The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has announced a bequest of more than $80 million as well as nearly four hundred works of art from the estate of trustee emerita Jayne Wrightsman.

The bequest includes an eight-figure gift for the Wrightsman Fund, which provides support for the acquisition of art created between 1500 and 1850 in Western Europe and Great Britain, as well as significant gifts to various museum departments, including Drawings and Prints, European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, the Department of Asian Art, the Department of Islamic Art, and the museum's Watson Library. A selection of works from the bequest will be on display at the museum through mid-February, including a pair of seventeenth-century Italian porphyry urns, an eighteenth-century French porcelain inkstand in the form of a pomegranate, a portrait of Marie Antoinette by Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, and works by Canaletto, Eugène Delacroix, Anthony van Dyck, Théodore Géricault, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and Georges Seurat.

Charles Wrightsman (1895–1986) became a trustee of the museum in 1956, followed by his wife, Jayne (1919–2019), in 1975. In total, the couple gave nearly thirteen hundred works to the institution, in addition to providing support for the purchase of masterpieces such as Johannes Vermeer's Study of a Young Woman, a self-portrait by Peter Paul Rubens that shows the painter with his family, and a portrait of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier and his wife by Jacques-Louis David.

"Jayne and Charles Wrightsman served as model patrons and standard-bearers for a generation of donors," said Met president and CEO Daniel H. Weiss. "Their legendary eye for art was exceeded in magnitude only by their unwavering dedication to the Met collection, galleries, and staff. They truly became part of the museum's family, and we are eternally grateful for the infinite ways they profoundly impacted — and will continue to impact — this institution."

(Image credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art)