Six paintings donated subject to usufruct in Amiens

2/4/24 - Acquisitions - Amiens, Musée de Picardie - We recently reported on the donation of an Antoine Vestier painting to the Musée de Picardie by a couple of collectors (see news item 27/10/22). These collectors are particaularly generous, having recently donated six new works, subject to usufruct (the equivalent of a promised, non-revocable gift). All these works come from a single dealer, Stéphane Grodée, himself from Amiens.

1. Daniel Gran (1694-1757)
Dawn Chasing the Night, c. 1724
Oil on canvas - 89 x 81.5 cm
Donated subject to usufruct to the Musée de Picardie in Amiens
Photo: Stéphane Grodée

See the image in its page

The first of the six paintings that now belong to the museum is a ceiling sketch by the 18th-century Austrian painter Daniel Gran (ill. 1). Jérôme Montcouquiol is responsible for its exact identification: the work, acquired by Stéphane Grodée at auction as a French 18th-century school, had been attributed by him to Gregorio Guglielmi, the name under which it entered the collection. In reality, it was a preparatory study for the decoration of the cupola of the Schwarzenberg Palace in Vienna, which was destroyed in 1945. This makes the acquisition of a Germanic Baroque sketch that is rare in French collections all the more valuable. Its entry into the museum under the name of an 18th-century Italian Baroque painter, followed by its correct attribution to an Austrian Baroque painter, is reminiscent of a similar case at the Musée du Louvre, when it did not hesitate to buy fine anonymous paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries. A large ceiling study, The Assumption of the Virgin, was bought as a mid-eighteenth-century Roman school before it was discovered that it was the sketch for a fresco, also destroyed at the end of the Second World War, for the ceiling of the Bürgersaal church in Munich, by Martin Knoller... an Austrian painter. This demonstrates two things: that little is known about the Austrian school of the 18th…