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Joszi Arpad Koppay (b.1859) Joszi Koppay was born in Vienna in 1859 with Hungarian nationality. He was trained as an architect but soon devoted his life to painting, becoming a student in Munich in 1884. In 1887 he became a court painter in Madrid but never settled in Spain and returned to Germany, living in Berlin. He also spent time in Paris and obtained an honourable mention at the Paris Salon in 1888. It was probably here that he launched his career as a fashionable portrait painter. Koppay’s clients included Henrik Ibsen, Paul Lindau,
the Austrian Imperial Family, the families of Harriman, Roosevelt
and Rockefeller. The Algemeines Lexicon der bildenden
Künstler (1907-50) states that Koppay’s art
suffered from his desire to please the client and the example
given is this Rothschild portrait.
Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild (1868-1937) Lionel Walter Rothschild was the eldest child of the first Lord Rothschild and grew up at Tring Park, the family home in Hertfordshire. From an early age he was interested in the natural world and began to collect insects and stuffed animals. The taxidermy was carried out by Alfred Minall who worked on the estate, the entire collection was kept in a garden shed. This soon became too small to hold his growing collection and so rooms and sheds were rented around Tring for Rothschild’s insects and birds. In 1889, when he was twenty one, he was given some land by his parents on which to build his museum. The resulting Zoological Museum at Tring was opened to the public in 1892. Rothschild was employed at N. M. Rothschild and Sons, the family bank, but was neither interested in his work nor was very competent. He retired from the bank in 1908, to spend more time working on his collections at Tring. He employed two curators to manage his collection, Ernst Johann Otto Hartert (1859-1933) for ornithology and Karl Jordan for entomology. Numerous collectors were sent worldwide to bring back specimens both for the museum and the research collections. The Zoological Museum also published its own journal, Novitates Zoologicae, starting in 1894, in which the majority of papers published were based on work carried out on the Tring collections. In 1932 the ornithology collection was sold to the American
Museum of Natural History in order to pay a large debt, but
with great secrecy. Walter died unmarried and childless in
1937 and bequeathed the rest of his museum and collections
to the Natural History Museum with the proviso that scientific
work should continue to be carried out at Tring.
This painting was purchased from Dr P. Tauchner in 1983.
Exhibition and publication details
References and further reading Benezit, E.C. (1999) Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs de tous les temps et de tous les pays. Grund: Paris. Jordan, K. (1938) In memory of Lord Rothschild, PhD, FRS, J.P. born the 8th February 1868, died the 27th August 1937, Novitates Zoologicae, Vol. XLI, pp.1-41. Rothschild, M. (1983) Dear Lord Rothschild: birds, butterflies and history. Hutchinson: London. 398pp. Thieme, U & Becker, F. (1907-50) Allgemeines lexicon
der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart
: unter Mitwirkung von 300 Fachelehrten des in- und Auslandes.
W. Engelman: Leipzig.
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