Viktor, Ritter von Ephrussi (born 8 November 1860 in Odessa; died 6 February 1945 in Tunbridge Wells was an Austrian banker.
Viktor, Ritter von Ephrussi (born 8 November 1860 in Odessa; died 6 February 1945 in Tunbridge Wells was an Austrian banker.
Viktor von Ephrussi was the heir of the Ephrussi & Co. bank in Vienna, Austria, founded by his father, Ignaz von Ephrussi. Viktor was made a knight (Ritter) by the Emperor of Austria in 1872, at the same time as his father, too, was knighted. [1]
On 7 March 1899, in Vienna, he married Baroness Emmy Henriette Schey von Koromla (1879-1938), from a family linked to the Rothschilds. The couple had four children:
Viktor von Ephrussi lived in the Ephrussi Palace, at 14 Dr. Karl Lueger-Ring (renamed the Universitätsring in 2012) in Vienna (Austria).
In 1920–1923, Viktor was nearly ruined by severe inflation.
In May 1938, he was robbed of all his property by the Nazis who had just annexed Austria: his palace, its art collections, as well as the Ephrussi bank were "Aryanised". [2]
Ruined and threatened with deportation, he first took refuge in Slovakia in his country house in Kövesces, where his wife died, then, before the advance of the Nazis, with his daughter Elisabeth in the United Kingdom in 1938, and died in Tunbridge Wells (Kent) in 1945. [3]
Her children left Vienna in the 1920s. Elisabeth was the first woman doctor of letters in Austria and then moved to the United States at the time of the Anschluss. Gisela left for Madrid in 1925. Ignaz-Iggie became a fashion designer in Paris before moving to America as well, enlisting as a military intelligence agent and then exporting cereals to Tokyo.
His great-grandson Edmund de Waal wrote a best-seller about the fate of his family under the Nazis, The Hare with Amber Eyes . [4] [5] [6] The event reunited the family which had been dispersed in the world by the Nazis. [7]
The Rothschild family is a wealthy Ashkenazi Jewish noble banking family originally from Frankfurt that rose to prominence with Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744–1812), a court factor to the German Landgraves of Hesse-Kassel in the Free City of Frankfurt, Holy Roman Empire, who established his banking business in the 1760s. Unlike most previous court factors, Rothschild managed to bequeath his wealth and established an international banking family through his five sons, who established businesses in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Naples. The family was elevated to noble rank in the Holy Roman Empire and the United Kingdom. The family's documented history starts in 16th century Frankfurt; its name is derived from the family house, Rothschild, built by Isaak Elchanan Bacharach in Frankfurt in 1567.
Palais Ephrussi is a former Ringstraßenpalais in Vienna. It was built for the Ephrussi family of financiers by Theophil Freiherr von Hansen, the architect of the Austrian Parliament Building. It is on the Ringstrasse, specifically the Universitätsring, opposite the Votivkirche.
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.
The Ephrussi family is a wealthy Ashkenazi Jewish noble banking family. The family's bank and properties were seized by the Nazi authorities after the 1938 "Anschluss", the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany.
Louis Nathaniel, Baron von Schwartz de Rothschild was an Austrian Baron from the famous Rothschild family.
Thomas Patrick Lowndes de Waal is a British journalist and writer on the Caucasus. He is a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe. He is best known for his 2003 book Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War.
Edmund Arthur Lowndes de Waal, is a contemporary English artist, master potter and author. He is known for his large-scale installations of porcelain vessels often created in response to collections and archives or the history of a particular place. De Waal's book The Hare with Amber Eyes was awarded the Costa Book Award for Biography, Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize in 2011 and Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for Non-Fiction in 2015. De Waal's second book The White Road, tracing his journey to discover the history of porcelain was released in 2015.
Alice and Elisabeth Cahen d’Anvers is an oil painting by French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Produced in Paris in 1881, the painting depicts the sisters Alice and Elisabeth, daughters of Louise Cahen d'Anvers and her husband the Jewish banker Louis Raphaël Cahen d'Anvers. It is considered one of the most popular works in the collection of the São Paulo Museum of Art, where it has been conserved since 1952.
Victor Alexander de Waal is a British Anglican priest. He was the Dean of Canterbury from 1976 to 1986.
Archduke Franz Salvator of Austria was the son of Archduke Karl Salvator of Austria and Princess Maria Immacolata of Bourbon-Two Sicilies. He married Archduchess Marie Valerie in 1890, though, due to Marie Valerie's death in 1924, remarried in 1934 to Baroness Melanie von Riesenfels.
Maurice Ephrussi was a French banker and horsebreeder.
The German and Austrian Alpine Club was a merger of the German, Austrian and German Bohemian Alpine Club that existed from 1873 to 1938.
Charles Ephrussi was a French art critic, art historian, and art collector. He also was a part-owner and then editor as well as a contributor to the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, the most important art historical periodical in France.
The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (2010) is a family memoir by British ceramicist Edmund de Waal. De Waal tells the story of his family, the Ephrussi, once a very wealthy European Jewish banking dynasty, centred in Odessa, Vienna and Paris, and peers of the Rothschild family. The Ephrussis lost almost everything in 1938 when the Nazis confiscated their property, and were unable to recover most of their property after the war, including priceless artwork; an easily hidden collection of 264 Japanese netsuke miniature sculptures was saved, tucked away inside a mattress by Anna, a loyal maid at Palais Ephrussi in Vienna during the war years. The collection has been passed down through five generations of the Ephrussi family, providing a common thread for the story of its fortunes from 1871 to 2009. In 2021, The Hare with Amber Eyes was distributed in Vienna as a free book, with a print run of 100,000 copies.
Baron Ignace von Ephrussi (1829–1899) was a Russian-born Austrian banker and diplomat. He was the head of Ephrussi & Co. in Vienna, Austria.
Elisabeth de Waal (1899–1991), née von Ephrussi, was an Austrian writer born in Vienna. de Waal's works include The Exiles Return.
A Sprig of Asparagus (L'Asperge) is an 1880 oil on canvas painting by Édouard Manet, signed at the top right. It is now in the Musée d'Orsay.
Philipp Schey Freiherr von Koromla, known as Pips Schey, was an Austro-Hungarian baron.
His greatgrandfather, Viktor Ephrussi, was the scion of a banking dynasty that rivalled the Rothschilds;
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