James Alexander de Pourtalès-Gorgier
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James Alexander de Pourtalès-Gorgier (born November 28, 1776 - March 24, 1855 ) (Count of Neuchâtel and Valangins) was chamberlain to the King of Prussia .
Live and act
He came from the Pourtalès family , who fled to Neuchâtel as Huguenots and were raised to the Prussian count in 1815. He was a Prussian diplomat in Paris (1832) and Constantinople (1844). Later he was chamberlain to Friedrich Wilhelm III.
In his private life he was a well-known collector of antiquities with over a thousand works, which were first exhibited in the Place Vendôme and later in a town house he had built at 7 rue Tronchet in Paris. In 1813 he bought the Seigneurerie in Gorgier , adding to his name.
On August 2, 1824, he bought the Lorraine estate in Bern from Captain LG Walther, a citizen of the city of Bern, and gave it to the tenant Leu as a fief. He probably never lived in Bern, but bought the property because of family connections (von Steiger, old Bernese family) and for investments. Pourtalès granted the important American writer James Fenimore Cooper a hospitable stay in his Lorraine manor house during his trip to Europe in the summer of 1828. In the summer and autumn of 1828 Cooper wrote his leather stocking stories in Bern.
His wife was the banker's daughter Anne-Henriette de Palézieux dit Falconnet. In 1834 he bought the Gotha manor, which he left to his eldest son Heinrich six years later. He sold Gorgier Castle in 1879. Through his son Edmond , he was the father-in-law of Mélanie Renouard de Bussière .
In Muri bei Bern , the Pourtalèsstrasse is reminiscent of the Pourtalès family. There you will find the embassies of Albania and Korea, as well as the house of Dr. Rolf Bloch . A hospital in Neuchâtel bears the name.
literature
- Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon , Volume 16. Leipzig 1908, p. 244
- Olivier Boisset: Les antiques du comte James Alexander de Pourtalès-Gorgier: une introduction . In: Monica Preti-Hamard, Philippe Sénéchal (eds.): Collections et Marché de l'Art en France 1789-1848 . Rennes 2005
Individual evidence
- ↑ Adolf Hebeisen: The Lorraine in Bern, origin, becoming and her present-day being. Paul Haupt Verlag, Bern 1952, p. 14.
Web links
- [1]
- Painting formerly owned by James Alexander de Pourtalès-Gorgier, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC ( Memento of October 4, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Pourtalès-Gorgier, James Alexander de |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Count of Neuchâtel and Valangins and Chamberlain to the King of Prussia |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 28, 1776 |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 24, 1855 |