Artist’s daughter Marguerite features in most of the pieces, kept in the family until ‘complete surprise’ donation
The Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris has received an “extraordinarily generous” donation of 61 works by Henri Matisse that have been kept in the artist’s family.
Most of the donated art – which includes paintings, drawings, etchings, lithographs and a sculpture – features the painter’s daughter Marguerite.
The donation, described by the museum as exceptional and historic, was made by Barbara Dauphin Duthuit, the wife of Matisse’s grandson Claude, who died in 2011 in New York.
Many of the works had been loaned to the MAM for its Matisse et Marguerite exhibition last year, but the museum said Duthuit’s decision to allow them to keep them was a complete surprise. In 2013, Duthuit gave the Pompidou Centre Marguerite with a Black Cat, one of Matisse’s best known portraits of his daughter.
