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The Metropolitan Museum of Art New York (The Met) has received a bequest of over 375 works from the late Jayne Wrightsman (1919–2019). A former Trustee and sometime head of the museum’s Acquisitions Committee, Wrightsman is remembered as of the most generous benefactors in the museum’s history.
Born in Michigan, Wrightsman grew up in Los Angeles. She and her husband Charles Wrightsman (1895–1986), an oil executive, together amassed what is considered to be the finest private collection of the decorative arts of the Ancient Regime in the US, and engaged in significant philanthropic activities. Jayne Wrightsman served as a member of The Met’s 100th Anniversary Committee, and from 1975, was elected to its board of trustees. She was extremely active as a trustee and went on to become chairman of the museum’s Acquisitions Committee. Wrightsman so regularly bought and donated significant artworks to The Met that she came to refer to it affectionately as, “my poor relative.” In 2012, she donated over $15 million by auctioning off her own jewels at Sotheby’s New York. In her private life, she was a gifted hostess and extremely fashionable, named to the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1965. Wrightsman died on April 20, 2019, aged 99.
The gift Wrightsman left to the museum in her will includes significant donations to the departments of Drawings and Prints, European Paintings, and European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, as well as to the Department of Asian Art, the Department of Islamic Art, and The Watson Library. In total, she and her late husband donated more than 1,275 works to The Met.
Daniel H. Weiss, President and CEO of the museum, has expressed the institution’s enduring gratitude to the couple, “Jayne and Charles Wrightsman served as model patrons and standard-bearers for a generation of donors. Their legendary eye for art was exceeded in magnitude only by their unwavering dedication to The Met collection, galleries, and staff. They truly became part of the Museum's family, and we are eternally grateful for the infinite ways they profoundly impacted—and will continue to impact—this institution.”
Wrightsman also set out provisions for a substantial additional grant to the existing Wrightsman Fund, of which The Met has already been received over $80 million. The fund supports new acquisitions of works of art from Western Europe created between 1500 and 1850, and has helped the Museum achieve a total of $211.5 million in new gifts and pledges in the past fiscal year alone.
A selection of works from Jayne Wrightsman's bequest is on display from November 15, 2019 through February 16, 2020. Some are on view at the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, including a pair of 17th-century Italian porphyry urns and an 18th-century French porcelain inkstand in the form of a pomegranate.
The Department of European Paintings is currently showing 22 paintings from Wrightsman’s collection—such as works by Canaletto, Eugène Delacroix, Anthony van Dyck, Théodore Gericault, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Georges Seurat, and others. These works are identified along with other European paintings previously given by the Wrightsmans with a sticker on the label of each painting.
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