Acquisitions of the month: June 2024

A review of the most important works of art that have recently entered public collections

Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam
Clovis is sleeping (1884), Paul Gauguin

Before Paul Gauguin moved to Tahiti in the 1890s, which changed his artistic practice and style, he painted a number of Impressionist works, including still lifes, portraits, and domestic scenes. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has acquired a benchmark work from Gauguin’s Impressionist phase—a delicate 1884 painting of Gauguin’s five-year-old son, Clovis, resting his head on a large table. Gauguin painted Clovis—and the large Norwegian tankard that stands next to him—from life, but added an ethereal blast of blue that covers the upper half of the canvas, perhaps to evoke the dream world inhabited by the sleeping child. The museum does not often acquire works, but in the past few years it has made efforts to bolster its collection of works by Van Gogh’s contemporaries, including Jean-François Millet, Émile Bernard, and Mary Cassatt.

Städel Museum Frankfurt
The Devouring Lion (1908), Rembrandt Bugatti

The Städel is celebrating the 125th anniversary of the Städel Museums Association – a patronage group that supports several museums in Frankfurt – by adding to its impressive collection of European art from the 14th to the 21st century. The latest acquisition is a bronze by the Italian sculptor Rembrandt Bugatti depicting a lion devouring its prey, with its claws exposed and its tail raised in a striking pose. Bugatti was fascinated by animals, and a large part of his 300 or so surviving works were inspired by them: he spent time modelling sculptures for the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and at the Antwerp Zoo. He took up work as an assistant in a military hospital, spending much of his time observing animals at the Antwerp Zoo during World War I, before committing suicide in 1916 at the age of 31. The Devouring Lion comes from the collection of the French actor Alain Delon, who has a large private collection of Bugatti’s work, and was acquired with the support of the Association and a significant private donation. It becomes only the second Bugatti sculpture to be in a public collection in Germany, the other being a sinister bronze from 1904 depicting a hunting panther, which is owned by the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth
Mares and foals belonging to the 2nd Viscount Bolingbroke (C. 1761–62), George Stubbs

This year marks the 300th anniversary of the birth of George Stubbs, a prominent 18th-century horse painter. The Kimbell Art Museum has acquired a large canvas by Stubbs of a group of brown horses belonging to the 2nd Viscount Bolingbroke, painted at about the same time as Whistle (C 1762), a huge, arresting portrait of the Marquis of Rockingham’s racehorse, which is probably Stubbs’s best-known work. The painting, which was purchased from a private collection through London dealer Simon Dickinson for an undisclosed price, will join another Stubbs work in the Kimbell collection, Lord Grosvenor’s Arabian stallion with groom (C ((1765)).

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Hagar’s Exile (1839–41), Johann Friedrich Overbeck

In the early 19th century, a group of graduates of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts living in Rome joined forces, united by their dislike of the omnipresence of neoclassical art, to found the Nazarene movement, which aimed to re-establish spirituality at the center of culture and to restore the clarity of form they saw as having disappeared in art since the Renaissance. The most important of these students was Johann Friedrich Overbeck, a German-born painter whose magnum opus, The Triumph of Religion in Art (1829–40) is a programmatic demonstration of his philosophy, a large painting that took 11 years to complete and depicts a conclave of saints, biblical figures, and artists that Overbeck admired, from Peter the Apostle and Thomas Aquinas to Michelangelo and Durer. The MET already owns several of Overbeck’s drawings, but has now acquired an evocative oil painting painted after the completion of Triumphdepicting the exile of the slave Hagar and her son Ishmael by Sarah and Abraham.

Tate Britain, London
Portrait of Anne Sotheby (1676–77) Mary Beale

In recent years, there has been a surge in interest in the work of Mary Beale, who was one of the leading portraitists of her time but fell out of favour in the centuries after her death. Earlier this year, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston bought her portrait of the Marchioness of Halifax; now Tate Britain has acquired a portrait of Anne Sotheby, painted in 1676-77 by Beale with the help of her son Charles, who worked in her studio. The painting, which depicts a person dressed in flowing gold and blue in a woodland setting, is currently on display in Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 (until 13 October).

Ingres Bourdelle Museum, Montauban
Study for the Infant Jesus in This Wedding of Louis XIII in the cathedral of Montauban (C 1824), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

The cathedral in Montauban in the south of France houses one of the greatest works by the artist born in that city, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Wedding of Louis XIII (1824), an elaborate neoclassical oil painting depicting the French king making an oath to the Virgin Mary. The Musée Ingres Bourdelle, dedicated to Ingres and another Montauban-born artist, the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle, has now acquired a study of this work. This representation of the Infant Jesus, which in Oath held by Mary, it presents a pose almost identical to that in the finished work – with minor changes in the angle of the child’s head and legs, the position of his hands, and the color palette.

Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest
Still life with fruit (C. 1640), Juan de Zurbaran

The Spanish Baroque painter Juan de Zurbarán, son of the more famous Francisco de Zurbarán, died of the plague in 1649 at the age of just 29. Only about 20 of his works have survived – all of them still lifes, mostly depicting fruit – which is why this acquisition Still life with fruit (C. 1640) by the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, which already owns a significant number of works by Spanish Old Masters, including Velázquez, El Greco and Goya, is a rare find. This particular painting, which depicts two bowls filled with fruit and four grapes scattered on a table, is a less elaborate work than, for example, his Still life with lemons in a wicker basket (C 1643–49) in the National Gallery, London, but is distinguished by the characteristically skillful brushwork and almost photorealistic attention to detail that make Zurbarán’s works such famous examples of the genre.

Goa State Museum, Panaji
Three sculptures from the Shri Shivnath Temple

The Goa State Museum has acquired three sculptures discovered during construction work at the Shri Shivnath Temple in Shiroda village in Goa: a sculpture of Gajalakshmi (one of the manifestations of the Hindu goddess of prosperity, Lakshmi) seated on an elephant-shaped pedestal; a statue of Nandi, Shiva’s sacred bull; and a Shivling, a representation of Shiva himself. The objects, which were donated to the museum by the temple authorities, are currently being carbon-dated and forensically analyzed to determine their exact origins.