Otto Hermann Kahn Collection

Description

Otto Hermann Kahn was born in Mannheim, Germany, in 1867 into a family of art collectors. He studied music and learned to play the violin and cello while attending university. His father, Bernhard Kahn, was a banker who hired him as an apprentice to train at a bank in Karlsruhe. At the age of twenty-one, he joined Deutsche Bank in Berlin, later relocating to the bank’s London office. After five years in England, he left his position and moved to New York to work for Speyer & Company. In 1896, he married Addie Wolff, the daughter of a partner at the New York banking firm Kuhn, Loeb & Co, where Kahn soon began working. Following the example of his parents, Kahn began collecting works of art from a young age and supported cultural initiatives such as the Metropolitan Opera Company (Collins, 2002). His New York residences housed the pieces that formed his collection, many of which Kahn himself later donated to museums (M’Cormick, 1925). The Great Depression of 1929 severely affected his finances, and in 1934, he died suddenly of a heart attack. After his death, his wife was forced to sell his collection to museums and private collectors, leading to its current dispersal (Kobler, 1988). His collection included works by Canaletto, Matisse, Canova, Botticelli, Rembrandt, Hals, among others.