Heinrich Thyssen

Heinrich Thyssen (31 October 1875 – 26 June 1947), after 22 June 1907 Heinrich, Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kászon et Impérfalva, was a German-Hungarian entrepreneur and art collector. Biography Thyssen was born in Mülheim an der Ruhr, the second son of German industrialist August Thyssen. Heinrich Thyssen had abandoned Germany as a young man and, after studying chemistry at the University of Heidelberg and philosophy at the University of London and obtaining a doctorate, he settled in Hungary in 1905 and married Baroness Margit Bornemisza de Kászon et Impérfalva (Csetény, Veszprém, 23 July 1887 – Locarno, 17 April 1971) in Vienna or Budapest on 4 January 1906 and became a citizen of Austria-Hungary. In Vienna on 22 June 1907 he was adopted by his father-in-law, Gábor, Baron Bornemisza de Kászon et Impérfalva (Kolozsvár, 20 April 1859 – Budapest, 21 April 1915), the King's chamberlain who, having no sons of his own, adopted Heinrich. Franz Joseph I of Austria, Emperor-King of Austria-Hungary granted him the hereditary title and rank of a baron in the Hungarian nobility in 1907. His mother-in-law was English American Mathilde Louise Price (Wilmington, New Castle County, Delaware, 14 March 1865 – Locarno, 19 January 1959 and married at Vienna on 16 May 1883), who was a sister of Anne Hollingsworth Price (wife of Friedrich Wilhelm, Prince of Ardeck) and they were descendants of the Winthrop family, and related to Daniel M. Frost and John Kerry. The couple lived at the castle of Rohonc until after World War I and the uprising of Béla Kun, when they fled and moved to The Hague in the Netherlands from whence they directed some of the Thyssen commercial and industrial interests, including the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart. In 1926 he had refused to participate in the Vereinigte Stahlwerke AG, founded by his elder brother Fritz Thyssen, although becoming a board member, but kept his own inherited wealth, including his father's foreign investments and some German companies apart from the Thyssen steelworks, in a separate organization, the August Thyssensche Unternehmungen des In- und Auslandes, GmbH, today Thyssen-Bornemisza Group Holdings N.V. (TBG).