Louvre acquires Chardin’s Strawberries painting thanks to 10,000 individual donors
Famous 18th-century work will tour France, heading to Lens and Brest
The Musée du Louvre in Paris has raised the final €1.3m needed to acquire a painting of a pile of strawberries by the 18th-century French artist Jean Siméon Chardin. The remaining amount came from almost 10,000 individuals who donated more than €1.6m to a fundraising campaign to keep the work in France. The painting, Basket of Wild Strawberries (1761), was sold for €24.3m (with fees)—the highest price paid at auction for an 18th-century French painting—at Artcurial in Paris in March 2022.