19th Anniversary

A gift from the sitter’s descendants, a large-scale, circa-1745 portrait of Joyce Armistead Booth (Fig. 3) by William Dering of Williamsburg, Virginia, in its original frame, became the fifth example of the artist’s work to enter the collection of the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg; only six examples are known. Having founded The Met’s Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art in 2013 and gifted the institution a nearly $1 billion collection of Cubist artwork, in September, Lauder added to this gift with a 1914 Juan Gris still life The Musician’s Table , purchased at Christie’s in May for $31.8 million (Fig. 4). The Canton Museum of Art in Ohio bought Childe Hassam’s Bleak House, Broadstairs (1890) from a private collector (Fig. 5). Getting a work by the artist was on the institution’s “wish list,” according to Max Barton, executive director of the museum. Fredric Edwin Church’s Valley of Santa Isabel, New Granada, 1875 (in its original frame designed by the artist) has become the most significant Hudson River School painting in The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art’s collection. Deaccessioned from the Berkshire Museum, it was purchased in a private transaction for more than $4 million. With the lawsuits completed over the Berkshire Museum’s decision to deaccession paintings from its permanent collection, we now know that one of its most notable pieces, Norman Rockwell’s Shuffleton’s Barbershop (1950), put up for sale in April, is going to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, set to open in Los Angeles in 2022. Founder movie director George Lucas purchased the work for a sum assumed to be between $20 and $30 million. The work is currently on loan to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg, drew from two of its purchase funds to acquire a Reuben Haley-designed (and Cubist-influenced) lilac-colored toilet bottle from 1928–1932 (Fig. 6 ), pa r t of t he Ruba Rombic line of g la sswa re manufactured at the Consolidated Lamp and Glass Company in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania. Among the 209 items acquired by the Arkansas Arts Center this year were works by Russian avant- garde artist Alexander Archipenko, American impressionist John Singer Sargent, and a ceramic vessel by Japanese ceramicist Iguchi Daisuke (Fig. 7). 19th Anniversary 116 www.afamag.com |  www.incollect.com Fig. 4: Juan Gris (Spanish, 1887–1927), The Musician’s Table, 1914. Charcoal, wax crayon, gouache, cut-and-pasted printed wallpaper, blue and white laid papers, transparentized paper, newsprint, and brown wrapping paper; selectively var- nished on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection; Purchase, Leonard A. Lauder Gift, 2018 (2018.216). Fig. 5: Childe Hassam (1859-1935). Bleak House, Broadstairs, 1889. Watercolor on paper, 13 x 9 in. Collection of the Canton Museum of Art, Canton, Ohio. The house at the top of the painting is where Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield.

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