FH Schiff and the Gresham Apartments, Shanghai French Concession

Posted: August 13th, 2026 | No Comments »

I’ve had reason to mention the Austrian artist in Shanghai Friedrich “FH” Schiff many times, most recently in this post about his illustrations for a photography book with Ellen Thorbecke – Peking Studies (1934 – click here to read). Schiff was born in Vienna in 1908. He attended the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt and then the Akademie der bildenden Künste from 1924. In 1930, he travelled to Shanghai to visit his cousin Francis Gmehling, who ran an art and antiques shop there. He decided to stay and established himself as an artist and press illustrator, also opening a School of Applied Art. He worked with many restaurants and nightclubs including the Maskee, Roxy, The Pelican, Maxim, La Cumparsita, Bolero, Blue Peter Bar, (Jack Reilly’s) DD’s and Silk Hat. His cartoons, portraits and other work were published and mentioned in the local press, such as The North China Daily News, The Shanghai Herald, The China Journal, Shanghai Evening Post & Mercury and the Shanghai Daily Tribune.

The great collector of old China ephemera Roy Delbyck saw my post and sent me the documents below related to the Gresham Apartments. Roy had acquired a batch of documents relating to the property seemingly owned by a Japanese lawyer named K Sugunama. He had inquired about the 29 residential units and four shops in the Gresham Apartments (where he lived at #12a) at 1228 Avenue Joffre (HuaiHai Lu) and some retail premises on Rue Gaston Kahn (Jiashan Lu), both in the French Concession. The documents were overseen at the offices of the well-known Frenchtown lawyer Paul Premet on Avenue Edward VII (Yan’an Lu) – Premet was known as a regular in the Shanghai courts and most famously had been engaged by accused Soviet spies in the 1920s and represented several Shanghai beauty queens (click here)

Among the list of renters in the Gresham Apartments in late 1941, is FH Schiff. There he is at #27…. Earlier records have one Otto Blume living at #27 so we can conclude that Schiff moved in sometime after January 1941.

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