Art Institute trustee Carol Horvitz and her husband, Jeffrey Horvitz, have donated nearly 2,000 drawings, 200 paintings, and 50 sculptures to the Art Institute of Chicago, the museum announced Tuesday.
The gift makes the Art Institute one of the leading exhibitors of French art outside France, if not the leading exhibitor, based on the breadth and depth of its holdings. Among the artists represented are renowned court painter Charles Le Brun and his descendant through marriage, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun; Rococo artists François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard; Neoclassical painters Jacques-Louis David and Marie-Gabrielle Capet; and several artists whose work is seldom exhibited in the United States.
The Horvitzes’ gift includes planned financial contributions for the collection’s upkeep. While a museum spokesperson declined to share the value of those contributions, the museum expects their sum to become “one of the largest financial gifts in the history of the Art Institute.”
Last year, Aaron I. Fleischman and Lin Lougheed contributed $75 million towards a new Art Institute facility. That was preceded by two $25 million dollar gifts by the Nichols and Bucksbaum families, which also targeted structural improvements to the museum’s downtown campus.
“We are so grateful to Jeffrey and Carol for this impactful gift,” Art Institute president and director James Rondeau said in the museum’s statement. “Their continued support and passion for the museum is truly special, not only because it will allow millions of visitors to experience a fuller story of French art, but also because their generous financial support of the ongoing care and research of this collection will allow us to continue advancing our broader mission.”
The Horvitz Collection is considered the United States’ premier private collection of French Old Master artworks. The Art Institute offered a foretaste of the collection through two exhibitions — one focused on Neoclassical paintings, the other on French Revolution-era drawings — in the fall. Contemporary Japanese ceramics from the Horvitz Collection were also loaned for last spring’s “Radical Clay: Contemporary Women Artists from Japan.”
“We have always envisioned this collection remaining as a whole in order to be more than the sum of its parts, and for it to go to a major American museum where the most visitors can experience these artistic treasures, where scholars and curators can avail of the resources and advance this important research, and where our enthusiasm will resonate long after we are gone,” Jeffrey Horvitz said in an Art Institute statement. “We spent years thinking about where the collection should ultimately go — there was no more perfect choice than the Art Institute.”
Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.