Mór Lipót Herzog (also Baron Herzog)

A major Hungarian collector of pre-modern and modern art, Mór Lipót Herzog amassed more than 2,500 artworks, mostly acquired through international purchases throughout Europe. The collection was installed at his family residence, located at 93 Andrássy Avenue in central Budapest. It featured paintings by El Greco and Francisco de Goya, and significant holdings of Renaissance sculpture, furniture, tapestries, and Dutch and Flemish Baroque art, as well as examples of French and Hungarian modernism.

Herzog was born into one of the richest Jewish families in the Kingdom of Hungary during the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was the only son and thus sole heir of Péter Herzog, head of an international tobacco trading company, banker, and investor in railways, textile, and milling industries. To mark Péter’s political and social significance among the Hungarian business elite, in 1904 the Austro-Hungarian emperor Joseph Franz I conferred him with the hereditary rank of baron.

Mór Lipót Herzog completed his studies at the Budapest Academy of Commerce and entered the family business in 1894. His art collection developed as a form of financial investment, although he had started collecting applied arts and antiques in his youth during vacations abroad. The Budapesti amateur gyűjtemények kiállítása (Exhibition of Amateur Collections in Budapest) in 1907 marked the first public display of his holdings, including almost eighty pieces of goldsmith work, porcelain, and glass, as well as an eighteenth-century mantelpiece ornament in the style of Louis XVI. Upon his father’s death in 1914, Herzog became head of the family’s business empire and manager of the family fortune, which brought him a new level of wealth.

József Keszler, a Hungarian journalist and art critic, advised Herzog’s art purchases during the first decade of the twentieth century, when Herzog primarily focused on works created before 1900. However, his encounter with Marcell Nemes, the most prolific Hungarian collector of modern art at the time, inspired Herzog to develop his collection in new directions. Nemes and Herzog likely met for the first time by 1912 at Budapest’s Commercial Bank, where Nemes sought financial support for his art purchases at a time when Herzog was looking for new investment opportunities. They began a mutually beneficial business collaboration: Herzog provided credit for Nemes to purchase valuable artworks for resale, and, with Nemes’s guidance, Herzog built an internationally renowned collection in only a few years. By the mid-1910s he had acquired one of the largest private collections of paintings by El Greco, seven canvases altogether, many of which he had purchased directly from Nemes. Over time Herzog became a passionate collector who traveled internationally to purchase works of art. In a 1924 interview, Herzog recalled that he had made seven trips from Budapest to London to get the best price for a landscape painting by the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Philips Koninck, remarking at the exhausting labor involved in art collecting.

Although the collection constantly transformed due to new purchases and frequent resales, a description from 1924 suggests that some of the most treasured modern works from the collection hung in the dining hall of the Herzog residence. They included Edouard Manet’s La Négresse (1863; Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin) and Rue Mosnier with Flags (1878; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles), Pierre-August Renoir’s Henriot Family (ca. 1875; The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia), Paul Cézanne’s Bathers (ca. 1890–91; State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg) and Apples and Biscuits (1880; Musée de l’Orangérie, Paris), and Paul Gauguin’s Still Life with Profile of Laval (1886; Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields).

In addition to buying numerous works from Nemes’s own collection, Herzog made purchases from Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris (e.g., Camille Pissarro’s Haymaking Peasant Girl at Éragny, 1889; private collection), Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris (e.g., Jean Baptiste Camille Corot’s Lady with the Daisies, ca. 1870; Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest), Galerie Paul Cassirer, Berlin (e.g., Renoir’s Seated Woman with Flowers, 1866; Nizhny Novgorod State Art Museum), and Matthiesen Galerie, Berlin, to which he sold Renoir’s Henriot Family in 1929.

During the short-lived Hungarian Bolshevik regime in 1919, Herzog’s entire collection, like all private holdings, was nationalized and taken away from the family’s residence. The most valuable pieces were put on display that summer at the monumental A köztulajdonba vett műkincsek kiállítása (Exhibition of Artworks Taken into Public Property) at the Kunsthalle in Budapest. The collection was returned to Herzog after the fall of the Bolshevik regime in August 1919 and remained in the property of the Herzog family until 1944, when it was confiscated under an antisemitic decree and transferred to the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. Many of the works were looted by Nazi or Soviet soldiers in 1945. Herzog’s heirs are still pursuing legal action to restitute more than fifty artworks.