Caroline von Rothschild (née Stern) (1782-1854)

Caroline Stern was the daughter of Jacob Samuel Hayum Stern and Sara Stern. The Sterns were a family of entrepreneurs and bankers; after establishing a successful wine business in Frankfurt in 1805, Jacob Stern transformed it into a bank.

In 1800, Caroline Stern married Salomon Mayer von Rothschild (1774-1855), who was later to establish the Viennese Rothschild bank. Thanks to this family connection, two of Jacob’s sons served an apprenticeship with M. A. Rothschild in Frankfurt. The next generation of the Stern family was to establish A.J. Stern & Cie bank in Paris in 1824, Julius J. Stern in Berlin in 1833 and Stern Brothers in London in 1836. For generations, the Sterns were also a major family of patrons and donated many works  to the Louvre Museum include a significant collection of objets d’art from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Salomon and Caroline had two children, Anselm Salomon (1803-1874) who married his Enbglish cousin Charlotte (1807-1859) and Betty (1805-1886) who married her uncle James Mayer (1792-1868). In 1820 Prince Metternich, Austrian Minister for Foreign Affairs, entered into negotiations with the House of Rothschild for a large loan that was to take the form of a lottery. The complicated arrangements for this enormous loan demanded the presence of a Rothschild in Vienna and thus Salomon, who had been handling Rothschild affairs with Austria, moved to the city with his family.