Heinrich Thyssen


Heinrich Thyssen, after 22 June 1907 Heinrich, Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kászon et Impérfalva, was a Hungarian-German entrepreneur and art collector.

Biography

Thyssen was born in Mülheim an der Ruhr, the second son of German industrialist August Thyssen. Heinrich Thyssen had abandoned Germany as a young man and, after studying chemistry at the University of Heidelberg and philosophy at the University of London and obtaining a doctorate, he settled in Hungary in 1905 and married Baroness Margit Bornemisza de Kászon et Impérfalva in Vienna or Budapest on 4 January 1906 and became a citizen of Austria-Hungary.
In Vienna on 22 June 1907 he was adopted by his father-in-law, Gábor, Baron Bornemisza de Kászon et Impérfalva, the King's chamberlain who, having no sons of his own, adopted Heinrich. Franz Joseph I of Austria, Emperor-King of Austria-Hungary granted him the hereditary title and rank of a baron in the Hungarian nobility in 1907. His mother-in-law was English American Mathilde Louise Price, who was a sister of Anne Hollingsworth Price and they were descendants of the Winthrop family, and related to Daniel M. Frost and John Kerry.
The couple lived at the castle of Rohonc until after World War I and the uprising of Béla Kun, when they fled and moved to The Hague in the Netherlands from whence they directed some of the Thyssen commercial and industrial interests, including the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart. In 1926 he had refused to participate in the Vereinigte Stahlwerke AG, founded by his elder brother Fritz Thyssen, although becoming a board member, but kept his own inherited wealth, including his father's foreign investments and some German companies apart from the Thyssen steelworks, in a separate organization, the August Thyssensche Unternehmungen des In- und Auslandes, GmbH, today Thyssen-Bornemisza Group Holdings N.V..
In 1932, he moved to Lugano and started to enlarge his art collection, to which he had already been adding new items since the 1920s. His preference was for classic and modern painting, although he disliked 20th-century painting. Among other works, he bought from the estate of the American banker Otto Hermann Kahn, Maecenas of the Metropolitan Opera House of New York, in 1935, the painting Portrait of a Knight by Vittore Carpaccio, which currently remains in the collection. In Europe he bought from many famous collections other famous paintings such as the portrait of Henry VIII of England by Hans Holbein the Younger from the Spencer collection.
Thyssen divorced his first wife on 17 March 1932 and married Else Zarske, known as Maud, at Brussels on 29 August 1932. Maud was maintaining an affair with Georgian polo player Alexis Mdivani which was revealed in 1935 following her car accident in which Mdivani died. They divorced in 1937 without issue. He married his third wife, Gunhild von Fabrice in Berlin on 15 November 1937. He died in Lugano in 1947.

Children

His children by first marriage were: