Louvre acquires Chardin's Basket of Strawberries thanks to donations from the public

The Louvre succeeds in its bid to acquire the Basket of Woodland Strawberries, a masterpiece by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (Paris, 1699 - 1779), which had ended up on the market last year, sold in an Artcurial auction for 24 million euros (against an initial estimate of 12-15), setting a record for an Old French painting. The work was then blocked as it was declared a “National Treasure” by the French state: the circumstance allowed the Louvre to exercise its right of first refusal to attempt a purchase before letting the work go.

24.3 million euros were needed: the Louvre had therefore launched an appeal to its supporters to raise the missing amount, or 1.3 million euros (the rest of the sum had been raised through the support of LVMH Moët Hennessy - Louis Vuitton, other major donors, and the Society of the Friends of the Louvre). The Basket of Wild Strawberries had thus been at the center of the new chapter of the Tous Mécènes campaign by which the Louvre asks its public each year for a contribution toward the purchase of a major work of art. Thus, thanks to the generous contribution of nearly 10,000 individual donors, the museum raised 1.6 million euros, marking a record for the Tous Mécènes campaign. Chardin’s Basket of Woodland Strawberries , therefore, is now in the Louvre and will go on tour: it will be on public display at the Lens “branch” from March 21, then, after a stop in Paris in June, it will be presented at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Brest for the summer from July 2, before reaching the Roger-Quilliot Museum in Clermont-Ferrand on October 2 for the fall.

Since 2010, the Tous Mécènes collaborative funding initiatives have established themselves as major events for the Louvre Museum, involving more than 35,000 donors, many of whom are regular supporters: nearly 14,000 have participated in more than one campaign and 116 have contributed to all fourteen. In addition to the funds raised, these initiatives strengthen the bond between the Louvre and its audiences.

"Record broken for the Chardin Strawberry Basket!" gloats Louvre director Laurence des Cars. "I wholeheartedly thank the ten thousand donors to our Tous Mécènes campaign who, throughout the country, and often for the first time, chose to contribute to this acquisition. The exceptional mobilization of all these Louvre lovers is a particularly exciting sign of the public’s attachment to our heritage, to the very idea of a museum, and to its promise of sharing. So I hoped that this wonderful masterpiece by Chardin would come to meet all French people, first in Lens, then in Brest and Clermont-Ferrand, before reaching the walls of the Louvre."

The Basket of Woodland Strawberries dates from 1761: in the summer of that year, Chardin exhibited his work at the Louvre’s Salon Carré, one of his last still lifes, a restrained and composed work that differs from other of Chardin’s coeval canvases characterized by their “beautiful disorder,” as critics have often pointed out. The dense but transparent volume of the glass of water lends balance to the composition by contrasting with the fragile mass of the small red fruits: here, the artist wanted to visibly try his hand at the challenge of representing this singular pyramid of intense red, which appears at once as a compact mass and as a fragile edifice composed of a multitude of small, unstable elements. The painting was admired by Denis Diderot and his contemporaries, and in 1863 it also attracted the attention of the Goncourt brothers: “Look at these two carnations: they are nothing more than a speck of white and blue, a kind of raised silver enamel seedling; you take a step back; the flowers rise from the canvas as you move away [...]. And this is the miracle of the things that Chardin paints: shaped in the mass and around their contours, drawn with their light, made, as it were, the soul of their color, they seem to detach themselves from the canvas and come alive, through some marvelous optical operation, between the canvas and the viewer in space.”

Louvre acquires Chardin's Basket of Strawberries thanks to donations from the public

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