Jean-Siméon Chardin, Basket of Wild Strawberries (1761)
Musée du Louvre, Paris
The Louvre has triumphed in its campaign to buy Chardin’s Basket of Wild Strawberries for France, two years after the Kimbell Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, landed the winning €24.3m bid for the painting at Artcurial auction house in Paris. The sale was thwarted by the Louvre, which petitioned the French culture ministry to suspend the painting’s export for 30 months while it raised the matching funds. The luxury goods giant LVMH committed €15m while 10,000 people gave a record €1.6m through a crowdfunding campaign. To thank them, the painting is now going on a national tour, starting at the Louvre-Lens, followed by Paris, then Brest and Clermont-Ferrand.
Jean-Valentin Morel, Hope Cup (1855)
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Jean-Valentin Morel's Hope Cup (1855) Musée d’Orsay, ParisMusée d’Orsay
The Musée d’Orsay describes the Hope Cup, purchased for $2.1m at Sotheby’s New York in February, as “a masterpiece of the decorative arts”. According to one contemporary source, it took three years and “the invention of numerous new techniques” to create the elaborately carved jasper goblet, which won Jean-Valentin Morel a medal of honour at the 1855 Universal Exhibition in Paris. Morel, a master goldsmith whose clients included the exiled French royal family and Queen Victoria, engaged various collaborators to chisel the stone and to craft the enamelled decorations. The mythological composition features Perseus in battle with the sea monster to free his future bride Andromeda, who appears chained to the cup’s stem, while a cameo of Medusa adorns the golden spout. The cup is named for the English politician and art collector who commissioned it, Henry Thomas Hope.
Photography gift from Joy of Giving Something, Inc.
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond
Mark Steinmetz’s Athens, Georgia (1996), part of the JGS gift © the artist
In 1998 the US financier Howard Stein established the non-profit Joy of Giving Something (JGS), a philanthropic outlet for an extensive photography collection, ranging from the 19th century to contemporary works. JGS’s past initiatives have included loans to museums, a print journal and “one of the first cyber-museums”. It is now focused on grants supporting arts education in underserved communities in New York. Following previous donations of works from the collection to US museums, JGS has given 1,124 photographs by more than 25 artists to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The highlights include Paul Strand’s Mexico portfolio and work by Mark Steinmetz, Raymond Meeks and Debbie Fleming Caffery that broaden the museum’s holdings of “photography made in and about the American South”.
