Daniël George van Beuningen

Daniël George van Beuningen was born in Utrecht (Netherlands) and died in Arlesheim (Switzerland). He was a Dutch businessman and art collector and followed in his father’s footsteps as director of the Steenkolen Handels Vereniging (SHV). He established a number of companies in the port of Rotterdam.   Van Beuningen was a great collector of late fifteenth and early sixteenth century Netherlandish art. He started to collect paintings in 1916, purchasing on a regular basis from art dealer Jacques Goudstikker (1897-1940) in Amsterdam. One of the most famous paintings from the Van Beuningen collection is Tower of Babel (ca. 1565) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, now at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen.   In 1941, Van Beuningen bought the collection from the Roman Catholic German-Dutch art dealer Franz Koenigs. Van Beuningen sold about a quarter of the Koenigs collection through Hans Posse to the Nazis for 1.5 million guilders. Van Beuningen kept four paintings by Rubens and a number of drawings. He bequeathed the rest of the Koenigs collection to the Museum Boijmans in Rotterdam.   He married three times. His first wife was Mies Schout Velthuys; she died in 1926. A brief second marriage to Odette Paule Fernande Ragoulleau ended in divorce. In 1938 he married his third wife, Albertha Eveline Charloui. After Van Beuningen’s death, his heirs sold the collection to the city of Rotterdam. The painting Portrait d’homme (Schloss German no. 117/ French no. 142), then attributed to the Dutch seventeenth century painter Judith Leyster in the Adolphe Schloss Collection, was owned by Van Beuningen until 1955.

For more information see: http://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/bwn1880-2000/lemmata/bwn2/beuningen [about:blank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Koenigs] [about:blank http://public.boijmans.nl/koenigs/enPortalFK8.pdf] [about:blank https://www.lootedart.com/web_images/pdf2016/16%20NRC%20The%20Deceptive%20Art%20Deal%20by%20Van%20Beuningen%20by%20Arjen%20Ribbens.pdf]  Accessed 4 June 2021.