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ALIDE GOLDSCHMITT (1885-c.1967) My Grandmother was born into a prosperous middle class Jewish family in Hamburg in 1885. She showed a serious interest in painting from her early teens and was encouraged by her family. In her late teens she went to live in Rome with Ludwig and Frida Mond, at the Palazzo Zuccari. The Monds were devoted to the arts, both as collectors and patrons; their house was a meeting place for both aspiring and established artists in the Rome of the late 19th Century. Alide started exhibiting in her early twenties and in due course moved to Paris to be closer to the impressionist tradition that she admired. From 1907 to 1910 she showed paintings in each of the Paris Salons d'Automne (where the selectors and co-exhibitors included Roualt, Bonnard, Matisse and Kandinsky) and met with considereable success. In 1910 she met and married my Grandfather, Israel Gollancz, then a lecturer at Cambridge and a friend and student of the scholar W.W. Skeat, who was in due course to become an eminent figure in academic and public life and to receive a knighthood for his services to English literature. She continued painting and exhibited in London, Paris and Rome. She was commissioned to paint the portrait of the retiring President of the American University and in 1926 participated with two other women artists in an exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery, which was widely and well reviewed. In 1930 Sir Israel died after a short illness. They had been an utterly devoted couple; Alide was devastated and stopped painting completely. Some years later when refugee relatives from Germany were staying with her during the war, their young daughter persuaded her to make drawings and paintings for her - but she never exhibited again. OLIVER GOLLANCZ (1914-2003) My father was born in June 1914, the second child of Sir Israel and Lady Gollancz. Oliver read history at Cambridge and taught in adult education. Comparatively late in life - in his late forties - he studied painting and drawing with Cecil Collins and Hans Tisdall at the Central School of Art. He was appointed Senior Lecturer in History and Theory of Art at Sir John Cass College where he continued teaching until his retirement. Oliver combined an encyclopedic knowledge of art history with a passionate engagement with the material world. He loved untouched landscape, paricularly the thickly forested hills of the Cènnes (where he had a house) and the deserts of Israel (where he undertook a residency at Mizpeh Ramon) and North Africa. He endlessly studied the pictures revealed by modern microscopy and by the Hubble telescope; he was fascinated by the way that atoms and nebulae, rock formations and cloud formations, disclosed in their forms fundamental physical properties of the world. His intellectual curiosity meant that he wanted not merely to see but to understand and he read widely in scientific literature, and worked closely with scientific colleagues at Cass. One of his most successful large pictures is based on the spectrum of colours generated by the oscillation of metal crystals and in the crystalline structures in which they are found. Until the last two years of his life, when his sight failed, he painted all day every day; then, he painted as much as he could manage. On the day of the stroke that killed him, four weeks short of his 90th Birthday, he told me with great pleasure that he had managed "a good couple of hours painting". David Gollancz.

Alide Goldschmitt (1885-c.1967)

Schola, San Marco, Venice; and five others by the same hand

Details

Alide Goldschmitt (1885-c.1967)
Schola, San Marco, Venice; and five others by the same hand
signed and dated 'Alide Goldschmidt/1909' (lower right), signed again 'Goldschmidt' (on a label attached to the reverse)
oil on panel, unframed
13¾ x 10¼ in. (34.9 x 26 in.) (6)

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