The collection of the Musée d’orsay will enrich of 106 new works. Of Bonnard paintings, paintings of Vuillard, of the works of Camille Claudel will join the museum in paris, after a second donation of Marlene Hays, great collector of art, texas with her husband Spencer, who died in 2017.

This american couple has amassed a huge collection of around 600 works from the second half of the Nineteenth century and the first half of the Twentieth century. The benefactors had already loaned 187 works at the musée d’orsay in 2013 for the exhibition A French Passion . In October 2016, this set has been the subject of a first donation subject to usufruct.

» READ ALSO – Black is the colour at the Musée d’orsay

«This new donation is an historical enrichment of public collections national of the State», stressed on Thursday the minister of Culture, Franck Riester. Among the hundred works, include 40 paintings, 47 works on paper and 19 sculptures, bringing to nearly 300 the number of parts given by the couple, lovers of French painting and the charm of the nabis.

Ten paintings of Bonnard (including girl with dog , 1894), nine Édouard Vuillard will, therefore, complement the collections of the musée d’orsay, as well as tables considered as major Robert Delaunay ( the Woman at The bread , 1905), Henri Matisse ( The Woman in yellow , 1923) and Modigliani ( Young woman in the pink – Margherita , 1916).

» READ ALSO – The youth flaming Picasso at the Musée d’orsay

A couple of enthusiasts

Married for nearly 60 years, the businessman Spencer Hays and his wife Marlene Hays were autodidacts in the history of art «as a Child, I lived in Texas, in a town where there was neither art nor museum. I met my wife Marlene before entering the university. We were both come from very modest», said this great collector in 2013.

He began selling books door-to-door in Tennessee, until his wife suggested he buy a painting of a Dutch painter of the Xvii century, to decorate their home in Nashville, tn. This will be the beginning of a great collection. The couple began with an interest in american art before starting in the 1980s in the French works of the late Nineteenth. The donation Hays had crowned the efforts of Guy Cogeval, president of Orsay Museum until 2017, who knew the couple since 2001, and shared with him the passion of painters nabis.