Margarete Oppenheim
In the same year, Margarete Eisner married Georg Reichenheim, a chemist with a doctorate, whose family owned textile factories in Silesia.
The family circle also included the entrepreneur, art collector and patron James Simon, who had married Georg Reichenheim's sister Agnes in 1878.
The town house built there according to plans by the architect Hugo Wach was designed to meet the needs of the collector Margarete Oppenheim with gallery space and special wall display cases.
For this purpose, three contiguous plots of land were purchased, on which the Oppenheim country house was built according to plans by the architect Alfred Messel.
[3] Even though Franz Oppenheim supported his wife in building up the art collection, he made it clear in a letter to Wilhelm Bode what division of responsibilities he saw in the Oppenheim household: "I am responsible for the management of the factory, the art department is under my wife.“ A fountain with penguin figures by the sculptor August Gaul was installed in the extensive garden of the country house.
Among the neighbors at Wannsee was the painter Max Liebermann, a friend, who portrayed Margarete Oppenheim in various drawings in 1917 and painted various views of the garden.
Starting in 1906, Margarete Oppenheim was a member of the Kaiser Friedrich Museumsverein, the sponsoring association of the museum headed by Wilhelm von Bode (today the Bodemuseum).
Together with the banker Robert von Mendelssohn, she donated the painting The Garden Bench by Max Liebermann to the National Gallery in 1917 on the occasion of the artist's 70th birthday.
The Villa Oppenheim, Am Grossen Wannsee 43-45, which had been inherited by the two children of Franz from his first marriage to Elsa Wohlheim, Kurt and Martha, was seized by the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst in 1937 and by the Gestapo in 1942.
Other items in the collection were flasks, pin boxes, cane handles, signet rings, fans, plaques and medals, keys, glassware and eating utensils, embroidered textiles and lace, European porcelain manufactured in Meissen, Ludwigsburg and Berlin, and Chinese handicrafts.
While the 1936 catalog hardly mentions the collection of paintings and works on paper, it is considered important today due to its financial worth and the fact that Oppenheim was a pioneer collector of modern art.
Works by Vincent van Gogh included an unspecified boy's head (whereabouts unknown) and the paintings On the Banks of the Oise at Auvers (Detroit Institute of Arts), White Roses (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), and Angle in the Park of the St. Paul Asylum (whereabouts unknown).Oppenheim's collection was best known for the works of Paul Cezanne.
From the German-speaking world, Oppenheim acquired a painting version of Max Slevogt's Parrot Man from 1901 (private collection).
in 2018 the Oppenheim heirs reached a settlement with the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, resulting in the restitution of eleven objects of which five works were repurchased for the museums.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City houses a landscape-painted porcelain cup and matching saucer from about 1730-1740 from the workshop of Charles Fromery and a silver reliquary pendant from the Rhineland of the late 14th century.
A snuff box made of Meissen porcelain is now part of the collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and a lidded tankard with a pouring tube is in the Grassimuseum in Leipzig.
