Nannette and Herbert M. Rothschild

Herbert and Nannette Rothschild were American collectors based in New York who acquired mostly modern European art. A furniture manufacturer and distributor for the Herrmann Furniture Company, John Widdicomb Company, and John Stuart, Inc., Herbert is credited with helping to introduce modern Scandinavian (especially Danish) and English furniture to the American market in the 1950s.

Herbert and Nannette married in 1917. The couple’s daughter, Judith, was an artist and she had a major influence on their collecting, which began in the 1930s with the purchase of works on paper by Diego Rivera and collages by Kurt Schwitters. Subsequent major acquisitions were made in the early 1950s and included pieces by Fernand Léger, Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian. In 1966 an exhibition of the couple’s holdings was co-organized by Pembroke College, Brown University, and the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design. At that time, the collection comprised more than 180 paintings, sculpture, and works on paper.

In pursuit of early twentieth-century avant-garde art, the Rothschilds made periodic trips to Paris where they met Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Georges Braque, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Natalia Gontcharova, Mikhail Larionov, Léger, Gino Severini, and Tristan Tzara. They purchased art directly from those artists as well as from local galleries, including Galeries Percier and Berggruen. Cubism was well represented in the collection with works by Braque, Albert Gleizes, Juan Gris, Roger de La Fresnaye, Jacques Lipchitz, Léger, and Pablo Picasso. In New York, they bought art from the Sidney Janis, Rose Fried, and Saidenberg Galleries.

The Rothschilds donated artwork from their collection to American museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University. The bulk of their collection, however, was bequeathed to their three children, Robert, Judith, and Barbara.