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Schaeffer Galleries Records
910148
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Contributing Institution: Special Collections
Title: Schaeffer Galleries records
Creator: Schaeffer, Kate Born, 1898?-2000
Creator: Schaeffer, Hanns
Creator: Schaeffer Galleries (New York, N.Y.)
Identifier/Call Number: 910148
Physical Description: 114.5 Linear Feet(217 boxes, 19 oversize boxes)
Date (inclusive): 1907-1988, bulk 1925-1980
Date (bulk): 1925-1980
Abstract: Hanns and Kate Schaeffer specialized in Old Master paintings from all European schools. The records of the Schaeffer Galleries
document gallery's stock and business dealings from the early 1920s until the late 1980s, both in Berlin and New York. The
core of the collection comprises approximately two and a half thousand photographs of art that was handled by the gallery,
which are filed along with documents concerning attribution, provenance, acquisition history, and sales. Card catalogs, lists,
and ledgers record artworks sold and purchased and detail transactions with clients. These documents of business dealings
are amplified by extensive correspondence with art collectors, museum curators, art dealers, art historians, restorers, and
storage and shipping companies. Also included are inventories of private collections, lists of artworks shown at exhibitions
held at the gallery, and unpublished albums with photographs of gallery stock.
Physical Location: Request access to the physical materials described in this inventory through the
catalog record for this collection. Click here for the
access policy .
Language of Material: Collection material is in English and German.
Approximately sixty monographs, issues of periodicals, and auction catalogs were pulled from the archive to be added to the
Getty Research Library's online catalog. When cataloged, they will be searchable by the source collection phrase: Schaeffer
Galleries Collection.
Schaeffer Galleries records. The Frick Collection/Frick Art Reference Library Archives.
Schaeffer Galleries records, circa 1921-1982, bulk 1935-1950. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
The Archives of American Art also holds an oral history interview of Kate Schaeffer conducted June 18, 1975 by Paul Cummings.
Scope and Content of the Collection
The records of the Schaeffer Galleries document the gallery's stock and business dealings from the early 1920s until the late
1980s, both in Berlin and New York.
Series I. Indexes and Series II. Financial records comprise card catalogs, lists, and ledgers compiled and maintained throughout
the years of the gallery's operations, which record artworks sold and purchased and detail transactions with clients and the
gallery's administrative and financial dealings. The gallery's stock is also represented by approximately one thousand black-and-white
negatives of artworks, numbered in white ink.
Series III. Inventory forms the core of the archive and consists of approximately two and a half thousand study photographs
of art handled by the gallery. These extensive photographic files are organized alphabetically by the artist's name and subsequently
by title of artwork and include further documents concerning attribution, provenance, acquisition history, and sales and reference
notes.
Series IV. Correspondence dates from the early 1920s to the late 1980s. It contains the Schaeffer Galleries business correspondence
with art collectors; museum curators; other art dealers; art historians; art restorers; and firms such as storage and shipping
companies. Present are originals of letters received and carbon copies of letters sent. Occasionally included are bills and
invoices; telegrams; and handwritten notes acknowledging purchase or return of an artwork. The files are incomplete for some
years. Series IV.B includes personal correspondence of Kate Schaeffer from the years 1979 to 1981.
Series V. Research files comprises a variety of materials. Included are papers documenting the gallery's business dealings
with private collectors: inventories and lists with related correspondence and photographs; lists of artworks shown at exhibitions
held at the gallery; several unpublished albums with photographs of gallery stock; and papers documenting artworks and art
collections seen by the Schaeffers when travelling in Europe. There are several files concerning individual artworks and artists
such as the sale by the Schaeffer Galleries of two Breughel paintings to Canada; an unpublished inventory of drawings by George
Romney; or documents concerning the painting
Tarquin and Lucretia by Titian. Also present are notes; photographs; certificates of authenticity; Kate Schaeffer's manuscript on Javanese art;
a collection of annotated offprints, exhibition catalogs, and auction catalogs; and some unidentified items.
Arranged in five series: Series Indexes, undated; Series II. Financial records, 1936-1982, undated; Series III. Inventory,
approximately 1925-1980, undated; Series IV. Correspondence, 1919-1988, undated; Series V. Research files, 1907-1988, undated.
Biographical / Historical Note
Hanns Schaeffer (1886-1967) and his wife Kate Born Schaeffer (1898-2000) established the Schaeffer Galleries in Berlin in
1925. Hanns Schaeffer had already operated an art gallery in Berlin since 1921 and later operated galleries in London and
San Francisco. Those galleries were also named Schaeffer Galleries. The London and the San Francisco galleries closed before
Schaeffer Galleries in Manhattan, New York, was founded after Hanns and Kate Schaeffer moved to the United States permanently
in 1933. The gallery in Berlin remained operational until 1939. The New York gallery was first located at 61 East 57th Street
and changed venues several times before moving to its final location at 983 Park Avenue where it remained for over fifty years.
After Hanns Schaeffer's death in 1967, Kate Schaeffer became the owner and president of the gallery and continued to manage
the business until her death in 2000. Schaeffer Galleries closed shortly thereafter.
The gallery specialized in Old Master paintings, at first concentrating on Flemish and Dutch masters, and later adding paintings
and drawings from all European schools. Between 1927 and 1950 Hanns and Kate Schaeffer organized and held at their venues
in Berlin and New York approximately twenty exhibitions of artworks from the gallery's stock and published several scholarly
exhibition catalogs. Throughout their lives, they were held in high esteem by the international art market community as knowledgeable
and distinguished art dealers.
The paintings and drawings that passed through the Schaeffer's hands included, among many others, Botticelli's
Madonna and Child with Singing Angels, now held by the Staatliche Museen in Berlin; a Lucas Cranach in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art in Kansas City,
Missouri; Correggio's
Salvator Mundi in the National Gallery of Art in Washington; Peter Paul Rubens's
Cleopatra at the Detroit Institute of Arts; a Frans Hans at the Mauritshuis in The Hague; Leonardo da Vinci's
Bear Walking at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and numerous paintings by Rembrandt van Rijn, including
Juno at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
Throughout the years, the Schaeffers maintained business relationships with numerous well-known European and American art
dealers, such as Hermann Abels,Thomas Agnew & Sons, Alfred Bader, Christoph Bernoulli, Kunsthandel P. de Boer, C. G. Boerner,
Mortimer Brandt, P. & D. Colnaghi & Co., G. Cramer Oude Kunst, Kunsthandel Gebr. Douwes, Duits Ltd., Galerie Fischer, Walter
Feilchenfeld and Marianne Feilchenfeld Breslauer, French & Company, Alexander Gebhardt, Lucien Goldschmidt, Galerie Wilhelm
Grosshennig, Hildebrand Gurlitt, Alexandre Jolas, M. Knoedler & Co., Matthiesen Gallery, Bruno Meissner, Kurt Meissner, Ferdinand
Möller, Fritz Nathan, Parke-Bernet Galleries, Gustav Rochlitz, Heinz Steinmeyer, Roman Norbert Ketterer at Stuttgarter Kunstkabinett,
Hans Trojanski, Van Damen Lilienfeld Galleries, Julius H. Weitzner, and Wildenstein & Co.
From 1936 and through the war years the Schaeffers were engaged in a consignment partnership with the Dutch dealership Firma
D. Katz in Dieren, Netherlands. Regular business dealings with the Katz family (Benjamin, David, Hanna, Joseph, Nathan and
W. Katz) continued after the war.
Among their clients were many renowned American and European art collectors, including George S. Abrams, Alexandre Ananoff
(the French pioneer in astronautics), Manson F. Backus II and the Estate of Le Roy M. Backus, Murray Gordon Ballantyne, Herbert
N. Bier, Oscar Roy Chalk, Eugene Ferkauf, Harvey S. Firestone Jr., Frits Lugt, Walter C. Baker, Luis A. Ferré at Museo de
Arte de Ponce, Malcolm Forbes, Trude Krautheimer, Titi Leyendecker, Lord Methuen (Paul Ayshford Methuen, 4th Baron Methuen),
J. William Middendorf II, Ruth Nottebohm, Rudolf August Oetker, Norton Simon, Richard F. Sterba, Anne and Otto Wertheimer,
and Stanley S. Wulc.
The gallery's business correspondence reveals frequent contact with the eminent art historians Svetlana Alpers, Winslow Ames,
Kurt Bauch, Otto Benesch, Hermann Bünemann, Ludwig Burchard, Bernhard Degenhart, Max Jakob Friedländer, Walter Friedländer,
Jan Gerrit van Gelder, Horst Gerson, Kurt Gerstenberg, Ludwig Grote, Sturla J. Gudlaugson, Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann, Julius
S. Held, Walter Andreas Hofer, Walter Hugelshofer, Michael Jaffé, Myron Laskin, Konrad Oberhuber, Erwin and Gerda Panofsky,
Eduard Plietzsch, John Alexander Pope, Leo van Puyvelde, John Rewald, Marcel Roethlisberger, Eric H. L. Sexton, Seymour Slive,
Wolfgang Stechow, Charles Sterling, Werner Sumowski, Hanns Swarzenski, Hans Tietze, Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner, Lionello
Venturi, and Federico Zeri.
The Schaeffers also contributed artworks to numerous art museums in United States, Canada, and Europe. James J. Rorimer, the
director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1955 to 1967, observed in 1961: "The Schaeffers are among the most serious,
knowledgeable and helpful art dealers who are enabling American Museums to grow for the benefit of our public. They are friends
who share unstintingly in helping curators, directors and trustees to choose with care the works of art which redound to the
credit of their museums" (cit. obituary for Kate Schaeffer,
New York Times, January 7 2001).
Vladimira Stefura processed the 1991 and 1993 acquisitions between 1996 and 1997 and wrote a preliminary finding aid. Additions
received in 2001 and 2002 (45 boxes) were merged with the archive between 2014 and 2015 by Isabella Zuralski who also reorganized
and reprocessed portions of the archive and substantially rewrote the finding aid.
The collection was acquired in 1991 and 1993 from the Schaeffer family. Additions received in 2001 and 2002 were merged with
the archive.
Schaeffer Galleries records, 1907-1988, bulk 1925-1980. Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Accession no. 910148.
http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa910148
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Library Rights and Reproductions .
Open for use by qualified researchers.
Subjects and Indexing Terms
Photographic prints
Painting, Flemish
Photographs, Original
Painting, European
Painting, Dutch
Drawing, Dutch
Letters (correspondence) -- United States -- 20th century
Art -- Collectors and collecting -- Europe
Gelatin silver prints
Black-and-white prints (photographs)
Art historians -- Correspondence
Art dealers -- Correspondence
Art -- Collectors and collecting -- United States
Art -- Private collections -- United States
Color transparencies
Color prints (photographs)
Dye diffusion transfer prints
Art galleries, Commercial -- United States
Black-and-white negatives
Schaeffer Galleries (New York, N.Y.)
Schaeffer, Hanns