AMERICAN COLLECTORS MAKE HISTORIC $381 MILLION GIFT TO MUSéE D’ORSAY

France24 reports that the American couple Marlene and Spencer Hays have donated a large collection of nineteenth-century and some early twentieth-century works to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. This is the largest gift to a French museum by foreign donors in more than seventy years, which will be bequeathed upon their deaths. The collection comprises around six hundred works and is worth an estimated $381 million, including pieces by artists Édouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, and Edgar Degas.

The Hayses donated an initial 187 pieces during an official ceremony, presided over by French President François Hollande, at the Elysée presidential palace in Paris over the weekend. French Culture Minister Audrey Azoulay said the “donation . . . is exceptional for its size and coherence.”

The couple donated the collection under the condition that the Musée d’Orsay exhibit the works in a single space. The institution will move its library and archives to accommodate the request, according to the museum’s president Guy Cogeval. One of the motivating factors behind the donation is presumed to be that, under French law, museums are prohibited from selling pieces they received as gifts.