A GLORIOUS GIFT OF EUROPEAN ARTWORKS IS ON DISPLAY AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM

Selections from the trove donated by the late Jayne Wrightsman includes stunning works by Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Jean François de Troy, and Eugène Delacroix.

Hakim Bishara

She was a reputable New York socialite, a fashion icon, and one of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s greatest benefactors. Jayne Wrightsman, who died in April of this year at age 99, was a longtime donor and trustee who had gifted the museum hundreds of artworks during her lifetime. Last week, the Met announced that Wrightsman left it with one last sizeable gift: a bequest of $80 million in cash and more than 375 paintings, drawings, decorative art objects, and rare books.

This past Friday, November 15, the Met installed a selection of works from Wrightsman’s bequest to pay tribute to her immense contribution to the Met’s collection in three of its galleries. The Department of European Paintings now features 22 paintings in Gallery 632, including works by Eugène Delacroix, Anthony van Dyck, Théodore Gericault, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and Georges Seurat, among others. The Department of Drawings and Prints exhibits works on paper from the Wrightsman Collection in Gallery 690, including a portrait of Marie Antoinette by Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, a pair of drawings by Louis de Carmontelle, and several rare bound books. The Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts showcases 55 small objects in Gallery 545, from decorative tobacco snuffboxes to a French porcelain inkstand in the form of a pomegranate. Older works that were donated by Wrightsman and her husband, Charles Wrightsman (an oil executive who died in 1986), were marked with a blue sticker to highlight the couple’s previous donations (the couple has given more than 1,275 works to the Met over the years).

An entire wall in the European paintings galleries is dedicated to landscape paintings of Venice, a city that was recently submerged in historically-high floodwaters. Six paintings by the 18th-century painter Giovanni Antonio Canal, commonly known as Canaletto, depict the city’s iconic Piazza San Marco, its Grand Canal, and other landmarks. They join eight existing Canaletto works that Wrightsman previously donated to the museum.

“These are permanent reminders of the glories and the beauty of this magical place,” Austin Chinn, a museum educator at the Met, told Hyperallergic while guiding a group of visitors through the gallery. “There’s no church building in mainland Europe that resembles this dream,” he enthused about St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, which is depicted in Canaletto’s “Piazza San Marco” (circa late 1720s).

Keith Christiansen, chairman of the Met’s Department of European Paintings, told Hyperallergic in an email that Wrightsman originally purchased the paintings for the museum in 1988 but kept some of them in her apartment until her death. “They are the kinds of pictures you can see yourself living with: they are not grand gallery pictures,” he wrote, “You can see why she wanted to retain them.” The newly bequeathed Canaletto works, he said, “have suddenly transformed the collection into one of the finest collections of this artist in the country.” Wrightsman’s gifts include other Venetian paintings by Canaletto’s contemporaries Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and Francesco Guardi.

Wrightsman, Christiansen added, had also fortified the Met’s Delacroix collection with a unique painting she bequeathed after her death. “Delacroix’s ‘Rebecca and the Wounded Ivanhoe’ is as fine as these pictures get and, once again, has raised the Delacroix collection — which had already benefited from two earlier gifts (including an exceptional portrait) — to one of the finest outside the Louvre,” the curator said. In this painting, which draws from Walter Scott’s popular 19th-century novel Ivanhoe, the novel’s eponymous protagonist strains to leave his sickbed as an alarmed Rebecca describes to him a battle raging outside the window................

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