Beschrijving
Amsterdam, Fredereik Muller, 1951, 36pp. with 698 titles, original softcover paper binding, no illustrations, auction catalogue of the bookcollection of the famous art dealer Jacques Goudstikker. Jacques Goudstikker (30 August 1897 – 16 May 1940) was a Jewish Dutch art dealer who fled the Netherlands when it was invaded by Nazi Germany during World War II, leaving three furnished properties and an extensive and significant art collection including over 1200 paintings, many of which had been previously catalogued as ‘Old Masters’. The entire collection, which had been surveyed by Hermann Goering himself, was subsequently looted by the Nazis. Between the two World Wars, Jacques Goudstikker had been the most important Dutch dealer of Old Master paintings, according to Peter C. Sutton, executive director and CEO of the Bruce Museum of Arts and Science. Despite efforts of Goudstikker's widow after the war to regain possession of the collection, it was not until after her death that the Dutch government finally restituted 202 paintings to the Goudstikker family in 2006. To finance efforts to reclaim more of the stolen art, a large portion of them were sold at auction in 2007 for almost $10 million. Goudstikker was born in Amsterdam as the son of the art dealer Eduard Goudstikker. He studied at the commercial school in Amsterdam, and more intensely (?) with Wilhelm Martin and William Vogelsang at Leiden and Utrecht.
In 1919, he joined his father's Amsterdam gallery, restructured it as a public besloten vennootschap with himself as the director and major shareholder, and introduced a notably more international style; publishing catalogues in French rather than Dutch, and showing for the first time Italian Renaissance paintings, including The Madonna and Child by Francesco Squarcione. This was revolutionary in the Netherlands of the time, where in 1906, Adriaan Pit, the director of the Rijksmuseum, had stated ‘We have become chauvinistic with regard to the field of art. This worship of our old school of painting, which started thirty years ago is still alive and appears not to let us appreciate any foreign art While escaping the Nazis in May 1940, Goudstikker fell in the hold of the SS Bodegraven in the English Channel, fatally breaking his neck (source Wikipedia). Scarce.
