Henry Rothschild was born into a Jewish family in Frankfurt in Germany in 1913 and immigrated to England in 1933 after Hitler's accession to the chancellorship, where he studied at the University of Cambridge. In 1944, he founded Primavera, an art gallery and retail outlet which showcased ceramics and other crafts, and which became hugely influential in presenting these arts to a wider audience, supporting the careers of many notable practitioners, including fellow émigrés, ceramicists Hans Coper and Lucie Rie.
Gallerist and collector Henry Rothschild was born into a Jewish family of industrialists in Frankfurt, Germany in 1913. He attended a philanthropic Jewish primary school and a Modern Language secondary school before reading chemistry and physics at the University of Frankfurt, intending to join the family business on graduation. However, in 1933 he was sent to England as Hitler and the Nazi party rose to power in Germany. Here, he first continued at Chelsea Polytechnic, before completing his studies and graduating from Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge in 1936, with a degree in natural sciences. He became a naturalised British subject in 1938. After graduating, he worked in private banking in London and, when the Second World War broke out, he joined the Territorial Army's Signal Corps in 1939. Through this, he discovered the traditional weavers and potters of Tuscany and Bologna when posted to Italy. On returning to England, he began to search for the British equivalents of the Italian crafts and, with the advice of the Rural Industries organisation, met the few surviving traditional basket makers and country potters, as well as the newer artist potters.
In 1946, he opened Primavera, located on Chelsea's Sloane Street. This gallery and shop became a place of eclectic good taste, combining ceramics, glass, textiles, and furniture in the dark post-war years in Britain. A significant number of his employees were émigrés, some were relations or were directed to him by friends or family. Rothschild was drawn to the work of émigré potters, including Lucie Rie, Hans Coper, and Ruth Duckworth, although he also championed the work of British artists. In 1952, Primavera held the first exhibition of two European potters, Albert Daito and Francine del Pierre. By the mid-1950s, the gallery was attracting architects and interior designers and developed a strong range of contemporary furniture by young designers, such as Nigel Walters. These successful collaborations led to the creation of Primavera (Contracts) Ltd in the late 1950s, which secured large furnishing contracts in the booming university building programme of the late 1950s and 1960s. The 1950s also saw a sequence of selling exhibitions of Britain's studio potters, including the first exhibition of Hans Coper's work in 1958. Rothschild supported and nurtured a generation of potters who were using hand-building and sculptural techniques, including Dan Arbeid, Ian Auld, Gillian Lowndes, Gordon Baldwin, Ian Godfrey, and Ewen Henderson. In 1959, Rothschild, with his wife Pauline who he had married in 1952, opened a second location in King's Parade, Cambridge. This iteration of Primavera allowed for a different direction, showing more painters with a greater regional focus. In the mid-1960s, he was the first secretary of the British section of the World Crafts Council. In 1971, the London location of Primavera (which had moved to nearby Walton Street in 1967) closed, while the Cambridge store remains open today, under new management.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Rothschild worked extensively with German potters and institutions, organising exhibitions and promoting German craftsmen. In the early 1990s, he developed a fruitful relationship with the Shipley Art Gallery in Gateshead in the northeast of England, which accepted many gifts and loans from his collection, from which they developed a touring exhibition in 1995 entitled Primavera: Pioneering Craft and Design 1945–1995. Rothschild was also an invaluable expert on ceramics, becoming an informal advisor to the circulation departments at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and the Paisley Museum in Scotland. His politics were left-liberal and he was instrumental in creating important craft and design collections for circulation in schools by the Greater London Council and by Leicestershire, Bristol, Bedford, and the West Riding of Yorkshire education authorities. He strongly believed in good design for all, which was reflected in the designs created by Rothschild and his team for furnishing bedsits and common rooms in universities, including St Anne's College, Oxford, and the universities of Canterbury, Exeter, Lancaster, Newcastle, and York, stating of these that 'I believe good patterns and colours help the student' (Harrold 2009, p. 34). In 1990, he founded and developed the charity Wintercomfort, dedicated to helping the homeless in Cambridge. In 1999, Anglia Ruskin University awarded Rothschild an Honorary Master of Art. He died in 2009 in Oxford, survived by his daughter Liz and two grandchildren.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Henry Rothschild]
Publications related to [Henry Rothschild] in the Ben Uri Library