A major bequest for the Musée d’Art de Nantes

5/9/23 - Acquisitions - Nantes, Musée d’Art - Some collectors are well known to museums, forge privileged relationships with them, and end up donating one work, sometimes several, or even an entire collection.
This was not the case with Jacqueline Boéjat. She had been buying old master paintings and drawings for some twenty years, many of them from the Artcurial auction house, but had never made herself known to the Nantes museum. So it came as a complete surprise when the latter learned that it was the legatee of the recently deceased artist’s works. No fewer than twenty paintings and fourteen drawings have entered the museum’s collections, the most important bequest of early art since that of Clarke de Feltre in 1852.

We will be devoting several articles to this remarkable collection, which consists of four parts: an ensemble of early French, Nordic and Italian drawings, French paintings from the late 17th and 18th centuries, Flemish and Dutch Nordic paintings, and two 19th-century French paintings. There are also two drawings by André Derain, which are somewhat anecdotal.

Before returning to the details of this bequest, we will reproduce here three works, the ones that seems to us the most important, in each of the first three groups. This is a purely subjective choice, which everyone will be able to make up their own minds about in the coming days. And we’ll add the only two French paintings from the 19th century.

1. Jan Davidsz. de Heem (1606-1684)
Panier de fruits et citron sur un entablement
Huile sur panneau - 28,5 x 40,5 cm
Nantes, Musée d’Arts
Photo : Artcurial

See the image in its page

Thus, for the six Nordic paintings, including four from the 17th century, the centerpiece is unquestionably a still life by Jan Davidsz. de Heem (ill. 1) that the collector had bought at Artcurial on November 14, 2017. Unpublished until now, this signed panel joins an important Nordic collection already preserved at the museum and already rich in…