New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art will sell a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington that it has kept for 80 years during a Christie’s auction of American art this January.
The 1795 painting depicts Washington near the end of his presidency, and is one of more than 100 portraits of him that Stuart painted. The Met, on the other hand, owns one more, also from 1795, which is more famous than this one; that work is among the most outstanding works in the museum’s holdings.
At Christie’s, Stuart’s painting is expected to sell for between $1.5 million and $2.5 million, making it one of the best lots at auction. However, it is unlikely to topple Stuart’s auction record, set in 2018 by the sale of another Washington portrait of Peggy and David Rockefeller for $11.5 million.
Related Articles
O Art Journal The first news of the sale of Stuart’s painting came on Wednesday.
Museums regularly sell works from their holdings in a practice known as offloading. Museums typically auction pieces that are considered duplicates of those they already own or are no longer considered relevant to their institutional setting.
In the case of the Met, the money brought in from the sale of Stuart’s work will support a fund dedicated to future acquisitions, bringing it in line with the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) guidelines which stipulated that institutions can withdraw objects, by that whenever doing so helps to maintain their collections.
During the pandemic, the AAMD loosened those guidelines, allowing museums to take greater liberties when selling art at auction. But doing so has periodically resulted in scandal, as was the case in 2020, when the Baltimore Museum of Art tried to sell works by Andy Warhol, Brice Marden and others in the name of diversity, only to scrap the plan at the last minute. minute as mounted pushback.
The Met itself has removed works from its holdings in recent years, most notably a Pablo Picasso sculpture that sold at Christie’s for $45 million in 2022.
