Acquisitions of the month: February 2025

Art Institute of Chicago
More than 2,000 works of French art from the collection of Jeffrey and Carol Horvitz

The American collectors Jeffrey and Carol Horvitz have, over the past four decades, amassed one of the most important private collections of French Old Masters in the United States. The Art Institute of Chicago, which already has an extensive collection of 19th-century French art, has now announced that more than 2,000 works from the Horvitz collection have been donated to the museum. This vast gift, made up of work from the 16th to the 19th century, comprises nearly 2,000 drawings, 200 paintings and 50 sculptures, and includes pieces by, among others, Boucher, Fragonard, David, Géricault, Vigée Le Brun and Boilly, as well as works by several lesser-known artists whose work is rare in US collections, such as Reynaud Levieux and Nicolas Prévost. The couple have also promised the AIC a series of financial donations to help with conservation, research and staffing, in what a museum statement said is ‘expected to become one of the largest financial gifts’ in the museum’s history.

Indigence and Honor (1804), Hilaire Le Dru. Art Institute of Chicago

Musée du Louvre, Paris
Religious icons from the Abou Adal collection

In 2022, the Louvre announced the establishment of a new department for Byzantine art and Eastern Christian arts, which is scheduled to open in 2027 in the Denon Wing. Its latest acquisition, a collection of 272 religious icons from the 15th to the early 20th centuries assembled by the late Lebanese collector Georges Abou Adal and, later, his son Freddy. The collection, which first went on public display at the Carnavalet Museum in Paris in 1993, has a startling geographical range, while the rarity of many of these works provides valuable insight into the enormously complex exchange of artistic traditions and religious beliefs that took place from the late Middle Ages onwards. Among the collection are Russian and Balkan pieces, Cretan icons from the 15th century, objects produced in Aleppo during the rebirth of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch in the 17th century, a number of Levantine and Melkite works and a large, exceptionally well-preserved icon, probably created in the 17th century, depicting the first council of Nicaea, with Emperor Constantine at its centre.

Archangel Michael (early 18th century), attr. Ne’meh al-Musawwir. Photo: Julien Vidal; © Musée du Louvre, Dist. GrandPalaisRMN

Princeton University Art Museum
Alphabet No. 1 (1960), Ibrahim El-Salahi

At the age of 24, the Sudanese artist Ibrahim El-Salahi travelled to London to study at the Slade; upon his return to Sudan in 1957 – a year after the country gained independence from Britain – El-Salahi became one of the founders of a modernist movement known as the Khartoum School, which took inspiration from, among other sources, Arabic calligraphy. ‘Calligraphy itself is an abstraction,’ El-Salahi said in an interview in 2019. ‘I had to break the bone form of the letters to find out what they came from – animals, humans, voices, spirits.’ That interest in transforming calligraphy into a new visual language, or series of motifs, is borne out in Alphabet No. 1 (1960), a composite painting made up of figures and geometric shapes, which has now been acquired by the Princeton University Art Museum. The painting is the first work by El-Salahi to be owned by the museum.

Alphabet No. 1 (1960), Ibrahim El-Salahi. Princeton University Art Museum. Photo: Jeff Evans; © Ibrahim El-Salahi/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge
Prints and paintings by Edvard Munch from the collection of Philip A. and Lynn G. Straus

Harvard Art Museums have received a bequest of 62 prints and two paintings by Edvard Munch from the collection of Philip A. and Lynn G. Straus. The couple, who died in 2004 and 2023 respectively, had been collecting works by Munch since 1969, when they bought Salome, a lithograph from 1903. They had a longstanding relationship with Harvard Art Museums, financing a new conservation centre there with a $7.5m donation in the 1990s, as well as gifting other artworks over the years by Beckmann, Nolde, Braque and others. Among the works in the bequest are four self-portraits spanning 1895–1930; four impressions of his famous Madonna; a woodcut version of Melancholy II that Munch printed with his own hand-crank press; and the painting Train Smoke, a chilly view over the Oslo fjord that last year underwent conservation work to restore it to its original state. The acquisition strengthens the museum’s holdings of Norwegian art and takes its collection of works by Munch to 142.

Melancholy II (1898), Edvard Munch. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum. Photo courtesy Harvard Art Museums; © President and Fellows of Harvard College

British Library, London
Missing pages from one of Edward Elgar’s sketchbooks

In 1930, 25 years after the premiere of Edward Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro for strings in London, the composer tore out a set of pages from the sketchbook in which he had jotted down his original ideas for the piece, and gave them to a former pupil of his, Frank Webb. The British Library has now bought these pages at a Christie’s private sale from Webb’s descendants, after discovering that they were torn out of one of Elgar’s sketchbooks already in the library’s collection. These sketchbooks help us follow Elgar’s creative process and allow experts to see the early iterations of pieces that would go on to become classics. Because of the fragility of the documents, the newly acquired pages will not be reattached to the original sketchbook but displayed alongside it in the rare books and music reading room.

Sketches for the Introduction and Allegro for strings by Sir Edward Elgar (1905). Photo: © The British Library Board

Nationalmusée um Fëschmaart, Luxembourg City
Portrait of Sebastian Spörlin (1626), Bartholomäus Sarburgh

Bartholomäus Sarburgh is hardly a household name today, but in the first half of the 17th century this German painter was an acclaimed portraitist who travelled around Europe for commissions – he is recorded as having worked in Bern for three years in the early 1620s. This painting of 1626, which has been acquired by Luxembourg’s National Museum, depicts Sebastian Spörlin, the burgomaster of Basel, in formal dress, with one hand on a sheathed sword. Sarburgh included the subject’s age in the top right-hand corner of the painting and, even more pleasingly, inscribed the name of Spörlin’s elegant pet spaniel, Credit, just above the dog’s head, which can be seen peeking out from behind his owner’s legs.

Portrait of Sebastian Spörlin (1626), Bartholomäus Sarburgh. Nationalmusée um Fëschmaart, Luxembourg City