thread related, her uncle or great uncle has u.k. taxpayers and tourists paying for the upkeep of one his castles/mansions ....
Lunch with the FT: Jacob Rothschild
By Jackie Wullschlager
The banker and arts philanthropist has Sunday lunch with Jackie Wullschlager at Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire
Idon’t, you know, usually give interviews. So if you decide to write anything, I’d rather it wasn’t about me.” With this unpromising plea for discretion, my host Jacob Rothschild offers a glass of Château Duhart-Milon 2000, a Rothschild wine – his cellars contain 15,000 bottles, going back to 1870 – and insists that what is interesting is not himself but “what we’re doing at Waddesdon”, the National Trust property that houses the Rothschild collection.
Lord Rothschild, 73, is known for tremendous dynamism while staying resolutely behind the scenes. If the tall, thin man standing before me in tweed jacket, grey turtle-neck jumper and black trousers looks familiar, it is not because he has cultivated a public persona; it is because the long oval face, high forehead and arched, hawk-like eyes, as well as the intellectually engaged expression, resemble exactly his 1989 portrait by Lucian Freud.
I comment on this likeness. “When he paints us we think we look awful and horribly old, then 20 years later we’re pleased,” he says drily. Freud’s painting is in the National Portrait Gallery – “not because of me, but because of him”. A second version hangs at Waddesdon Manor alongside David Hockney’s 2003 double portrait of Lord Rothschild and his daughter Hannah, eldest of his four children.
Rothschild has invited me to Eythrope, Buckinghamshire, for Sunday lunch. We are in the 19th-century tea pavilion that is his private home, next to his Waddesdon estate. His wife Serena is skiing in Switzerland, and this is the only free slot in his overloaded schedule as banker, arts philanthropist, collector and country house owner.
After working in and then resigning from the family bank NM Rothschild & Sons, he founded J Rothschild Assurance Group, now St James’s Place, with Sir Mark Weinberg in 1991. He is also chairman of his investment trust company RIT Capital Partners and his other business concerns include Spencer House Capital Management and the mini-merchant bank Spencer House Partners.
As a philanthropist, his achievements include restoring the publicly owned Somerset House, one of the neoclassical jewels of London, and establishing it as a centre for the visual arts, and ensuring the future of the Courtauld Institute of Art, which contains an unrivalled collection of impressionist and early modernist masterpieces. As a personal project he bought Spencer House in St James and spent £16m returning it to 18th-century glory.
To all those activities, he has brought individual flair and an instinctive grasp of the innovations needed to uphold historical continuities. Today he says that his “main interest” is the reinvigoration of Waddesdon Manor, the neo-Renaissance chateau built in the 1880s by Ferdinand de Rothschild. The house has just opened for the summer 2010 season with an unexpected twist: the dramatic installation of Jeff Koons’s reflective blue 6ft 6in high chromium stainless-steel “Cracked Egg” and, from May 1, chandeliers and furniture by the witty, irreverent Brazilian designers Humberto and Fernando Campana.
Rothschild describes his family as having “operated the first European business, in a way, and, genetically, they got lucky”. Since the mid-19th century its members have tended to offset their astounding wealth and lavish properties with a sober, retiring private demeanour.
We chat in an opulent Eythrope drawing room – deep soft beige sofas, long coffee tables heaped with art books, and superb Chilterns views, though the eye is drawn, above all, to a huge, modernist grey chandelier. It is by Diego Giacometti, brother of the more famous Alberto. “Oh, I was in the Paris studio when Diego was making the chandeliers for the Picasso Museum and he said, ‘Do you want me to make them for you as well?’” he explains. “All the chandeliers in the house are by him.”
A sly black cat by Alberto Giacometti is stretched out beneath a Freud etching of a garden. “I worship Giacometti,” says Lord Rothschild, leading me past another of the sculptor’s figures, a serpentine upright female form, into a dining room lined with 18th-century rococo panels. Serving dishes are already spread on an antique sideboard: we help ourselves to roast chicken, pan-fried new potatoes, brussels sprouts – from the estate – and carrot and swede purée. All are cooked to tender perfection in plain English style.
We sit at a circular table laid with a white cloth and groaning with silver, candles, flowers and piles of books. Lord Rothschild eats slowly and little, while talking in measured tones that do not entirely conceal his excitement about new developments at Waddesdon. “Cracked Egg”, he explains, is owned by Mark Getty, son of the billionaire Sir Paul, and a “close friend and neighbour” who as a resident non-domicile cannot bring it into the UK without paying tax. “So I said, ‘It’s more fun to have it down the road than not to see it at all – can we borrow it?’” It joins contemporary works including Sarah Lucas’s surreal horse and cart “Perceval” and a chandelier of broken china commissioned by Lord Rothschild from the inventive German lighting designer Ingo Maurer, whose work is collected by museums including New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The piece is, says Lord Rothschild, “funny, witty, a breath of fresh air in the house, and our bestselling postcard”.
I laugh out loud at Maurer’s shimmering iconoclasm. “Yeah, that’s what we feel like doing with our porcelain,” Lord Rothschild mutters. Does that imply Waddesdon is a burden? “It’s a burden I enjoy,” he says cautiously, admitting “it would be impossible to live in the house in this day and age.” He runs the manor semi-independently for the National Trust, which received it in 1957 as a bequest from his cousin James, along with its contents and 2,000 acres of grounds. Lord Rothschild owns the rest of the Waddesdon estate.
Today, such private/public sector overlaps in the arts are increasingly successful. Of more than 40 Rothschild mansions built around the world in the 19th century, only Waddesdon still has its collection intact and is open to the public. With nearly 400,000 visitors a year, it is the National Trust’s most visited house and epitomises how the English country house now markets itself as a chic-eclectic mix of styles, media and collapsed aesthetic hierarchies, relevant to young audiences – and emblematic of 21st-century social shifts.
Not that hierarchy has vanished from Eythrope. As Lord Rothschild pours me another glass of smooth, deep-ruby bordeaux, Clive, a fully uniformed butler in pinstripes, waistcoat and tails, brings dessert – intimidatingly large apple and blackberry tarts. “Would you like to share one?” Lord Rothschild asks, slicing the pastry in half and giving me the lion’s portion of tumbling blackberries.
www.waddesdon.org.uk