Who was Nissim de Camondo?

Visitors often assume Nissim was the collector, because his name is on the gate. He was not. He was the collector’s son, born on 23 August 1892 at Boulogne-sur-Seine to Moïse de Camondo and Irène Cahen d’Anvers, a year after their marriage. He had one sister, Béatrice, born in 1894. His parents divorced and he grew up in his father’s houses, the second of them the one René Sergent built on rue de Monceau between 1911 and 1914, when Nissim was in his early twenties. The history page has that building; this page has the man it was for.

He was named for his grandfather, the Nissim who had brought the family from Constantinople to Paris in 1869 and lived on the same plot until 1889. Names recur in this family; so, it turned out, did the pattern of losing them.

1917

In the war Nissim flew reconnaissance missions, the work of photographing enemy lines from the air, which in 1917 meant slow aircraft over guns. On 5 September 1917 he was killed in aerial combat near Leintrey, a village in Meurthe-et-Moselle in the east of France. He was 25. His father was 57 and had, until that day, been building a house for a family that would go on.

Why the museum bears his name

Moïse de Camondo lived another eighteen years in the house and did not change it. When he died in 1935 his will left everything to Les Arts Décoratifs on condition that it become a museum named for his son and that nothing be moved. The museum opened in December 1936 as the Musée Nissim de Camondo. On the first floor, Nissim’s apartment is kept as it was, next to his father’s. It is the quietest part of the house and the part I found hardest to talk through with a group.

His sister Béatrice outlived him by twenty-seven years and was murdered, with her children, at Auschwitz. The whole arc is on the Camondo family page. The house that carries Nissim’s name is now the memorial of all of them.

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