Watteau to Degas: French Drawings from the Frits Lugt Collection
October 6, 2009, through January 10, 2010
| |
 |
|
|
| |
Frits (Frederik) Johannes Lugt (1884–1970) |
|
|
Frits (Frederik) Johannes Lugt (1884–1970) was the only child of a civil engineer in the Amsterdam Public Works Department. He was a born collector, who by the age of
eight had formed his first collection of curiosities — Het Museum Lugtius (The Lugt Museum),
“open when the Director is at home” — and who sold his shell collection to the natural
history department of Amsterdam’s Royal Zoo. At age twelve, he talked his way into the
Print Room of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum to study the Dutch Golden Age drawings and
started work on a catalogue of them three years later. At sixteen, he left school to work in the
auction house of Frederik Muller & Co. In 1910 Lugt married Jacoba Klever (1888–1969),
the only daughter of a coal magnate. With the outbreak of the First World War, Lugt left
Muller’s auction house to deal on his own, and also to pursue his scholarship on Dutch and
Flemish drawings. He and his growing family — five children in all — lived in an eighteenth-century
country house in Maartensdijk, in the province of Utrecht. In the 1920s Lugt and his
wife traveled frequently to Paris, and over the next three decades he would be engaged in
cataloguing and publishing the Northern drawings in each of the French capital’s principal
public collections.
In his thirties Lugt began to collect in a more serious and systematic way, initially specializing
in Dutch and Flemish drawings and prints, his chief interest. The death of Lugt’s father-in-law
in 1935 ensured that his family’s financial situation was established on a sound footing and
allowed him to continue research and writing without the constraints of holding an official
position. Lugt was among the founders and principal supporters in the creation of the
Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (RKD), an institute devoted to the study of
Netherlandish art and artists established in the Hague in 1930. With the onslaught of the
Second World War, Lugt sent his most important prints and drawings in sixty registered-mail
envelopes to Switzerland, where he and his family resided between September 1939 and
May 1940. They then crossed the Atlantic and spent the war years at Oberlin College, Ohio,
before returning to Europe in 1945.
Eager to establish his collection in an active urban
center, in 1947 Lugt created the Fondation Custodia in Paris. In 1953 he acquired the Hôtel Turgot
at 121, rue de Lille, as a home for his collection, and it was in this building that the Institut Néerlandais was inaugurated in January 1957. For the next thirteen years, Lugt poured his
considerable energy into organizing exhibitions, catalogues, concerts, and lectures in this
cultural center a few steps from the Assemblée Nationale. After his death in 1970, the activities of
the Fondation continued unabated, and the collections were extended by his successors. |
