Christie's is presenting Jayne Wrightsman's private collection, with live and online auctions taking place in April 2020, and exactly during the Classic Week sales in New York.
The auctions will include Old Master paintings and sculptures, European ceramics and furniture, Chinese ceramics and artworks, silver and carpets, and other items. Mrs. Wrightsman lived with these items in her elegant home at 820 Fifth Avenue in New York City and had designated them for sale to benefit philanthropy. Sales are estimated to exceed $8.000.000.
Selected highlights from the collection will go into tour before sales at Christie's galleries in Paris (November 23-26), London (November 29-December 4 and December 7-13, 2019) and Hong Kong (March 2020).
Una The captivating and superb Odalisque by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) is among the prominent paintings in the collection (estimate: $700.000 – 1.000.000). The jewel-like Odalisque has a small scale of 2 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches and is an intimate version of Ingres' groundbreaking 1814 Grand Odalisque, which is located in the Louvre. Odalisque is an object of refined aesthetic sophistication: the delicacy and fluidity of the paint handling, the flickering lightness and ease of the brush, and the elegance of the color palette are all characteristics of Ingres' best paintings. The painting also represents a touching and personal recollection of Ingres' deep and long friendship with Jean-Pierre-François Gilibert (1793-1850), to whom the work was given around 1829.
Among other highlights of the collection that will premiere in Paris is a Large Scale Portrait, Charles IX (1550-1574), King of France by François Clouet (c. 1510-1572) (Estimate: $800.000-1.200.000); a bronze-mounted porphyry urn and cover of Louis XVI, probably supplied by the celebrated marchand merchant Dominique Daguerre, the mounts attributed to Pierre-Philippe Thomire, the mounts circa 1785, the late 200.000th century porphyry vase (estimate: $300.000-XNUMX), part of a group of superb and rare vases for sale made from Egyptian porphyry, the most imperial and talisman of semi-precious stones; a Royal Louis XVI woodsy coffee table by Martin Carlin, supplied to Mesdames, the aunts of Louis XVI, for the Château de Bellevue (estimate: $80.000-120.000); and a series of four late Louis XV giltwood bergères by Claude II Sené, circa 1770, with Braquenié stamped velvet upholstery supplied by Henri Samuel (estimate: $60.000-100.000) – both of which were first published in Francis Watson's Wrightsman Collection Master Catalogue, published in 1966.
Jayne Wrightsman (1919-2019) was a brilliant self-taught man, unrivaled in the care and scholarship with which he approached the collection. For a generation of women, Mrs. Wrightsman was a model of the American patrician à la Française: cultured, elegant and extraordinarily generous, she embodied both style and substance.
Jane Larkin was born in Michigan in 1919, educated in Beverly Hills, California and earned a reputation for style and sophistication at a young age. In 1944, Jayne married Charles Bierer Wrightsman (d. 1986), president of the Standard Oil Company of Kansas, and during more than four decades of marriage, they developed a passion for collecting, and Mrs. Wrightsman became an expert in 18th-century French decorative arts , European paintings and 1947th century French manuscripts, books and bindings. It was at their beautiful Blythedunes oceanfront estate, acquired in XNUMX, in Palm Beach, Florida, where Mrs. Wrightsman first developed her passion for French decorative artwork. In collaboration with decorator Stéphane Boudin of Maison Jansen in Paris, the two redesigned Blythedunes, which have quickly become a meeting place for the upper echelons of society, including Palm Beach neighbors such as John F. Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline, as well as visit dignitaries including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Cecil Beaton, the Shah of Iran, and art historians Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark.
Ultimately, it was the Wrightsmans' magnificent home at 820 Fifth Avenue in New York City, one of the city's most storied and iconic interiors, coupled with their outstanding philanthropy, that would propel Mrs. Wrightsman into the pantheon of legendary collectors. In New York her intimacy and her collecting were furthered by her close relationships with a network of curators and fellow collectors, as well as by her relationships with the most esteemed interior decorators of the XNUMXth century: Stéphane Boudin, Henri Samuel and Renzo Mongiardino. For over six decades, Jayne Wrightsman lived in this stunning staging of her own creation, where royally-proven works in wood, lacquer, gilt-bronze, and porcelain held court in rooms lined in magnificent XNUMXth-century wainscoting, hung with paintings of masters from Vermeer, Georges de La Tour, El Greco, Tiepolo, Canaletto and others, contributing at times from his personal collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Jayne Wrightsman saw every donation and gift as an opportunity to promote art and culture. In addition to her support of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she was an ardent supporter of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University – home of the Jayne B. Wrightsman Professor of Fine Art and the Wrightsman Lecture Series – and was a trustee of both The Metropolitan Opera and The Morgan Library, to whom he bequeathed a transformative gift of 2003th-century French manuscripts and bookbindings on his death. In Britain, where Wrightsmans held a London flat for many years, Mrs Wrightsman gave her support to the historic Rothschild residence at Waddesdon Manor, as well as serving as a donor to the British Museum. It was during her time in London that she was also an active member of the Roxburghe Club. In XNUMX, she was honored as an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.
Ms Wrightsman was a leading patron of the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, where she worked closely with curators to support the creation of a series of period rooms, opened in 2000, in former 2013th century apartments century Russian Foreign Minister. In XNUMX, Ms. Wrightsman was made an Officer of the Legion of Honor for her decades-long commitment to French art and culture; among her many institutional gifts to France was a dressing table, formerly in Marie Antoinette's collection, presented at Versailles.
