The paintings that adorn the walls of Hôtel Turgot in Paris are treasures seldom shown to the public. For the duration of almost three months, a large selection of the paintings will leave their ‘hôtel particulier’ to be shown in the adjacent Institut Néerlandais.
At the heart of the collection are works by the Dutch painters of the Golden Age, but how many people are aware that the Fondation Custodia / Collection Frits Lugt also owns important Flemish paintings from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a masterpiece by Francesco Guardi (1717-1792) and Italian and French still-lives like the rare trompe-l’œil by the French painter Nicolas de Largillière (1656-1746)? This exhibition will also be an opportunity to discover some of the artists of the ‘Silver Age’, the eighteenth-century Dutch School, whose names deserve to be better known. Last but not least, a new aspect of the Frits Lugt Collection, the nineteenth-century oil sketches on paper by French, Dutch and Danish artists, will be presented for the first time. Many of the paintings have been restored especially for this exhibition, and seventeenth-century Dutch frames have been acquired so that the works can be shown to the best possible effect.
All the paintings on show can also be viewed on the exhibition website: www.fondationcustodia.fr/ununiversintime/.