Hugo Reisinger was a German merchant, art-collector, and philanthropist.
Background
Hugo Reisinger was born on January 29, 1856 at Wiesbaden, Germany, the son of Franz and Apollonia (Busch) Reisinger. His father was a university graduate and as secretary of Kossuth had taken an active part in the Hungarian revolution of 1848. He was also the owner and editor of the Mittelrheinische Zeitung, one of the oldest German newspapers. From him Hugo seems to have derived his interest in things pertaining to culture as well as the gift of handling practical affairs successfully.
Education
He graduated from the Gymnasium of his native city in 1875, but the prospect of peaceful activity in an academic career was not to his liking.
Career
After an apprenticeship in a business firm he became a salesman and sales-manager for the Siemens Glass works at Dresden. Sent to the United States in 1882, he succeeded so well in winning confidence and trade that he was sent again the following year and in 1884 became the firm's permanent agent in America. In 1886 he established himself as an importer and exporter. Because of his stern but fair methods and his agreeable personality, his business in this field was soon one of the largest in the country.
A director in several enterprises, among them the Linde Air Products Corporation of New York City and Buffalo and the Owens European Bottle Machine Company of Toledo, Ohio, he accumulated through his various activities a large fortune, and resided in a hospitable home on Fifth Avenue, New York.
He conceived as his main interest the cultivation of a better understanding between the nation of his birth and that of his adoption. As a means to this end he used his great love and knowledge of German and American art. To own the best collection of modern German paintings in the United States, including pictures by Menzel, B"cklin, and Lenbach, and to collect works from the brushes of Whistler, Gari Melchers, and others would not have meant very much to Reisinger had he not found a way to acquaint his American fellow citizens and his German countrymen with them. Accordingly, under the auspices of the German government and aided by his own collection and those of the leading art galleries of Germany, he arranged the first exhibition of modern German art.
It was displayed in the new wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and later, in Boston and Chicago. He also arranged an exhibition of American paintings in Germany and England, "to prove to German artists and art lovers that the modern American school of painting is the peer of any of its European contemporaries". Reisinger not only took upon himself the burden of choosing pictures to be exhibited, but also paid the costs of transportation to Europe and the setting up of the collection. Reisinger was also instrumental in making possible the publication of The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, edited by Kuno Francke and W. G. Howard, a collection of the translations into English of the gems of German literature.
He died at Langenschwalbach, Germany, where he had been delayed by the war when on the point of returning to the United States.
Achievements
Membership
The Deutsches Museum at Munich invited him to membership on its board of trustees, and the Metropolitan Museum of Arts and the National Arts Club elected him to honorary membership.
Personality
"Possession had value for him only as an incentive, " however; and "although he was primarily a man of affairs he was not the kind of man who became absorbed in affairs".
Connections
On Feburary 10, 1890, he married Edmée, daughter of Adolphus Busch of St. Louis, by whom he had two sons.