Fondation Custodia - Frits Lugt Collection

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Fondation Custodia - Frits Lugt Collection

The Fondation Custodia in Paris is a unique art collection, consisting mainly of drawings, paintings

The Fondation Custodia in Paris is an accessible and still growing art collection, created by the Dutchman Frits Lugt (1884-1970). It consists of more than 100.000 works of art: mainly drawings, prints, artists’ letters and paintings. The Fondation Custodia is also renowned for its publications and research as well as its exhibitions. It houses one of the most important art history libraries in France.

30/08/2026

Rediscovered at a Paris auction in December 2024, this highly theatrical Adoration of the Magi dated 1519 can be attributed to the Master of Mühldorf, a little-known but highly accomplished artist from the so-called Danube School. Delighting in the calligraphic possibilities of penwork, as well as in the decorative qualities of the brown-red prepared paper and the white highlights, the anonymous German artist distinguishes himself by a predilection for exaggerated perspective and wildly gesticulating figures. Only a handful of other drawings by him are known, most of them in the same technique, notably sheets at the British Museum in London and the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. Intriguingly, the new drawing has an early Italian provenance, as does one of those in London. It could be acquired at the auction for the Frits Lugt Collection, where German drawings from this period are sparse.

29/08/2026

Dated 1552, Frans Floris’s personification of Victory standing among prisoners and trophies of war is a reminder of how war-torn Europe was during much of the sixteenth century. Although he was a prolific print designer, this is the only plate Floris made himself. He based the composition on a painting he and his highly productive workshop made for the Arch of the Genoese Nation, a temporary structure erected for the triumphal entry in Antwerp in 1549 of Emperor Charles V and his heir, the future Philip II. This impression of the first state of the rare etching was acquired for the Frits Lugt Collection in 2025.

08/03/2026

The exhibition ‘Dessins du Seicento’, which opened yesterday at the Musée Condé in Chantilly, brings together over fifty Italian drawings of the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. To the relatively small but choice group of drawings from the museum’s own holdings (formed by its founder, the Duc d’Aumal) are added works from private collections, as well as the Musée du Louvre, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Orléans and the Frits Lugt Collection. Among our loans to the show is this graceful chalk study on blue paper by Federico Barocci. It is connected to the figure in the left foreground on one of the artist’s prime achievements, the altarpiece of the Madonna del Popolo, finished in 1579 for the church of Santa Maria della Pieve in Arezzo and today in Florence’s Galleria degli Uffizi. The woman depicted in the drawing encourages her child to look up at the apparition of the Virgin interceding with Christ in the upper half of the large picture. As was his habit, Barocci prepared the crowded composition in numerous drawings, over 120 of which survive. Our drawing is one of several outstanding sheets by Barocci acquired by Frits Lugt, who had a particular fondness for his work.

23/02/2026

A recent addition to the Frits Lugt Collection’s extensive holdings of artists’ letters is this illustrated example by Max Liebermann (1847-1935), dated 1924. Aged 76, the German painter wrote from his sumptuous palace on Berlin’s Pariser Platz, but outside, the world was far less rosy. The Weimar Republic was sinking into hyperinflation, and artists and intellectuals were among those suffering. The precarious economic and cultural situation of its neighbour inspired Switzerland to mount large-scale fundraising campaigns. As a token of gratitude, Liebermann sent this thank you letter to a recipient who remains unknown, accompanying his words with a drawing which can be understood as an allegory of Switzerland aiding the German intelligentsia. Frits Lugt, who personally knew Liebermann, acquired one of the artist’s drawings by Rembrandt, another illustration of compassion, depicting Christ healing the mother-in-law of Saint Peter. The composition and style of Rembrandt’s sketch are strongly reminiscent of the drawing heading the newly acquired letter.

18/02/2026

Refused by the jury of the Copenhagen salon, Vilhelm Hammershøi’s early painting of his sister Anna sewing met with greater success at the Paris Exposition universelle of 1889, where it received a bronze medal and the praise of as astute an art critic as Théodore Duret. The artist had made the work during his trip to the Low Countries in 1887, probably directly inspired by the genre scenes of his seventeenth-century predecessors. Today one of the treasures of the collection of works by the great Danish artist at the museum in Ordrupgaard, north of Copenhagen, Hammershøi’s painting was made into print by his contemporary Johan Rohde in 1893 with great refinement. This outstanding impression of his lithograph, acquired for the Frits Lugt Collection in 2021, is on view until 31 May in the exhibition ‘Hammershoi. The Eye that Listens’ at the Museum Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid.

13/02/2026

One of the few Italian paintings in the Frits Lugt Collection is this late masterpiece by Francesco Guardi, datable around 1780. Much of the canvas is taken up by the artist’s unmatched evocation of the water and sky of the Venetian lagoon, but it also includes a view of San Giorgio Maggiore, designed by Andrea Palladio and built in the second half of the sixteenth century. Guardi did not include the church’s clock tower, which had collapsed in 1774; it was rebuilt in the following years and completed in 1791. Versions of the same view — in drawing and in painting — survive in other collections, but they never quite match the compositional balance and virtuoso ex*****on of this work, which Lugt acquired in 1925.

05/02/2026

Today in New York, we acquired at auction this unusually large sheet of figure studies by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the visionary eighteenth-century draughtsman, printmaker and designer. The drawing contains not one or two, but four sketches of men, made (as often with Piranesi) on the back of a fragment of a proof impression of one of his etchings. Two of the figures are probably inspired by assistants active in the studio of his printer. The Piranesi scholar Hylton Thomas, who describes these works as ‘studies of movement’, notes that the unfinished extremities and distorted proportions of the figures increase their liveliness. Similar figures are ubiquitous in Piranesi’s etched views and evocations of Rome’s grandeur. The artist was previously not represented in the Frits Lugt Collection.

28/01/2026

We are pleased to announce that the Jacoba Lugt-Klever fellowship has been awarded to Annemarie Stefes, an independent art historian in Bremen. An initiative of the Fondation Custodia and the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD) in The Hague and named after Frits Lugt’s wife, the fellowship will allow her to complete a catalogue raisonné of the drawings of the Haarlem artist Nicolaes Berchem (1620-1683), the subject of her 1997 dissertation. Among the works included will be the fourteen sheets by Berchem in the Frits Lugt Collection, including this carefully composed and executed winterscape, which entered the collection in 1937. Despite the Northern nature of the scene depicted, Berchem’s more typical work as an Italianate landscapist can be recognised in the bridge, which seems to be based on Roman examples.

23/01/2026

This powerful figure study by Agostino Carracci belongs to a group of pen drawings that have been related to an engraving of Saint Jerome left unfinished at the artist’s death in March 1602. Like his brother Annibale, with whom he occasionally collaborated, and their cousin Ludovico, Agostino was also a productive and innovative painter in his native Bologna and well beyond. Rediscovered in 2006, the drawing was recently acquired for the Frits Lugt Collection in honour of the art historian Carel van Tuyll van Serooskerken, who devoted much of his studies to the Carracci, on the occasion of his retirement from the board of the Fondation Custodia.

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