American Collectors of Nabis Donate $380m Collection to Musee d’Orsay

Nashville’s Spencer and Marlene Hays have donated 600 works to the Musee d’Orsay in Paris which will show them in together, according to France’s RFI:

“This donation, exceptional both in its size and its consistency, is the biggest received by a French museum from a French museum since 1945,” the French culture ministry said on Friday.

The 89-year-old couple have bequeathed their huge collection to Paris’s Seineside museum of 19th-century art when they die but 187 works, worth 173 million euros, were to be donated on Saturday.

The collection includes works by well-known artists like Edgar Degas, Odilon Redon, Gustave Caillebotte, Camille Corot and Amedeo Modigliani but the couple are most interested in the works of the Nabis, a group named after the Hebrew word for prophet who aimed to revitalise painting, and its members are well-represented with 23 works of Edouard Vuillard, 12 by Pierre Bonnard and four by Maurice Denis.

American collectors donate 350-million-euro collection to Paris’s Orsay museum (RFI)