Jane Engelhard (Qingdao, China, 1917 - Nantucket, Massachusetts, 29 February 2004) was an American philanthropist of Brazilian, German, and Irish ancestry known for her marriage to billionaire industrialist Charles W. Engelhard Jr. as well as her donation of an elaborate 18th-century Neapolitan crêche to the White House in 1967.
Some sources give her birth name as Marie Annette or Marie Antoinette; how she became known as Jane is uncertain. Her maiden surname has been variously been published as Reis, Reiss, Pinto Reis, Pinto-Reis Brian or Reiss-Brian. Passenger manifests in the archives of Ellis Island indicate that her parents' surname, however, was Reiss.
She was the eldest daughter of Hugo Reiss , a Brazilian diplomat of German Jewish background who reportedly served as Brazil's minister to China in the 1920s, and his Irish American Catholic wife, Ignatia Mary Murphy , a native of San Francisco, California. She had two younger sisters, Barry J. (died 1972, unmarried) and Huguette Madeleine (died 1994, married twice). By her mother's second marriage to Guy Brian , she had two half-sisters: Marie-Brigitte (Countess Bernard de La Rochefoucauld ) and Patricia (Madame Jacques Bemberg , aka Bébé). All five daughters were raised as Catholics, with the three eldest girls spending their infancy and early childhood in Shanghai, China.
As Marie Annette Reiss, in Vaucresson , France, on 1 June 1939, she married Dr. Fritz Mannheimer (1890-1939), a German Jewish banker and art collector known as the King of Flying Capital. The director of Mendelssohn & Co., Amsterdam , a branch of a fabled private bank headquartered in Berlin and known for floating multi-million-dollar loans to various European governments, including that of Nazi Germany, he died eight weeks after the wedding, either of a heart attack or a self-inflicted gunshot wound, on 9 August 1939. The actual cause of Mannheimer's death remains as speculative as its timing was suspicious. One day after his death, the Amsterdam branch announced that it was insolvent and that it was confiscating Mannheimer's art collection, which had been financed with unlimited bank credit. Shortly thereafter, the entire firm was liquidated by the German government.
The couple had one child, Anne France Mannheimer (1940-), later known as Anne France Engelhard (married 1, Samuel Pryor Reed , and married 2, Oscar de la Renta).
She immigrated to New York City after her husband's death and became known as Jane Mannheimer and/or Jane Mannheimer-Reiss. During this period, she became an investor in a Broadway review and the owner of a microfilm company, which she reportedly inherited from her late husband. In 1947, she married Charles W. Engelhard Jr. (1917-1971), a multimillionaire minerals industrialist from New Jersey. The couple lived in Bernardsville, New Jersey, where they raised golden retrievers and thoroughbred race horses, including the fabled Nijinsky II. They had numerous homes, including Cragwood, a 1920s neo-Georgian mansion in New Jersey (it was decorated by Sister Parish of White House fame), and a palatial country house in South Africa.
The Engelhards had four daughters: Susan, Sophia, Alexandra, and Charlene.
Jane Engelhard was known for her donations to the New Jersey Symphony , the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the White House, and other prominent organizations. She also was a leading member of the Fine Arts Committee of the White House, organized during the Kennedy administration, and a major donor to its restoration. The decoration of the Small State Dining Room is among her reported contributions.
