Albert and Toni Roothbert: 

Art, Photos and Philanthropy

Among the most generous — and locally least-known — Ridgefielders of the 20th Century were Albert and Toni Roothbert, a modern art collector and a leading fashion photographer, who lived at Topstone Farm on Topstone Road for many years.

Together they aided many organizations and causes, and established a fund that has provided fellowships to more than 1,000 talented college students over a half century after their deaths.

Born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1874, Albert Roothbert came to the United States in 1902 and soon became a partner in a Wall Street investment firm. In 1925, at the age of 50, he retired and began studying and collecting modern and Oriental art. With the noted Mexican painter Miguel Covarrubias, he studied the art of Bali, and traveled from Paris to Peking in search of fine examples of modern European and Oriental art. (Some of the works he owned were later donated to major collections, such as at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)

He also began looking for ways to improve society, an effort that eventually led him and his future wife to found the Roothbert Fund.

Baroness Antonie “Toni” von Horn was born to a prominent family in Germany in 1899. Around 1920, she opened a photography studio in Heidelberg. While in New York on an assignment, she met Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity Fair (and a founder and the first secretary of the Museum of Modern Art), After seeing her photos, Crowninshield recommended she pursue a career in New York. 

She followed his advice and soon became a leading fashion and advertising photographer in the 1920s and 30s, working for Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar and at her own studio. She became one of the first woman photographers to gain a national and international reputation in the field, and did many celebrity portraits, including Greta Garbo, Eleanor Roosevelt, Ginger Rogers, Cole Porter, Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, and Jean Harlow. Her photograph of Albert Einstein has been called the best ever made of him. 

“She was one of the first women to operate in this field at the level of Edward Steichen, Adolf de Meyer and George Hoyningen-Heune, among others, and the only one to operate as an equal in direct competition with them,” said Charles van Horne, her great-nephew who serves as treasurer of The Roothbert Fund.

Unfortunately, she has not gotten much recognition as a pioneering woman in her field. Van Horne attributes that in part to the fact many people thought “Toni von Horn” was a man — she  sometimes actually signed her work Tony von Horn or just von Horn. What’s more, few originals of her work exist because “her plates and negatives lay in damp storage in an outbuilding at Topstone Farm and were discarded after she passed away, probably without a thought.”

Albert and Toni met in New York City and married in 1937. She closed her studio “and never took another picture,” The New York Times reported years later. 

In 1958, the Roothberts established the Roothbert Fund to aid “students motivated by spiritual values, who can satisfy high scholastic requirements and are considering teaching as a vocation.” 

According to the fund, “The Roothberts shared a devotion to young people, whose idealism, they believed, was the best defense against a recurrence of the tragedies of the first half of the 20th Century.”

Recipients are called Roothbert Fellows; more than 1,000 young men and women have received the fellowships. They have included black students expelled from Southern University in 1960 for their pioneering lunch-counter integration in Baton Rouge;  the first graduates of Harlem Preparatory School;  and top-ranking Yale graduates. 

The fund also has awarded grants for special projects, including training in family counseling in a poor neighborhood of Manhattan; funding a van helping street people in the  South Bronx; support for a program for inmates at a Pennsylvania prison involving mental health, poetry, and leadership; establishing an interfaith institute for clergywomen in rural Massachusetts;  a project on peace-making in Jerusalem;  and creating a library for the college-bound program at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for women in nearby Westchester County.

Toni was also interested in the mentally handicapped. She had bought a 216-acre farm in Copake, N.Y.,  planning to convert it to an organic operation. Instead she wound up turning the farm over to Camphill, a program for adults with special needs. She also helped to secure Albert Schweitzer’s assistance for Camphill.

Albert Roothbert died here in 1965 at the age of 90. In his will he left money to create a Ridgefield High School scholarship fund as well as a sizable grant to the Ridgefield Library. Toni died here in 1970 at 71.

In later life at Topstone Farm, Toni Roothbert was an organic gardener and  conservationist, as well as a humanitarian. She was  interested in a variety of spiritual movements, including Buddhism and  Quakerism. She was inspired by and a friend of Albert Schweitzer, the multifaceted physician, philosopher,  and organist whose humanitarian work at Lambarene Mission in Africa she supported for years — she would annually supply Schweitzer with seeds for his vegetable garden.

When Schweitzer died in 1965, she wrote to one of  his friends in Switzerland: “Since my girlhood in war-torn Europe, I have been looking to Albert Schweitzer as a guiding light and in times of sorrow and stress, my thoughts and love turned always to him…

“Compassion drove the young philosopher-musician to the dark continent and here he administered medicine to the sick, but his greater gift has been to all mankind: The opening of the heart in love to all creation, the reverence for life to all creatures. He became an apostle of goodwill, the challenger to us all. He is the conscience of Man today. Though his strong heart has stopped beating, his light will shine and the world needs this light.”

And, she told The Ridgefield Press that week, “The ethic he stands for is certainly a precious challenge to human beings in today’s cruel and crucified world.”

Larry Aldrich: 

Champion of Art and Open Space

Art and open space — they seem little connected. But Larry Aldrich championed both. 

The noted fashion designer brought a world-class art museum to Ridgefield and also gave the town Aldrich Park, 37 acres of prime open space, the home of both nature trails and one of the town’s first Little League fields. 

Born in 1906, Aldrich grew up in Manhattan and began working in the clothing industry when he was 18. He founded a women's clothing firm in 1927 when he was only 21, but his name did start appearing on the labels until the 1940s. 

“My dress collections were an immediate success and sold in all the best stores,” he told The Ridgefield Press in 1996 when he turned 90. 

“Larry Aldrich clothing was stylish, but not fashion-forward,” said the Vintage Fashion Guild.  “Styles from Paris were adapted to have a more conservative sensibility.”

The New York Times said “his women's clothing collections were reviewed alongside the likes of Claire McCardell, Geoffrey Beene, Mollie Parnis, and Pauline Trigere, and the dresses fought for the spotlight and sales with Paris designers. He saw a natural connection between fashion and art, and in 1965 he even produced a dress collection inspired by Op Art.”
He was considered a leader among his fashion peers, and was president of the New York Couture Group, described by The Times as “two dozen leading makers of high fashion apparel.”

Aldrich retired from the clothing business in 1972 to focus on developing his art museum, now called the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.  

His wife, Winifred, a talented artist, helped spark an interest in contemporary art and he began collecting in the late 1930s, eventually becoming a central figure in the New York City art scene. The

Aldriches moved to Nod Road in 1939 and by 1960, were running out of space for their art collection.

In 1963, Mr. Aldrich acquired three acres and a Main Street house that had once been The Old Hundred, a 19th Century country store, to serve as a museum for his collection. At first he thought of calling the museum “Old Hundred,” but decided the name did not reflect the contemporary theme of the art he would exhibit.

The Aldrich Museum opened there in 1964 and has expanded three times over the years, including the erection of a new exhibition building opened in 2004. 

Over the years, Aldrich and his museum  championed countless new artists by showing their work. “Almost all the well-known American artists you can think of have been seen here at early stages of their careers,” Aldrich said in 1986, “among them Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella and Cy Twombly.”

The Aldrich no longer owns a collection of art, and instead devotes its resources to exhibiting contemporary works and providing  educational programs.

“The museum is one of Connecticut's true treasures and a living example of Larry Aldrich's vision and commitment to the arts and to his community,” said University of Connecticut Chancellor Mark Emmert when he awarded Aldrich an honorary degree in 1996. 

That June, Aldrich donated $50,000 to the acquisition of more open space in Ridgefield. 

“It’s all part of my birthday celebration,” the good-humored philanthropist said, “because I'll never be 90 again.”

He died in 2001 at the age of 95. 

Abel Bahr: 

The Art of China

One of the 20th Century’s top experts on — and collectors of — ancient Chinese art spent his final years in Ridgefield.

Abel “Billy” Bahr’s vast collection, begun when he was a young man in Shanghai, is today distributed among some of the world’s finest museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which considered him and his daughter major benefactors.

Abel William Bahr was born in 1877 in Shanghai, a son of a German father and a Chinese mother. After receiving an education at a Catholic school in Shanghai, Bahr began his career as a clerk with a wholesale and retail coal merchant, and eventually established his own firm in 1898 at the age of 21.

“Bahr’s interest in Chinese art seems to have begun around 1905, when he began collecting porcelain from the Kangxi period (1662–1722),” says the Smithsonian Institution, whose Freer Gallery focuses on  Asian art and holds many of his papers. The idea of exhibiting art for the masses was virtually non-existent in China at the time, and in 1908 Bahr promoted the first exhibition of Chinese art in Shanghai, organized under the auspices of the Royal Asiatic Society. 

From 1910 until 1946, Bahr lived in England where he continued to amass a collection of  Chinese art, often making trips to China. One of his specialties was early jades, and his jade collection was acquired by the Field Museum of National History in 1928. (The privately printed, 51-page catalogue of the collection today can bring more than $2,000 on the rare book market.)

Bahr had both written and been the subject of books. He donated two of his favorites to the Ridgefield Library in the 1950s, but both — now worth thousands of dollars — are no longer in the library’s collection. One, “Early Chinese Painting from the A. W. Bahr Collection” (1938),  can fetch more than $1,000 at auction today. The other, his own “Old Chinese Porcelains and Works of Art in China” (1911) sells for as much as $2,500 today.

Bahr moved to Montreal in 1946 and then to Ridgefield in 1951 when he acquired “The Coach House” on Branchville Road opposite Ivy Hill Road.  There, amid his old Chinese art and artifacts, he enjoyed entertaining. 

“A gracious host, he insisted his male guests have a drink and advised them that scotch and water, not soda, was most healthful,” wrote Ridgefield Press publisher Karl S. Nash, who knew Bahr. “He offered them cigars and asked everyone to write a message in the guest book he maintained in the front hallway. He enjoyed talking about art, proper diet and his famous friends around the world, who called him ‘Billy.’ ”

Among the treasures in The Coach House were a magnificently carved, 10th Century wooden Buddha, a six-foot tall silk scroll, and Chinese Chippendale chairs from the 1700s.

Over the years Bahr donated or sold many of his pieces of art to museums including the Met, the Field, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, England, the Montreal Museum of Art, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. 

Bahr died in 1959 at the age of 81, and is buried in St. Mary Cemetery. 

Nash observed in his obituary: “He often minimized the importance of money and emphasized the pleasure he received from donating his art collection so that future generations could see and appreciate ancient Chinese culture.”

After his death, his daughter, Edna, gave many pieces of his remaining collection to various institutions in her father’s memory, particularly the Metropolitan Museum, which had made her a fellow in perpetuity, and the Ashmolean. A Ridgefielder from 1951 to 1962, she died in 1986 in England where she had lived most of her early life.