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Raymond Koechlin (1860–1931)

A personal friend of Elisina Tyler, Royall Tyler, Mildred Barnes Bliss, and Robert Woods Bliss, the Alsatian-born Raymond Koechlin collected Chinese, Japanese, Islamic, and medieval art and acquired works by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. He displayed his collection crowded together in a small apartment at 24, boulevard Saint-Germain. This grand amateur wrote a number of books about the arts that he collected, but he is best known for his studies of French Gothic sculpture (especially ivories), Islamic ceramics, and Japanese art. At the end of his life, Koechlin wrote a privately printed memoir about French collectors of Asian art, titled Souvenirs d’un vieil amateur d’art de l’Extrême-Orient (1930), which he sent to the Blisses. He served as a curator at the Musée du Louvre and made significant donations to the museum after his death in 1931.

 

Dictionnaire critique des historiens de l’art, s.v. "Koechlin, Raymond."  

Robert S. Nelson, "Royall Tyler and the Bliss Collection of Byzantine Art," in Home of the Humanities: The Collecting and Patronage of Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss, ed. James Carder (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2010), 31.