Clarice Adelaide von Rothschild (née Sebag-Montefiore) (1894-1967)
Clarice Sebag-Montefiore was the daughter of the English banker Edmund Sebag-Montefiore and Juliana Lucas Davidson. She was the great-granddaughter of the financier and philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore (1784-1885). She married Alphonse Mayer von Rothschild (1878-1942) of the Viennese Rothschild family in 1912. The couple had three children, Albert (1922-1938) who died tragically young at 16, Bettina, (later Mrs Matthew Looram) (1924-2012) and Gwendoline (later Mrs Roland Hoguet) (1927-1972). The family divided their time between Austria and England. They lived mainly in Vienna, in the Rothschild Palais on Theresianumgasse, and spent time among their Austrian country estates, including a hunting lodge near Vienna, Schillersdorf, and the Schloss Annaberg in Silesia. In 1925, she had her picture painted by the Hungarian portraitist Philip de László.
At the time of the Anschluss, the Nazi annexation of Austria in March 1938, Alphonse and Clarice were in London, where they had gone to attend an exhibition of stamps to which Alphonse, an avid philatelist, had lent some items. Having left their young daughters Bettina and Gwendoline behind at home, on March 11 they telegraphed to Vienna instructing their staff to take the girls to Switzerland without delay. Bettina later recalled that the party had got as far as Innsbruck when they were ordered off the train and taken to a police station where they were held before being suddenly released, the result of the arrest by the Gestapo of the girls’ uncle Louis (1882-1955), who had been held in custody in Vienna (he was only released after a year, having paid a vast ransom). In the family's absence, the Germans seized the family’s great art and antique collections and their properties. Alphonse and Clarice managed to meet their daughters in Switzerland. The family travelled together to England, and then to America in 1940, living in an apartment on Park Avenue, New York. Alphonse died two years later at his summer home in Bar Harbor, Maine.
After the war, Clarice assiduously pursued claims for the restitution of family assets, property and collections seized during the war. The restitution campaign had begun in 1947, when Clarice and Bettina accompanied their uncle Louis (1882-1955) to Vienna, to see what could be salvaged of their former property in Austria. The grand Rothschild Palais had been occupied by the Gestapo and the Clarice and Louis sold them to a trade union. The family’s alpine lands at Waidhofen, Göstling and Hollenstein, were given to the Austrian state, on condition that it used the proceeds to fund pensions for former Rothschild employees. Clarice retained her late husband Alphonse’s 30,000-acre estate at Langau, although because it was in the Russian zone she was unable to return there with her family until 1952; her daughter Bettina later inherited the property and she and her husband Matthew retired there to live in a house that they built for themselves. In 1949 Clarice began proceedings for restitution claims regarding the Rothschild Gardens, Hohe Warte, Vienna, which were returned to the family, who in turn gifted the land permanently to the city.
Requests by Clarice and Louis for the return of their art collections in the immediate post-war years had met with only partial success. Both of them by then lived outside Austria, and the Austrian government pointed to a law passed in 1918 that banned art exports. So a deal was struck whereby the Rothschilds were permitted to take part of their collections out of the country, but only on condition that the greatest artworks were donated to the nation and kept in Austria; and there matters stood for half a century. It was not until 1998 that Clarice’s daughter Bettina began to pursue claims for pieces then in Austrian museum collections to be returned to the descendants of the Viennese Rothschilds. Subsequently, after swift changes had been made to Austria’s law, the country’s museums released some 250 items taken by the Nazis from the great Austrian Rothschild houses that Bettina had known as a child. Keeping back only a few mementoes, Bettina, and her fellow beneficiaries (her two children and her late sister’s two children) consigned everything for sale at Christie’s in London.
Clarice died in the United States in 1967.
