Lotte von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy

Lotte Reichenheim received private lessons there as a child and also spent several years of her childhood in Silesia.

The architect friend Bruno Paul converted Börnicke Castle near Bernau into a country residence for the couple and designed a villa for them on Berlin's Alsenstrasse.

The Mendelssohn-Bartholdys were also among the early collectors of Vincent van Gogh's works in Germany, including the paintings Mrs Roulin with her Child (now the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), Park in Arles (private collection), The Tree (private collection), Trees in the Garden of the Hospital Saint-Paul ( Armand Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles), The Man with the Cornflower (private collection), The Town Hall of Auvers on July 14th (private collection) and a version from the well-known series of Sunflowers (Sompo Museum of Art, Tokyo).

The series of Picasso paintings in the collection included Inclined Woman's Head (Staatsgalerie Stuttgart), Portrait of Angel Fernández de Soto (private collection), Le Moulin de la Galette and Fernande with Black Mantilla (both Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City), Boy leading a horse (Museum of Modern Art, New York City) and Boy with a Pipe (private collection).

[6] There were also works by other artists such as Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, André Derain, Marie Laurencin, Maurice de Vlaminck, William Hogarth and Paul Signac.

In exile in Switzerland, her assets in Germany either confiscated or inaccessible, Charlotte Countess von Wesdehlen lived in financial difficulties.

After the death of her second husband, Georg Graf von Wesdehlen, in 1938, she was increasingly forced to sell works of art from her own collection.

Sales include Renoir's Still Life with Peaches and Plums to the entrepreneur Emil Georg Bührle (now a private collection) and Henri Rousseau's The Muse that Inspires the Poet to the Kunstmuseum Basel.