Béatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild

• Born: September 14, 1864
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: April 7, 1934
• Place of death: Davos, Switzerland

French aristocrat, heiress, and socialite

Ephrussi de Rothschild used her wealth to indulge her passions for travel and art. She amassed a vast art collection during her travels, which she left to the French Academy of Fine Arts, along with her estate in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, France, for the creation of a public museum.

Sources of wealth: Inheritance; marriage

Bequeathal of wealth: Museum

Early Life

Charlotte Béatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild (shahr-LUHT bay-ah-TREES eh-frew-SEE deh ROTH-child) was born in Paris, France, in 1864, a member of the French branch of the Rothschild banking family. She was the second daughter of Mayer Alphonse James Rothschild, who headed the French Rothschilds; his wife, Leonora de Rothschild, was a British Rothschild and his first cousin once removed. Béatrice and siblings Bettina Caroline de Rothschild and Édouard Alphonse James de Rothschild were raised at the family mansion at 2 rue Saint-Florentin in Paris and at the Château de Ferrières, a historic nineteenth century château located east of Paris. Her father was an avid art collector, and Béatrice came to share his passion for works of art.

First Ventures

Through her family’s business interests in the Baku area of present-day Azerbaijan, Béatrice became acquainted with Maurice Ephrussi, a Russian-born French banker, art collector, and racehorse breeder who was fifteen years her senior. She and Ephrussi were married in Paris in 1883. They established residences in Paris, the Reux municipality in the Basse-Normandie region of France, and Monte Carlo, Monaco. The couple would have no children.

Ephrussi de Rothschild traveled extensively, befriending art dealers and experts and building a collection of paintings, sculptures, antique furniture, porcelain, and objets d’art. In 1902 she commissioned the Rothschild Fabergé egg, one of the few made for anyone outside the Russian imperial family, which she gave as an engagement present to her brother’s future wife, Germaine Alice Halphen.

Mature Wealth

When her father died in 1905, Ephrussi de Rothschild inherited a substantial portion of his immense fortune. She purchased about seventeen acres of French Riviera land on the Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat peninsula, where, between 1905 and 1912, she oversaw the painstaking construction of a fanciful Italianate villa with elaborate gardens and stunning views of the Mediterranean Sea. She named her retreat Île-de-France after a favorite cruise ship, and she reproduced the sense of being aboard a ship at sea by designing the main garden to resemble the deck of an ocean liner, complete with gardeners dressed as sailors.

Ephrussi de Rothschild filled her villa with her extensive collections, and she kept a small menagerie of exotic animals in her gardens. She acquired eighteenth century furniture that had belonged to France’s Queen Marie-Antoinette, and she had a Temple of Love erected in her garden that was a replica of the one near the queen’s Petit Trianon château at Versailles.

Despite the attention she lavished on its creation, Ephrussi de Rothschild only occasionally stayed at the Île-de-France. After her husband’s death in 1916, she left Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat behind, residing instead at the couple’s Monte Carlo villa. Near the end of her life, she lived in Davos, Switzerland, where in 1934 she died of tuberculosis at the age of sixty-nine. In her will she bequeathed her art collections and her estate at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat to the Academy of Fine Arts of the Institute of France, with instructions that these donations be used to create a museum with the ambiance of a private home.

Legacy

Béatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild is remembered as the hugely wealthy, somewhat eccentric Rothschild who built and inhabited Île-de-France, now better known as the Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild. Thanks to her bequest to the French Academy of Fine Arts, her seaside retreat has become a Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat landmark enjoyed by more than 150,000 visitors a year. It is the French Riviera’s only great Belle Époque estate of its kind that has been opened to the public. As such, it provides a window onto a vanished era, when European aristocracy and the wealthiest international elite dominated the resort towns of the French Riviera. Her villa and collections also afford the visitor insights into the life and lifestyle of the art-loving Ephrussi de Rothschild herself.

Bibliography

Académie des Beaux-Arts, Institut de France. Villa and Gardens Ephrussi de Rothschild. Paris: Culturespaces, 2009.

Christie’s. Russian Works of Art, Including the Rothschild Fabergé Egg. London: Author, 2007.

Rothschild, Miriam, Lionel de Rothschild, and Kate Garton. The Rothschild Gardens: A Family’s Tribute to Nature. New York: Abbeville Press, 2004.