AFA 18th Anniversary

Longtime benefactors Peter and Paula Lunder saw that they could make a transformative difference at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, through their gift of 1,150 artworks, estimated at more than $100 million, by 150 artists, among them, Mary Cassatt, Albrecht Dürer, Vincent Van Gogh, Jasper Johns, Maya Lin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Claes Oldenburg, Rembrandt Van Rijn, James McNeill Whistler, and Ai Weiwei. A donation of 113 Dutch and Flemish Golden Age works (Fig. 14) by seventy-six artists (including Rembrandt, Rubens, Gerrit Dou, Frans Hals, Albert Cuyp and Jan Steen) from collectors Rose- Marie and Eijk van Otterloo and Susan and Matthew Weatherbie to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is intended to be shared with wide audiences and help nurture the next generation of scholars and curators. To support this intention, the donors made a substantial gift of funds to establish a Center for Netherlandish Art at the MFA, and the museum is committed to displaying and lending the collections generously. This center is the first of its kind in the United States; its programs are expected to launch in 2020. The Meadows Museum , which oilman Algur Meadows founded at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, in 1962 to house his collection of Spanish art and which received an additional $45 million gift two years ago from the Meadows Foundation, purchased an early fifteenth-century altarpiece attributed to Catalonian painter Pere Vall. The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles made what it referred to as “one of the most spectacular acquisitions in its history,” with sixteen drawings (Fig. 15) by such artists as Michelangelo, Lorenzo di Credi, Andrea del Sarto, Parmigianino, Rubens, Barocci, Goya, and Degas, as well as a 1721 painting by Jean Antoine Watteau ( The Surprise ) and Parmigianino’s circa- 1535 The Virgin and Child with Saint Mary Magdalen and the Infant Saint John the Baptist . The Getty bought the latter in 2016 for £24.5 million from the Dent-Brocklehurst family of Sudeley Castle, Gloucestershire. An export license was not granted for eight months while the British government sought, and failed, to find institutional buyers to match the price. The Getty also received from Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser 386 works by seventeen different photographers, including Berenice Abbott, Imogen Cunningham, William Eggleston, Andreas Feininger, and Dorothea Lange. 2018 Antiques & Fine Art 103 Fig. 11: Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920), Head , ca. 1913. Limestone, 20⅝ x 9¾ x 14¾ in. Collection of Kimbell Art Museum; Given in honor of Ted and Lucile Weiner by their daughter Gwendolyn (2017). Fig. 10: Three-piece sugar and tea caddy set by Royal goldsmith Thomas Heming (1722-1801), England, 1757. Silver with original fitted box. Photo by John Spurlock. Courtesy The Huntington Museum of Arts, Huntington, West Virginia.