Edward Solly

Who was Edward Solly?

Edward Solly was an English merchant living in Berlin, who amassed an unprecedented collection of Italian Trecento and Quattrocento paintings and outstanding examples of Early Netherlandish painting, at a time when those schools were still largely unappreciated. In 1821 Gustav Waagen assisted the purchase for the new art museum being created at Berlin, of about 3000 works from Solly's collection, 677 of them forming a core of the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. Solly acquired a second collection during his years in London after 1821. Solly is also credited for having undertaken a perilous journey to deliver the first news of Napoleon's defeat at Leipzig to the English.

Solly was a younger brother in an English merchant family headed by Isaac Solly that were engaged in the Baltic timber trade, with offices in the city of London. As Non-Conformists the family suffered social restrictions in the higher levels of English society. During the Napoleonic Wars the firm secured immense contracts for the supply of Prussian and Polish oak timber and ship's stores from the Baltic. Solly removed to Stockholm and then in 1813 to Berlin, overseeing the family firm's bulk purchases on the part of the European continent not covered by Napoleon's Continental System. In Berlin he married the daughter of Auguste Krüger in 1816. His great personal charm and intelligence opened the highest social circles, and as his business affairs prospered he was on good terms with ministry officials, the Prussian court, artists, connoisseurs and intellectuals.