The Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon added a significant 19th-century painting by Claudius Jacquand to its collection yesterday, 10 November, thanks to an impromptu fundraising drive at the VIP opening of the fifth edition of Paris Tableau, the Old Masters fair held at the Palais Brongniart (11-15 November).
Around €16,000 was raised within two hours to buy the painting A Soldier Being Cared for by a Nun in a Cloister (View of the Cloister of the Palais Saint Pierre), 1822, from the stand of the Lyon-based dealer Galerie Michel Descours. The Musée des Beaux-Arts is housed in the 17th-century Palais Saint Pierre, which used to be a Benedictine convent.
The drive was led by Jean-Pierre Cuzin, the former head of paintings at the Musée du Louvre, and Guillaume Kientz from the French institution's Spanish paintings and sculpture department, who asked fair-goers for donations of €100 to acquire the painting. The London-based Old Masters dealer Jean-Luc Baroni, who is not exhibiting at Paris Tableau, donated €10,000.
“I was going to offer the painting to the museum first,” said the gallerist Michel Descours. “Cuzin, Kientz and Baroni deserve a lot of credit [for securing the painting] for the museum,” he said. The museum also owns the picture Thomas Morus, grand chancelier d'Angleterre (1828), by Lyon-born Jacquand.
