(Bloomberg) -- On Sept. 14, Sotheby's New York will sell more than 100 pieces of Meissen porcelain, once owned by a German-Jewish coal baron and restituted to his heirs.
For a casual observer, the $3.1 million high estimate for the trove, known as the Oppenheimer collection after its owners Franz and Margarethe Oppenheimer, might elicit a yawn. After all, that's less than half of what a buyer paid in May for a single work painted eight years ago by the market star Jonas Wood.
But among a small, discreet, intensely wealthy group of collectors, the Oppenheimer collection represents a rare opportunity to buy a concentrated, highly coveted set of porcelain pieces the likes of which haven't been seen on the market for more than 40 years.
“It's a sensation,” says Alfredo Reyes of Galerie Roebbig in Munich. “It's a highly important collection. I would compare it to the Maurice de Rothschild sale at Christie's, to judge how the market will be.”
The technically anonymous sale to which Reyes refers took place in the late 1970s. Since then, the Meissen market has changed dramatically.
“Going back 20, 30 years ago, there was an even spread to the market,” says Errol Manners, a co-owner of E.H. Manners in London. “Now, the pyramid is a little steeper. And a smallish number of very committed collectors are vying for the great pieces,” even as the middle and low end of the market have failed to keep pace.
And that's how Reyes can compare the Oppenheimer sale to the Rothschild auction: Both contain many objects from what Manners describes as Meissen's “golden age, into the early 1720s and early 1730s—while Augustus II was still alive—and pieces that were made for him and his court and his Japanese Palace will remain at the top.”
The Most Collectible Pieces
For about 1,000 years, China was the exclusive manufacturer of hard paste porcelain, prized for its durability and dazzling white color. In the early 18th century, the West cracked the code, and Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony and king of Poland, founded a royal porcelain factory in the town of Meissen.
For several decades, Meissen was the unquestioned leader in European porcelain. “Up until about 1750, those are the collectible pieces,” says Reyes. “The greatest artists of the time were all in Dresden [15 miles downriver from Meissen], and then after that, the secret of porcelain was spread out, so the competition was quite big.” The Seven Years' War was the final straw, and “Meissen was not able to recover” from it, Reyes says.
But during the glittering decades of the factory's dominance, “the quantity produced was massive,” says Manners.
Meissen porcelain was used for “diplomatic and political gifts at the highest possible level,” says Michele Beiny, whose eponymous gallery is located in New York. “So the function of porcelain, and the role it played in the 18th century, is important. And that continues in the 19th century, though not so much for Meissen.”
Its proliferation allowed collectors over subsequent centuries to build up substantial Meissen collections. At first it was European aristocrats; by the 1920s, when the Oppenheimers were building their collection in Berlin, the major collectors were bankers and industrialists.
Twists and Turns
Franz Oppenheimer was the part-owner and chief executive officer of Emanuel Friedlaender und Co., a private company that dominated the Silesian coal industry. After the Nazis came to power in Berlin, Oppenheimer and his wife fled to Vienna. They stayed there until the Anschluss joined Germany and Austria, at which point they settled in New York.
The exact details of how and when the Oppenheimers parted with their collection are blurry. What is known is that they were able to take some of the porcelain to Vienna, but that by 1939 at the very latest, the vast majority of their collection had been purchased by a German-born, Amsterdam-based Jewish-German banker named Fritz Mannheimer.
Mannheimer, whose only child was later known as Annette de la Renta, died in 1939 of a heart attack, and his collection was subsequently acquired by the Nazis. After the war it was recovered by the “monuments men” and returned to Holland.
The administrators of Mannheimer's estate declined to claim at least part of his Meissen collection, because they would have had to refund the price paid by Hitler's curators, so much of the Oppenheimer porcelain passed without a struggle into the collection of the Dutch National Art Collection. Many of the objects were loaned to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam until Oppenheimer heirs successfully initiated a restitution claim in 2015.
The Auction
The collection, dealers say, has multiple things to recommend it. “Provenance is very seductive,” Beiny says. “It's another conversation piece if you own something like that. The story does matter.”
And then there are the objects themselves.
“The Oppenheimers didn't collect figures,” says Sotheby's Richard Hird, a specialist in European ceramics and glass. “That makes them unique among their contemporaries.”
Nor did the Oppenheimers solely “concentrate on the very beginning years” of the Meissen manufacturer, says Beiny, referring to objects made from 1710 to 1720.
What the Oppenheimers did buy—which will be offered in profusion—is a variety of vases, clocks, plates, and serving vessels. They “chose a decorative scheme as their overarching theme,” says Hird. “And that was chinoiserie, which Meissen had really stopped producing by 1740.”
Top Lots
“In every collection there are obvious stars, and the Oppenheimer collection is no exception,” Beiny says. “It's one of the great collections to come—certainly in living memory, or at least in postwar memory.”
A clock case from 1727 is valued at $200,000 to $400,000; a pair of canary-yellow vases from about 1735 is estimated from $150,000 to $250,000; and an intact tea and coffee service, painted with the arms of the prominent Venetian Morosini family, is valued from $120,000 to $180,000.
There are also pieces that Beiny says “will be affordable to collectors of every level.”
A gilt sugar bowl has a high estimate of just $2,500; a striking cane handle with a silver mount, from about 1730-35, has a high estimate of $3,000; and an exquisite purple milk jug from the same time period has a high estimate of $5,000. “Not everything,” Beiny says, “is a show buster.”
Manners, Reyes, and Beiny all say they plan to bid at the sale, on behalf of clients or for their own galleries. “I think it does have the potential to set some records,” Beiny says.
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