A golden ship stands proudly on an ornate foot, its sail a rippling flash of silver. At the front stand five men, their coats glistening, one banging a drum. Behind them a group sits rowing in the gloom, while a gunman watches nervously from his crow’s nest.
The Schwarzenberg Nef (around 1580), as it is known, is one of nearly 200 Old Master treasures on display in two dedicated galleries opening on 10 September at the Holburne Museum in Bath, UK. The works are on long-term loan from the Schroder Collection, built by the late banker and billionaire Bruno Schroder (1933-2019) and his predecessors across more than a century. It will be the first time many of these objects have been seen in public.
The Holburne initially borrowed nine paintings from the Schroder Collection before hearing that Bruno’s daughter, Leonie, was interested in sharing the rest with the public. “She had two requests: one was that it would have to stay in the UK and the second was that preferably it should go to a regional museum, because she felt that London is already full of beautiful art,” says the collection’s curator, Caterina Badan.
The bulk of the loan will be shown in the Schroder Gallery, a modern “Schatzkammer”, or treasure chamber, created on the lower ground floor. Silver, maiolica and paintings by the likes of Lucas Cranach the Elder and Hans Holbein the Elder—and much more—will help, Badan says, to tell a multi-faceted story of the Renaissance defined by trade links, wars, looting and cultural exchange.
A common thread is a sense of “intellectual systems” mixing together, says Timothy Schroder, Bruno’s cousin and a silver historian. TheCavalry Salt (1550), for example, is dominated by a sculpted crucifixion scene that was made—like the other figures—by torching enamel powder onto a wire armature. The work features imagery relating to the Old and New Testament, nature and antiquity, with a depiction of Hercules holding two snakes at the base.
Badan hopes that showing the collection will lead to fresh insights. Mysteries linger, for example, over where parts of objects such as the nef—which has a fascinating backstory involving the Knights of St John, the Ottomans and Napoleon—were made.
Sometimes a more general attribution is in question: Portrait of a Lady in a Red Feathered Hat (1528–35), for instance, is attributed to Cranach and his workshop. “When you see it in the flesh, you realise it’s really a Cranach, but in my research I haven’t found any example from his repertoire where you find the same type of folds in the dress. I hope someone comes up and says they know one.”
The Holburne is also opening a gallery upstairs housing a rotating selection of 17th-century, mostly Dutch paintings. The entire initiative has cost £2.5m, funded by the Bruno Schroder Trust.
The history of the collection began with John Henry Schröder, who was born in Hamburg in 1825 and later moved to London from his hometown, Hamburg, to join what would become the family’s investment bank. His estate, and notable holdings of silver, were passed on to his nephew, Baron Bruno Schröder (1867-1940), who together with his wife Emma accumulated most of the masterpieces going on view in Bath—many of which adorned their Renaissance Revival-inspired London home, Dell Park.
The Holburne works derive from the estate of their grandson, Bruno Lionel Schroder, whose father Helmut dropped the umlaut in 1930. Alongside his critical role in furthering the success of the Schroder firm—Forbes estimated the Schroder family fortune at $6.2bn in 2018—Bruno had other passions, including reimagining the 18,000-acre Dunlossit Estate he inherited on the Scottish island of Islay.His house on island—where he also helped to revive a whisky distillery and supported bagpipe playing—featured a purpose-built room of Renaissance objects. One of several colourful anecdotes about his life on Islay is in The Times obituary, which refers to him flying pigs there from Dorset on his private jet.
The opening of Bath’s Schatzkammer is, Timothy Schroder says, an important moment for the UK. “One has many such collections on the continent, particularly in Germany—but in this country, other than the Waddesdon Bequest [at the British Museum], there is very little of such material at all,” he says. “We have endless wonderful public collections of domestic silver, but the sense of the cumulative, the layers of meaning that were intended to be conveyed by a Schatzkammer—that’s what the public will get an idea of in this place.”
