Charles Dellheim

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Historian Professor Charles Delheim explains how a small group of Jewish art collectors came to be arbiters of taste and own great art before it was stolen from them by the Nazis.

Delheim looks at the characters behind the great art collections, from the Dutch brothers Henry and Joel Duveen, who were commissioned to redecorate Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace, to Nathan Wildenstein,  who sold Jacques-Louis David’s portrait Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and His Wife to New York oil magnate John D. Rockefeller. He explains how they became great collectors and arbiters of taste and showed how art can and did triumph at a time of antisemitism and persecution.

Delheim was born in New York the son of a German Jewish refugee. He is professor of history at Boston University and author of The Face of the Past: The Preservation of the Medieval Inheritance in Victorian England and The Disenchanted Isle: Mrs. Thatcher’s Capitalist Revolution.

This event is part of the festival’s programme of Jewish and Hebrew literature and culture.