"Die feinsinnig gewählte Galerie der Herrn Maximilian Kellner" : eine Sammlung alter Meister zwischen Brünn, Wien und Berlin

The article looks at the results of the collecting activities of Maximilian Kellner (1869–1940), co-owner of the steam mill and bakery in Rosice (Rossitz), near Brno, and of the company's other branches in Brno and Vienna. His primary interests were Austrian, French, and English portrait miniatures from the 19th century and paintings by old and especially Netherlandish masters of the 17th century. Kellner's beginnings as a collector coincide with the period when he was working in Brno, where he began to build his collection of painted miniatures. However, likely inspired by his brother-in-law, Otto Kuhn (1865–1927), an entrepreneur and enthusiastic collector, he also turned his attention to works by minor Netherlandish painters (so-called the 'Little Masters' or 'Kleinmeister') from the 17th century. He continued to collect even after he moved to Vienna in 1917. He purchased work from auctions of important Viennese and German collections and from the international art market to steadily build a collection that was characterised by a very even level of artistic quality. Maximilian Kellner was then forced by the economic crisis to cease collecting in 1929 and to sell off his collection of 36 paintings by Old Masters and a number of valuable sculptures and decorative artefacts, which he did anonymously, represented as 'the Gallery of a Viennese Collector', at Rudolph Lepke's auction house, the oldest such enterprise in Berlin. In the appendix to the article a large part of Kellner's collection is reconstructed from the catalogue that was published for this auction.