reflection of the family's vast wealth and prominent position.
Nazi plunder was organized stealing of art and other items which occurred as a result of the organized looting of European countries during the time of the Nazi Party in Germany.
The Rothschild banking family of Austria was the Austrian branch of the Rothschild family. It was founded in 1820 by Salomon Mayer von Rothschild in Vienna, which was then part of the Austrian Empire.
Albert Salomon Anselm Freiherr von Rothschild was a banker in Austria-Hungary and a member of the Rothschild banking family of Austria. Businesses that he owned included Creditanstalt and the Northern Railway.
Louis Nathaniel, Baron von Schwartz de Rothschild was an Austrian Baron from the Rothschild family.
Malcolm Austin Rogers, CBE is a British art historian and museum administrator who served as the inaugural Ann and Graham Gund Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, from 1994 through 2015, the longest serving director in the institution's 150-year history. In this role, Rogers raised the status of the museum locally, nationally, and internationally, and brought both extensive popularity and occasional controversy to the museum.
Judith Helen Dobrzynski is an American journalist and instructor in journalism. She is currently a freelance writer who has contributed articles on culture, the arts, business, philanthropy and other topics to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and several magazines.
Hector Feliciano is a Puerto Rican journalist and author whose book "The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World's Greatest Works of Art" has shed light on an estimated 20,000 works of art plundered by the Nazis; each one is owned by a museum or a collector somewhere.
Lime Green Icicle Tower is a 2011 glass and steel sculpture by American artist Dale Chihuly. Housed in the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston, Massachusetts, it has been on display in the Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Family Courtyard since the 2011 exhibit "Chihuly: Through the Looking Glass". The sculpture proved so popular during the exhibit that the museum launched a fundraising campaign to purchase the piece.
Rudolf Leopold was an Austrian art collector, whose collection of 5,000 works of art was purchased by the Government of Austria and used to create the Leopold Museum, of which he was made director for life. Claims had been made by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust that some of the pieces in the collection were Nazi plunder and should be returned to their rightful owners.
The Offenbach Archival Depot was a central collecting point in the American Sector of Germany for books, manuscripts and archival materials looted, confiscated or taken by the German army or Nazi government from the occupied countries during World War II. From the Offenbach Archival Depot, these materials of looted art and Nazi plunder were sorted and eventually returned to their original country of origin, or otherwise maintained in new collections.
Archduke Leopold Wilhelm and the artist in the archducal picture gallery in Brussels is a 1653 painting of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm's Italian art collection by the Flemish Baroque painter David Teniers the Younger. It is now held in a private collection, but it was previously owned by the Rothschild family, from whom it was taken in World War II and placed in the Kunsthistorisches Museum where it stayed for 50 years until restitution in 1999.
Emma Ranette Budge was a wealthy German Jewish socialite, philanthropist and art collector.
Matthew James Looram Jr. was an American diplomat.
E. & A. Silberman Galleries was a commercial art gallery in New York founded by Elkan and Abris Silberman.
Oscar Bondy was an Austrian entrepreneur and art collector persecuted by the Nazis because of his Jewish heritage.
Customers Conversing in a Tavern is a Dutch Golden Age Oil-on-panel painting by artist Adriaen van Ostade completed in 1671. A promised gift to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston by collectors Susan and Matthew Weatherbie as part of an expansion on Dutch and Flemish paintings, it was subjected to provenance research, to which it has been revealed to have been looted by the Nazis.