Ferenc Hatvany

Baron Ferenc Hatvany (29 October 1881 - 7 February 1958) was a Hungarian painter and art collector. A son of Sándor Hatvany-Deutsch and a member of the Hatvany-Deutsch family, he graduated in the Académie Julian in Paris. His collection^[1] included paintings from Tintoretto, Cézanne, Renoir, Ingres and Courbet, most notably L'Origine du monde and Femme nue couchée.

Towards the end of the Second World War his paintings were looted by Soviet troops but some were ransomed by Hatvany. In 1947 he emigrated to Paris.^[2] In 1955 L'Origine du monde was sold at auction for 1.5 million francs (the buyer was psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan).

Paintings that were looted from Hatvany's collection are still hanging on museum walls in Budapest, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod. John Constable's "Beaching A Boat, Brighton" was identified in the collection of The Tate in 2014.^[3]

Hatvany died in Lausanne in 1958.

References

1. Inventory of art works which Hatvany placed in the strongrooms of major Budapest banks in 1942
2. ARTNews; The Mysterious Journey of an Erotic Masterpiece
3. "Tate to return Constable painting looted by Nazis" The Telegraph; 28 March 2014

• A short biography of Ferenc Hatvany
• László Mravik. Hungary's Pillaged Art Heritage. Part Two: The Fate of the Hatvany Collection. Hungarian Quarterly vol. 39, no. 15, 1998. . Accessed on February 7, 2007.
• László Mravik. "Princes, Counts, Idlers and Bourgeois:" A Hundred Years of Hungarian Collecting, 3rd part. In T. Kieselbach (ed.) Studies in Modern Hungarian Painting 1892-1919. . Accessed on February 7, 2007.