Fanny Mondschein ca. 1908-10
¾ length, standing portrait, slightly oblique view, head and gaze directed toward the viewer. The subject wears a low-cut black dress and an ermine cape with a black fur collar, which she gathers in front of her body with her hands. The subject's black hair is pinned up and adorned with a golden headband; she wears a golden ring on her right ring finger. In the background is a chest of drawers with a flower pot with dark pink-colored flowers on top of it and, partially visible above it, a painting in a gold frame.
JQAW# P_1910_220
Oil on canvas 120 x 83 cm
Signature: Not signed or dated
Private collection, USA
Image: edited private photo of the owner
Fanny Mondschein, neé Toch, 12.4.1879 Vienna to 11.10.1930 Vienna.
It is fitting that in this portrait, Fanny Mondschein is wearing a large ermine cape. Her father, Josef Toch, was one of Vienna’s most famous furriers of the late 1800s and early 1900s. He had invented a way to make furs particularly supple and they became popular among Hungarian officers who wore fur pelisses (attila) over their uniforms. Stylish Viennese women sought the elegant cuts of his boas, stoles, and coats made of exotic pelts of sable, polar bear, mink, martin, Bengal tiger – and the ermine in which Fanny is posing.
With his fur business thriving, Josef Toch in 1899 built a mansion at Judenplatz 5 in Vienna’s First District where his initials “JT” can still be seen on an upper story medallion and in the ornate gate. Besides his own success, Fanny’s father had married into wealth. Eugenie Toch – Fanny’s mother – was the daughter of Kopel and Louise Benedict who had emigrated in the mid 1830s to Vienna from the Moravian city of Nikolsburg (now Mikulov). They arrived with little money but by 1872, Kopel could afford to buy land in the Ringstrasse development project at the corner of Neutorgasse and Werdertorgasse where architect Julius Dörfel designed for him an elegant five-story building to house his textile business and his family. (It is still standing.)
As the only child of well-to-do parents (and grandparents), Fanny Toch lived a privileged childhood. At the age of about eight, Josef and Eugenie commissioned an oil portrait of her by an unknown artist, dressed in the fashion for a young girl of the late 1880s: a teal-colored knee-length dress with a small bustle, brown tights, brown leather ankle -height boots and a coral necklace (see cross-references).
A headstrong young girl, at the age of 14 Fanny became infatuated by Samuel Mondschein, a 28-year-old physician who was making headlines in the newspapers, saving lives with one of the world’s first ambulance services, the Wiener Freiwillige Rettungsgesellschaft.
When at age 17, she threatened to kill herself if they couldn’t marry, her parents relented. On October 10, 1896, Samuel and Fanny were wed in a Jewish ceremony at Vienna’s Stadttempel. By the time she was 21, Fanny and Samuel had three children. My grandmother, Maria (Bessie) Mondschein Bata, born in 1900, was the youngest. With antisemitism endemic in Viennese society, the children were baptized and raised Lutheran.
Among the notables that Samuel had rescued during a heart attack was Karl Wolf, owner of Vienna’s most elegant hotel. The grateful hotelier hired Samuel to become physician for his establishment, the Hotel Bristol, where Samuel spent the rest of his career discreetly treating the hotel’s many famous guests.
Unlike her husband who was a stickler for propriety, Fanny was a free spirit who loved going out to the opera, theater, parties, and telling off-color stories. According to one story passed down through the family, Fanny would go to nightclubs with her friends and memorize the “naughty” songs she heard there, then teach them to her children. One day in gym class, the three Mondschein children started to sing those songs to the shock of the mothers and governesses who were present. The children were kicked out of class.
It is likely that Fanny came to be painted by John Quincy Adams in part because they shared the same social circles, which included emigrés who had moved to Vienna from Mikulov and their descendants. Both Fanny and John Quincy Adams were also of the same generation (born 1879 and 1873). Even more, Fanny and John also had a family connection. Two of John’s sisters (Mary and Louise Adams) had married two brothers (Wilhelm and Josef Teltscher.) The Teltschers were a large Mikulov family and their great uncle was Isak Friedländer who arrived in Vienna from Mikulov with wealth and became one of the first people to buy Ringstrasse development land in 1861at Rudolfsplatz 1. Friedländer’s wife (Betty Nanette Hölzelmacher) was the sister of Fanny’s grandmother (Louise Hölzelmacher Benedikt). So, Friedlander was also Fanny’s great uncle.
It is unclear when John Quincy Adams apparently painted Fanny’s portrait. (It is unsigned and undated). Most likely, it was some time in the decade before World War I, when the Toch fur business was thriving. Crises would come later. Fanny and Samuel’s son became a prisoner of war in Italy during World War I and Fanny, distraught, might have shown the first signs of depression not knowing whether he was dead or alive. The fur trade fell on hard times during the war and in the hyperinflation that followed. And in 1919, Fanny’s father died, leaving the business to her and other relatives, who were finally able to revive it in the Roaring Twenties.
The stockmarket crash of 1929 sent the world economy reeling and so too, once again, the family business. But that may not have been the ultimate reason for what happened on October 10, 1930. That evening – Samuel and Fanny’s anniversary – the couple dressed in evening clothes and said they were going out for the evening to the theater and dinner. Instead, they checked into a suburban hotel under false names, dined in the hotel dining room, and then went up to their room where they injected themselves with high doses of morphine. According to accounts of the double suicide published in newspapers across Austria, the couple left notes saying that they had taken their lives for health reasons. Samuel, 65, was suffering from worsening heart disease. Fanny, 51, had a long-standing “nervous disorder” – likely depression.
The oil painting of Fanny wearing ermine just barely escaped the Nazis’ rapacious confiscation of art and household goods. On March 13, 1938, the day after German troops marched into Austria, Fanny’s daughter, Maria (Bessie) Mondschein Bata fled Vienna with her husband and their 16-year-old daughter who would later become my mother. Their household help rolled up the portrait and shipped it along with silver and linens to New York where Bessie’s brother –Fanny’s son – now lived. It stayed rolled up for the next three decades, suffering cracks and flaking paint, until I discovered it in my parents’ attic and, as Fanny Mondschein’s great granddaughter, had it restored and hung it in a place of prominence over my living room mantle.
--Dotty Brown, Oct 16, 2025
The portrait, which is dated to around 1908-1910 based on family photographs of the subject, is not signed or dated, but is attributed to John Quincy Adams based on stylistic features and archival references. An unspecified color photograph of the painting has been preserved in the Adams file in the Künstlerhaus archive (and has been recorded previously in this catalogue under the number P_0_410), and was therefore attributed to the artist by the archivist. There is also a reference to an Adams portrait of Fanny Mondschein and its location in the USA in the written estate of Harriet Walderdorff (the artist's daughter) preserved in the Künstlerhaus archive. However, an unsigned Adams portrait is extremely rare. It is possible that the signature was removed due to damage during the restoration of the painting in the USA (it was mounted on a new stretcher frame and the damaged areas were retouched). However, it is also quite possible that Adams did not sign the painting, contrary to his usual practice. The reason for this would probably be the ermine cape depicted, which in the portrait canon of the time was reserved as a distinguishing feature for ruling dynasties. In 1908, Adams made his breakthrough as a portrait painter with his portrait of Prince Johann II of Liechtenstein, which was soon followed by numerous commissions from the high aristocracy and the German and Austrian imperial families. Adams' aristocratic clientele would certainly have found the depiction of a bourgeois furrier's daughter in ermine both inappropriate and presumptuous. An unsigned portrait would therefore not have compromised the aspiring artist or jeopardized his social advancement [the editor].
Cross-references
Exhibited
Literature
Provenance
The sitter and her family descendants,
private collection, USA.