The late Brian Sewell, renowned as an acid-penned art critic, has left a tender painting to the National Gallery in London, a place he loved so much he once said he wanted to have his ashes mixed with bird food and scattered on its front steps.
Maternal Affection, a glowing painting on copper by the French artist Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée, has been hung beside works by other French 18th-century artists including Jean-Honoré Fragonard, François Boucher and Jean-Antoine Watteau. Although there are works by Lagrenée in the collections of the Bowes Museum and Stourhead, this is the first on public display in a national collection.
The director of the gallery, Gabriele Finaldi, said: “Brian Sewell had a profound love for the National Gallery as well as a connoisseur’s passion for lesser-known masters. It is especially pleasing that Lagrenée’s beautiful and refined Maternal Affection, which he owned, has come to the gallery as a gift from his estate.”
Sewell, who was born in London in 1931, and died in September 2015, said in an interview: “As a child there was not a major museum or art gallery in London I didn’t know, and the National Gallery was my favourite,” and he continued to pay weekly visits to Trafalgar Square for most of his life.
His columns for the Evening Standard were noted for occasional high praise and more frequently columns of beautifully crafted invective: he once wrote of Damien Hirst that “to own a Hirst is to tell the world that your bathroom taps are gilded and your Rolls-Royce is pink”.
The auction two months ago of his collection of more than 200 works vindicated his critical eye, selling at Christie’s for £3.7m, twice the pre-sale estimate, with one exquisite drawing by Daniele da Volterra, a 16th-century pupil of Michelangelo, selling to a museum for £797,000, five times the estimate and a world record for the artist.
Christopher Riopelle, acting curator of 18th-century French painting at the National Gallery, said the Lagrenée was a beautifully preserved work of exquisite refinement, and the gift allowed the gallery show the work of a hugely admired artist for the first time.
