Rare Artworks by Otto Antoine, “The Painter of Berlin,” Come to Market

A trove of works by the overlooked painter, deemed “the largest single-artist private collection” of a German artist in the U.S., catches the attention of collectors and historians. 

Related Articles

There is a familiar quality to the work of Otto Antoine. The German painter’s evocative depictions of early 20th-century Berlin show people in various states of motion amid solemn urban landmarks, portraying a society caught in the current of rapid, uncertain change. These scenes are rendered with bold brushwork that is recognizable and compelling, yet so embedded within a stylistic continuum that it threatens to occlude its authorship. 

A landmark discovery is poised to change that. An enormous collection of more than 200 works by Antoine has come onto the market, holding with it the potential to push the artist’s name from the precipice of obscurity into the pantheon of turn-of-the-century German painters. 

“This collection should be viewed as a unique, one-of-a-kind, historically intact treasure,” said Jacquelyn Delin McDonald, Ph.D., a lecturer at the University of Texas at Dallas and a specialist in lesser-known 19th and 20th-century European art. “It documents modern life, spanning decades of societal change.” 

Comprising 65 works in oil, 40 watercolors, and more than a hundred pencil drawings, it is, according to McDonald “the largest single-artist private collection of a German artist in the United States to my knowledge.”

The collected works are currently owned by Nohemi and Todd Barrowcliff, who purchased them as a unit from Fred Albright, Antoine’s grandson, in the 1990s. Albright, who had rented an apartment to Todd and Nohemi in southern California at the time, sold the collection to the young couple under the condition that the individual works never be pieced out.   

For nearly three decades, the Barrowcliffs kept the collection in their home, furnishing their walls with some artworks and keeping the rest in storage. That is, until earlier this year, when Todd retired from his career as a special education teacher and relocated with Nohemi to the Dallas-Fort Worth area before turning their attention toward elevating Antoine’s work.

When the Barrowcliffs invited McDonald to their new home to assess their holdings, McDonald immediately recognized the skillful execution of Antoine’s paintings. The moment she encountered the travel trunk, however, she was nothing short of astonished. “It became apparent they had a collection of extreme cultural value,” McDonald recalled. “It was like a time capsule filled to the brim with visual and written ephemera of an almost forgotten life.”  

Despite his relative obscurity today, Antoine enjoyed commercial and professional success during his lifetime. He was born in 1865 in Koblenz, Germany, a city between Cologne and Frankfurt, and though he demonstrated an aptitude for art from a young age, economic challenges led him to pursue employment in the post office. He cultivated his skills in tandem with his career in civil service, relocating to Berlin in 1891 to study at the Prussian Academy of Art.  

It was there, in what would be his home for more than fifty years, that Antoine’s professional and artistic pursuits converged. He painted murals under the employ of the post office while studying part time at the Academy of Fine Arts. Though he experimented in watercolor and pastel, it was under the tutelage of Frank Skarbina — a co-founder, along with fellow German Impressionists Max Liebermann and Philipp Franck, of the Berlin Secession movement— that Antoine began to seriously pursue oil painting, the chosen medium for his most emblematic works.  

Skarbina’s Modernist influence is evident in Antoine’s moody cityscapes, which constituted the overwhelming majority of his output from his middle period. The diffuse forms of the Berlin Cathedral, Brandenburg Gate, and Leipziger Platz are still unmistakable against a foreground of pedestrians in modern dress, hackney coaches, and other symbols of the Industrial Revolution. Such tableaux — many of which also traveled across the world, in miniature, on greeting cards and other commercial output for the post office — earned Antoine his moniker, “the Painter of Berlin.” 

Antoine committed wholly to painting after his retirement from civil service in 1930. In addition to documenting urban life, he surveyed a range of subjects throughout his career, from still lifes and genre scenes to nudes and portraiture; several of these alternative subjects are included in the Barrowcliffs’ collection. 

Antoine’s latter years are notably intertwined with a period of political upheaval as the Third Reich came to power in Germany in 1933. Along with his Secessionist contemporaries, Antoine fell under the scrutiny of the Reich Chamber of Culture; although he opposed Nazism (a series of paintings allegedly depicts Adolf Hitler as the devil), Antoine’s works gravitated toward Realism as he was ultimately forced to submit to the chamber’s strictures. 

Still, Antoine’s portrayals of Berlin found favor with the Reich. As McDonald explained, “Three of Antoine’s works were purchased by Joseph Goebbels, and one was purchased by Adolf Hitler himself.” Under the banner of the regime’s propagandistic agenda, Antoine’s works were exhibited in six of the eight Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellungen, (Great German Art Exhibitions) and even traveled to Chicago in 1933 as part of Germany’s exhibition at the World’s Fair.    

The record of Antoine’s oeuvre is yet incomplete. Several works were lost in the throes of war, and Antoine himself was displaced from Berlin after his home was bombed. A handful of pieces are held in private collections, and many more of his paintings are exhibited at the Museumsstiftung Post und Telekommunikation. 

The rarity of Antoine’s works, coupled with their cultural significance during a consequential period of German history, makes the artist particularly ripe for further study. The collection on offer marks a significant milestone to this end: the Barrowcliffs are seeking a buyer to purchase the entire collection with the intent that the benefactor will gift or loan the collected works to an academic institution such as the University of Texas, Dallas, for further study under McDonald.

Recent sales at auction of Antoine’s work have fetched sums in the tens of thousands, though the discovery of such a rich and varied archive of the artist’s life may well alter that course. McDonald is confident that as these works are cataloged and exhibited, the market value of Antoine’s work will grow. 

“The collection of art and the various personal effects need to be cataloged and studied further,” McDonald said. “It is a rare gem.”