The Rothschilds, the Montefiores, and the Victorian Gold Rush
Some years ago my colleague Andrea Wolk Rager and I spent several days in the darkened basement of the Rothschild Bank in New Court, St. Swithin’s Lane, in the City of London, inspecting almost every one of the nearly 700 autochromes created immediately before World War I by the youthful hobbyist Lionel de Rothschild. A small selection of the best of these was, in due course, reproduced in our exhibition at Yale Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century . After we had finished, the Rothschild Archivist Melanie Aspey [1] asked me to examine a box of correspondence, which she thought might have “something to do with Australia.” She was fairly certain that nobody apart from she had looked in it for at least 25 years. Upon further, careful inspection (and a subsequent visit of several days) this sizeable cache of letters turned out to be something of a revelation because they document the close involvement of the firm of N. M. Rothschild & S...