Moïse de Camondo
Moïse de Camondo · Arts & Literature
Banquier et collectionneur : il légua à la France son hôtel du parc Monceau et l'une des plus belles collections d'arts décoratifs du XVIIIe siècle, devenue le musée Nissim de Camondo, en mémoire de son fils tué au combat en 1917
15 mars 1860, Constantinople — 14 novembre 1935, Paris
Empire ottoman, France
Moïse de Camondo is recognized among Jewish contributors to Arts & Literature — Banquier et collectionneur : il légua à la France son hôtel du parc Monceau et l'une des plus belles collections d'arts décoratifs du XVIIIe siècle, devenue le musée Nissim de Camondo, en mémoire de son fils tué au combat en 1917
Origins and early life
Moïse de Camondo was born in Constantinople on 15 March 1860 into a Sephardi Jewish family of the Ottoman empire, the son of Nissim de Camondo and Élise Fernandez and the grandson of Abraham Salomon Camondo, who has his own fiche on this site — the banker whose house financed the Ottoman state and who was called the Rothschild of the East.
Work and career
He was born, lived and died a Jew. The family moved to Paris in 1869 and built two adjoining mansions on the rue de Monceau; Moïse ran the Camondo bank until it closed in 1917, kept racehorses, hunted, and collected. What he collected he collected with a single idea: to reassemble, in a house built for the purpose in 1911 in the manner of the Petit Trianon, the decorative arts of eighteenth-century France — Savonnerie carpets, Sèvres and Chantilly porcelain, furniture by Riesener and Jacob, panelling, silver and paintings by Vigée Le Brun and Hubert Robert — with a rigour that made it the finest such ensemble in private hands. His son Nissim, a pilot in the French air service, was killed in aerial combat over Lorraine on 5 September 1917.
Later years
Moïse never recovered; he gave the house and everything in it to the French state in his will, on the condition that nothing be moved and that it bear his son's name, and the Musée Nissim de Camondo opened in 1936, the year after his death. This fiche states plainly what followed: his daughter Béatrice, her husband Léon Reinach and their two children, Fanny and Bertrand, were deported from France and murdered at Auschwitz in 1943-1944. The line ended there; the house on the rue de Monceau remains exactly as he left it.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: Musée Nissim de Camondo (Les Arts Décoratifs), Paris ; Nora Şeni et Sophie Le Tarnec, Les Camondo ou l'éclipse d'une fortune (1997) ; Mémorial de la Shoah
This page is published in seven languages from an English source. The translations are reviewed, but a mistake can still slip through. If you spot one on this profile — a wrong word, a lost date, a sentence that says something the English does not — please tell us.
Banquier et collectionneur : il légua à la France son hôtel du parc Monceau et l'une des plus belles collections d'arts décoratifs du XVIIIe siècle, devenue le musée Nissim de Camondo, en mémoire de son fils tué au combat en 1917
Source: Musée Nissim de Camondo (Les Arts Décoratifs), Paris ; Nora Şeni et Sophie Le Tarnec, Les Camondo ou l'éclipse d'une fortune (1997) ; Mémorial de la Shoah
Similar Contributors
Léon Bakst
Morteza Neydavoud
Elsa Lunghini
Liliane Rovère
Aenne Biermann
