Franz Catzenstein (later Francis Matthiesen) was born into a Jewish family in Hanover, German Empire (now Germany) on 24 July 1897 or 1898. He was the director and owner of the eponymous Matthiesen Gallery in Berlin. In 1933, with the rise of Nazism, he first fled to Zurich, Switzerland and then settled in London, England, where he established the Matthiesen Gallery anew, specialising in European Old Masters, impressionists and twentieth century masters.
Art dealer and gallerist, Franz Catzenstein was born into a Jewish family, the son of Aenny (Anna, née Gottschalk) and Leo Catzenstein, a health councillor, in Hanover, German Empire, on 24 July 1897 or 1898. Later, he was known under several different names, including Francis Matthiesen (common in English references). He had one sister, Ellen Catzenstein-Bernkopf, who was a sculptor. During the Weimar Republic, Matthiesen began as an art dealer in Munich but quickly moved to Berlin, where he worked at the eponymous Galerie Matthiesen in the early 1920s. He married Maria (Mara) Matthiesen around this time. There is, however, some confusion about who actually started the gallery. According to the Hannoversches Biographisches Lexikon entry on Leo Catzenstein, Franz began as an employee (Schulze, 2020, p. 84) while Thomas Krakauer states that the gallery was named after his first wife, Maria (1995, p. 2), who died around 1936. Many English language sources, though, claim that Matthiesen himself started the gallery (National Gallery of Art). By 1923, Franz Matthiesen was appointed as the gallery’s director and became its owner. The gallery became known for its focus on French Impressionism, with exhibitions dedicated to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1924), Honoré Daumier (1926), and Édouard Manet (1928). After the October Revolution in Russia in 1917, Matthiesen's international connections gained him the role of managing the sales of masterpieces from the Hermitage Museum, between the Soviet Government and the Ottoman Empire-born, Armenian oil magnate and English-French-Portuguese emigré, Calouste Gulbenkian, and, later, the American billionaire, Andrew W. Mellon, with the assistance of New York art dealers, M. Knoedler & Co and London’s P. & D. Colnaghi & Co. Reportedly, Matthiesen also enjoyed a close friendship with the German poet Gottfried Benn – an early sympathizer of Nazism who later rejected it – travelling together on European road trips to France and Spain during the 1920s.
After 1933, following the Nazi rise to power, Matthiesen immigrated first to Zurich, Switzerland, and then went into exile in London, England, though the exact date of his arrival is unconfirmed. Reportedly, in England he began calling himself Francis Matthiesen. In 1933, his sister had an exhibition in Hanover, poorly received under the new regime. Nevertheless, Matthiesen remained the managing director of his Berlin gallery until 1935, with shares owned by the Zurich art dealer Gottfried Tanner and P. & D. Colnaghi & Co. By 1939, Matthiesen’s mother, sister, and newborn niece, Yael, fled to Mandatory Palestine. Matthiesen himself established a new Matthiesen Gallery at 142 New Bond Street, London W1, which operated until 1963. Soon after opening he presented a solo show for refugee sculptor, Georg Ehrlich and, the following year, he mounted an exhibition in his new premises titled Venetian Art and the Refugees, exploring the role of Venetian old masters and foreignness. Two of Matthiesen’s ex-employees, Heinz Mansfeld and Margarethe Noelle, then took over the Berlin gallery. In 1939, the business, given its Jewish ownership, was liquidated and Aryanized, with a number of works sold or intended for the so-called Führer Museum. After acquiring assets from the Matthiesen Gallery, Mansfeld and Noelle continued the business under the same name. Noelle eventually took sole ownership in 1948 and ran it until 1984. In 1947, Matthiesen became a naturalised British citizen with the name Franz Manes Zatzenstein-Matthiesen. In 1950, some of the artworks that had been confiscated by the Nazis and transferred to the Netherlands were returned to him.
In 1978, Matthiesen’s son Patrick established a new Matthiesen Gallery in London, building on his father’s legacy. This gallery continues to focus on international dealing in Italian, French, and Spanish art from the 14th to the 19th centuries. In 2021, Patrick and the heirs of the original gallery’s shareholders received a painting by Marc Chagall that had been owned by his father but sold by the Dresdner Bank (who received it as collateral in 1934) to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was quickly bought by a European collector. in July 2018 Patrick Matthiesen presented a case history of the Matthiesen Gallery at the inaugural conference hosted by The International Art Market Studies Association (TIAMSA) held at the at the Courtauld Institute at Somerset House, London.
Francis Matthiesen had three children. With his first wife he had a daughter, Maren Beate Antonia (born in Munich in 1921). His son Patrick was born in 1943 to his second wife, the Russian-born Olga Petrovna Tarrash. With his third wife, Fredericke Katherina Früh, he had a daughter, Suzanne. Francis Matthiesen died in London, England on 10 May 1963, after which a sale from his estate took place at Sotheby's in London. In the UK public domain, works from the Matthiesen collection are held by the British Museum.