“A true gift from heaven. » This is how the Nantes Museum of Arts describes the legacy it has just received. A Parisian collector entrusted him with 34 works, 20 paintings dating from the 17th to the 19th century and 14 drawings dating back to the 16th century. For the collections, this is a major enrichment, estimated at more than 800,000 euros. It is also for the museum the gift of the century, or more, the last such important donation dating back to 1852, with the Clarke de Feltre collection.
What is intriguing is that in Nantes the collector, Jacqueline Boejat, is unknown to the battalion. “Jacqueline Boejat, without direct descendants, designated the Nantes Museum of Arts as legatee of her collection of works of art, without us knowing, beyond a second home that she owned in La Baule, which motivated his choice,” indicates the museum.
Pieces of Flemish art from the 17th century
The donor, who died in 2022 at the age of 91 and was buried in La Baule, had built up most of her collection over the last twenty years, bringing together in particular pieces of Flemish art from the 17th century as well as French works from the Eighteenth century.
The collection of ancient art at the Nantes Museum of Arts, which includes a significant corpus of Flemish and Dutch art, is therefore strengthened. There we will find, for example, an ambitious marine work by Abraham Jansz Storck (c. 1635-1708), which has the title “Large Ship of the Crown of Denmark near a Coastline” and which will respond to the compositions already installed.
But the museum is also looking forward to other additions. “The legacy allows us to enrich the Nantes collection of the 12th century, particularly rich for the Grand Siècle, with a set of paintings embodying the triumph of color, at the turn of the 12th and 18th centuries,” he says.