Attendant Angel

With Salvatore Romano, Florence, possibly on joint account with Jacob Hirsch, New York, by 1930-1946 [1];

Purchased from Romano, through Harold Woodbury Parsons, by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1946.

NOTES:

[1] Dealers Salvatore Romano and Dr. Jacob Hirsch and Nelson-Atkins agent Harold Woodbury Parsons were friends and business collaborators for many years. They may have jointly owned these angels, which are first mentioned on a list of objects for the trustees’ future consideration, compiled by Parsons on May 2, 1930. On this list, Romano is named as the current owner and Parsons noted: “I have been trying to buy them for two years.” NAMA Archives, RG 80-05, William Rockhill Nelson Trust Office Files, Box 4, Harold Woodbury Parsons 1930, folder 1. In 1935, Wilhelm Valentiner described the angels as in a New York private collection and having come from the same source as a similar pair in Cleveland (which were also purchased from Romano through Parsons). That same year, the Nelson-Atkins angels were lent to A. S. Drey Galleries’ Italian Sculpture of the Renaissance exhibition, but Dr. Jacob Hirsch is listed as the lender in the exhibition catalogue. In 1938, Parsons is listed as the lender of the angels to The Detroit Institute of Arts’ Eighteenth Exhibition of Old Masters exhibition. When the Nelson-Atkins purchased the angels in 1946, the purchase was made from Romano. Copies of all archival documents are in the NAMA curatorial files.

Jacob Hirsch, PhD. (1874–1955) was born in Munich, studied at Deutsches Archäologisches Institut in Rome, and then founded a dealership in Munich in 1897. He moved to Lucerne in 1919 and founded Ars Classica in 1922. In 1931, he opened Jacob Hirsch Antiquities in New York. At some point, he also had a gallery in Paris. He handled coins and antiquities but also had his own collection. See Hadrien Rambach, “A List of coin dealers in nineteenth-century Germany,” in A Collection in Context. Kommentierte Edition der Briefe und Dokumente Sammlung Dr. Karl von Schäffer, ed. Henner Hardt and Stefan Krmnicek (Tübingen, Germany: Tübingen University Press, 2017),  69–70, hal-04345662. See also “Dr. Jacob Hirsch, 81, An Authority on Art,” New York Times, July 5, 1955, 29.