The Half That Was Not Sold

The collection was split in 1925 and half of it was auctioned

Sir David Lionel Salomons assembled roughly 124 Breguet timepieces, and when he died in 1925 they did not stay together. Fifty-seven went to his daughter Vera Frances Bryce Salomons, No. 160 among them. About seventy went to his widow, Laura Julia; the two figures together come to more than the roughly 124 usually given for the whole, which is a reminder that all three numbers are approximate and rest on one account. The two halves then had entirely different fates. Laura's share went to auction after her death, and Christie's in London sold sixty-one lots of it across three afternoons, twenty on 1 December 1964, twenty-one on 1 June 1965 and twenty on 2 November 1965.

Vera's half is the half that is now a museum. That is the whole shape of the story and it is worth stating before anything else, because the usual telling makes her a conduit. Our own record for the watch said the collection passed to his daughter on his death in 1925, which places all 124 in her hands and is wrong by more than half. It has been corrected in the same push as this article.

What she kept was the horology, and she kept it for forty-four years.

She created four foundations and named none of them for herself

The clearest evidence of intent in Vera Salomons's life is a pattern of naming, and her own name never appears in it. Shortly before her death in 1969 she made a will which was filed on the island of Jersey, and under it she established four charitable foundations to fund the museum and its acquisitions. Haaretz, which published the details in 2020, lists them and says they are named for her relatives, though Mayer was not one.

This was not a single gesture at the end of a life. In Kent she had done the same thing thirty-two years earlier. By a deed of trust of 8 November 1937, made when she was living at 31 Rue Vineuse in Paris, she gave Broomhill away, and the conditions she attached were that the house be renamed David Salomons House and that two rooms be kept as a publicly accessible memorial containing the mementos relating to her father and his family. In Jerusalem she repeated the proportion exactly: her family got one hall inside a museum dedicated to somebody else, and she put her father's clocks in it.

This archive holds another object whose name belongs to a woman who owned it rather than made it, the Lady Blunt violin. Vera Salomons ran that pattern backwards: she owned, she gave, and she put other people's names on the result.

The scholarship reads it the same way. Abigail Green and Peter Bergamin, writing on her in the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies in 2022, put it plainly: in Jerusalem she chose to name the Museum for Islamic Art after her mentor rather than herself.

She died five years before it opened

Vera Salomons never saw the museum she built. She was born in London on 31 October 1888, the fourth of five children. She died on 12 November 1969 while visiting Ireland and is buried at Adare. Construction in Jerusalem had begun in 1965, to a design by Alexander Friedman with Meir Rubin, and the building was dedicated and opened to the public in 1974. Breguet's own account of the watch dates its arrival in the museum's collections to that year.

This is the second thing our record had wrong. Its provenance table gave her as owner from 1925 to 1974, which is five years longer than she was alive, and it repeated the museum's statement that the collection was put on show in Jerusalem by his daughter Vera Bryce Salomons, without noting that she was five years dead when it happened. Both have been corrected, the second by keeping the museum's attribution and adding her death. The gap is not a technicality: the museum was completed and filled by the foundations she had created for the purpose, which is precisely why the foundations matter.

Her route to that decision is on the museum's own record. She studied Islamic art under Professor Leo Aryeh Mayer of the Hebrew University and became his friend, and after he died in 1959 she decided to create a museum to commemorate him. Our record called him an orientalist, which undersells a man who headed the university's department of Islamic art and archaeology and served as its rector, and which hides the fact that mattered, that he had been her teacher.

What she gave, and to whom, is still not settled

The legal question of what Vera Salomons actually handed over has not been resolved in public, and the text of her will has not been made public either. It became urgent in 2020, when Haaretz reported that 268 items from the museum, watches from the Salomons collection among them, had been slated for auction at Sotheby's in London. Reporting the dispute that November, the paper quoted the articles of regulation of the non-profit that ran the museum until the early 1990s, under which members of the foundation shall not have the authority to lend any item from the collection or library for display anywhere else, and items may be removed from the building for repairs only. The same report quoted Professor Amnon Lehavi of the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya saying that whether the assets were placed with the museum or with the foundation is something that only Vera Salomons's will can reveal, and reported that documents which would clarify the basis on which the museum was established are still missing.

The Hermann de Stern Foundation, a private Liechtenstein body, answered the paper directly. Its position, as Haaretz published it, is that the items are not owned by the museum and never were, that the foundation was established by Vera Salomons and that in 1993 and 2010 ownership of all the objects of art was transferred to the foundation by legal contracts. A separate Haaretz report of 17 November 2020 is headlined, in Hebrew, that the museum's founder wanted the collection to stay in Jerusalem, on the evidence of three testimonies the paper received.

Our record said she left the collection to the museum she founded. On the account of the body that says it owns the objects, that is not what happened, and the record now says she endowed the institution through foundations instead. The honest position is that the most famous watch in the world is publicly visible because of a woman whose founding terms nobody has produced. As of the last public reporting we found, in November 2020, the question was unresolved: the sale had been halted rather than cancelled and a Supreme Court petition was pending.

She was a collector in her own right, and on one account the trade thought her mistaken

Vera Salomons bought Islamic art herself rather than only inheriting watches. Breguet's own magazine records that she donated all her collections of Islamic art to the project. The Ministry of Culture's museums portal goes further than she does: it says the core of the collection was the result of acquisitions she made to complement Mayer's private collection, with Professor Richard Ettinghausen enhancing it afterwards. The encyclopedia entry on her records that she worked with Mayer and, after his death, with Ettinghausen and Otto Kurz to build the collection, adding that less well known is a collection of paisley that she apparently formed herself.

She published, too, and early. Three illustrated catalogues of eighteenth-century French book illustrators appeared under her name, on Gravelot in 1911, Choffard in 1912 and Charles Eisen dated 1914 but issued in 1921. The illustrations in the first two were made from photographs she took of the originals herself.

Her decision about where the watches should live was not admired at the time. George Daniels and Cecil Clutton are reported to have expressed disbelief that the core of the Salomons collection, the finest concentration of Breguet's work in existence, would be housed so far from the traditional centres of horological scholarship in London, Paris and Geneva. That judgement has aged badly in an instructive way, because Daniels himself, with Ohannes Markarian, then produced the catalogue of the collection for her institution, a 318-page volume published in association with the L. A. Mayer Memorial Institute in 1980. The scholarship followed the objects to Jerusalem.