- - The secret art gallery at centre of Rothschild family feud

Henry SamuelDecember 17, 2025 at 12:00 AM

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Château de Pregny is said to be replete with Old Master paintings and royal furniture worth hundreds of millions of pounds - FORGET Patrick/SAGAPHOTO.COM /Alamy Stock Photo

Behind high fences overlooking Lake Geneva lies a private “mini-Louvre” – one of Europe’s most valuable and secretive art collections.

The vast trove of masterpieces that form part of the Rothschild family’s fortune has been locked away for decades behind armoured doors within the Château de Pregny.

But now, it is at the centre of a bitter feud and legal battle between Nadine de Rothschild, 93, and her daughter-in-law, Ariane de Rothschild, the current baroness, and her four granddaughters.

The lawsuits centre on whether the collection should remain in the 19th-century château near Geneva, as Ariane wants, or in a new museum in the Swiss city, as proposed by Nadine.

Visitors to the château, and heritage experts, say it is replete with Old Master paintings, Renaissance objects and royal furniture worth hundreds of millions of pounds.

Works attributed to Goya, Rembrandt, El Greco and François Boucher hang alongside paintings by Hubert Robert, rare 18th-century French furniture and a raft of Renaissance artefacts. One visitor described it as a “mini-Louvre”.

Nadine de Rothschild and Ariane de Rothschild together at an event in the Louvre, Paris, in 2004 - Luc Castel/Getty Images

But the exact contents have never been revealed as the family maintains a code of silence.

Now, it is in the hands of Swiss judges to decide whether the collection will be made public.

Nadine says her husband, Edmond, a banker and serious collector who died in 1997, bequeathed her a substantial share of the collection.

She wants to remove those works and place them in a new public museum under the banner of the foundation she has created in her husband’s name.

But Ariane, 59, widow of the couple’s only son Benjamin, insists the collection must remain intact and inside the château, preserving it for posterity.

Nadine and Edmond de Rothschild in 1964 - Henri Bureau/ygma/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)

“I inherited from my husband many objects that are in the Château de Pregny,” Nadine said earlier this summer. “But it has been impossible to recover them since my son Benjamin’s death. That is why, sadly, I have been forced to take legal action.”

Benjamin, who later ran the Edmond de Rothschild banking group, died suddenly in January 2021 at the age of 57. His death shattered all semblance of family harmony.

As he died before his mother, control of the family estate passed to Ariane, who is acting on behalf of their four daughters, aged between 23 and 29.

Following her son’s death, Nadine formally requested access to inventory works she claimed as hers in 2021 but her representatives were turned away at the château’s gates, court documents show. Henceforth, she was formally barred from entering the property, meaning that mail and even her medication were handed to her “over the fence”.

‘Upsetting to end my life like this’

Representatives for Ariane argue that Nadine did not assert ownership of the artworks until after Benjamin’s death, and that this delay undermines her legal claim, an issue now central to the case before the Swiss courts.

Nadine’s long-standing plan had been to exhibit part of the collection publicly for the first time, including Renaissance coffers and armour, carved buffets, gilt mirrors and paintings such as El Greco’s Portrait of the Sculptor Pompeo Leoni, often cited as one of the château’s most important works.

Nadine has insisted she is acting to preserve the Rothschilds’ legacy.

“I am the last Rothschild baroness of my generation,” she told The Guardian. “All the others have died. To end my life with a major legal battle like this of course upsets me.”

A source close to the family reportedly said Ariane and her daughters would not discuss the row “out of respect for all parties involved”.

Nadine de Rothschild, pictured in France in 1993 - Luc Castel/Getty Images

Born Nadine Lhopitalier, she came from humble beginnings, growing up in a communist-supporting working-class family. She left home at 14, sewed poppers onto Peugeot sunroofs and worked as an artist’s model before taking the stage name Nadine Tallier and landing small film and music-hall roles.

She later recalled her first meeting with Edmond de Rothschild in the early 1960s: “He looked at my ring and said, ‘It’s lovely, but unfortunately the diamond is fake’.”

They married in 1963. From then on, all that glittered really was gold.

As the wife of the wealthiest member of the banking dynasty, Nadine oversaw the running of 14 properties. At Pregny and elsewhere, the couple welcomed the international glitterati, including the Kennedys, Audrey Hepburn, Maria Callas, Princess Diana, Romy Schneider and Greta Garbo.

Nadine later reinvented herself as the queen of French savoir-vivre, dispensing lessons in manners on television chat shows.

She has acknowledged, however, that she was an absent mother.

Benjamin was largely raised by nannies and would later say she treated him “as an heir rather than a son”.

Baroness Ariane de Rothschild wants to preserve the collection inside the property - Felix Wong/South China Morning Post via Getty Images

Nadine insists she welcomed Ariane into the family when she married Benjamin in 1999 and moved out of the 1,126-square-metre château into a pavilion on the grounds, leaving the main house to the young family.

But relations between the two baronesses soured after Benjamin’s death.

For now, the Goyas and Rembrandts remain behind the high walls of Pregny.

Whether the collection will one day become a public museum or remain sealed inside the family château now rests with the courts.

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