Arthur Max Heinrich Speyer (1894 - 1958)

On the SPEYER collection – compiled over three generations

Arthur Karl Hans Friedrich Speyer was born on 3 January 1858 in Kassel. Following his military service, Speyer worked as a farmer and finally, went abroad for a time. After returning to Germany, Speyer married and studied Zoology in Jena. Speyer eventually founded, most likely in 1889, an "Institute for Entomological and Biological Studies" in Hamburg-Altona. Initially, Speyer chiefly concerned himself with objects relating to natural history. However, his interest in ethnographical objects grew soon after. In the following period, Speyer sold natural historical and ethnographic artefacts and objects to various museums, for example those in Freiburg, Dresden, Strasbourg, Basel and Leipzig. Speyer moved to Strasbourg in 1910 where he was in charge of the university’s zoological collection. During the First World War, Speyer first supervised an Institute for Zoology in Berlin and then in 1919, he founded an Institute for Ethnology, likewise in Berlin.

After his death in 1923, his son Arthur Max Heinrich Speyer, born 16 July 1894, took over the Institute and continued dealing in ethnographic objects. In the years immediately following the First World War, museums had little in the way of money to purchase artefacts and objects for their collections. Consequently, Speyer felt forced to sell artefacts and objects to private businesses, for example as stage props. From around 1926, Speyer shifted his focus as a collector to North America. It is not exactly known how the objects made their way to Europe in the nineteenth century, which makes the reconstruction of the collections particularly difficult. Speyer acquired objects from the European aristocracy and, in turn, offered them to various museum collections. Until his death in 1958, Speyer had compiled one of the most highly regarded private collections of North American objects and artefacts.

Upon his death, his North American collection, as well as a smaller collection of pre-Columbian Mexican artefacts, was bequeathed to his son Arthur Johannes Otto Jansen Speyer, born 23 July 1922. The Oceania collection went to Speyer’s mother, Marie, while his sister Jeannette Speyer inherited the Africa and Indonesia collections. Arthur Johannes Otto Jansen Speyer acquainted himself extensively with the collection and within a short period of time was able to supplement it significantly. He extended the regional scope of the collection to encompass indigenous groups from northern and eastern latitudes of North America. The collection was subsequently exhibited for the very first time in 1968 in the German Leather Museum in Offenbach am Main and was published in a catalogue. Speyer sold the collection in 1972 to the National Museum of Man in Ottawa, Canada. German museums, for example those in Freiburg, Cologne and Berlin, also acquired a number of objects. Arthur Johannes Otto Jansen Speyer died in 2007.