Gauguin’s painting will be sold from a museum in Madrid

The painting, located in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum and estimated at $ 45.6 million, will be sold by the decision of the widow of Baron Hans Heinrich von Thyssen-Bornemisza.

One of Paul Gauguin’s paintings is likely to leave the walls of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Madrid Museum, where it spent many years to be in the hands of a new owner. This is the decision of the owner of the work – the famous Spanish collector Carmen Cervera, widow of Baron Hans Heinrich von Thyssen-Bornemisza. He was the founder of the museum, which is now a part of the Golden Triangle of Madrid (along with the Prado and the Reina Sofia Art Center).

The agreement concluded by Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza with the Ministry of Culture of Spain stipulates that 429 works with a total value of € 750 million from the Baron’s personal collection were provided to the museum for a period from 1999 to 2010. Since then, the agreement has been extended all the time. Since the same 2010, the widow of the baron, a well-known philanthropist and collector Carmen Cervera who inherited the entire collection in 2004, was trying to sell it to the state. However, no deal was reached.

The upcoming sale of Gauguin is not the first departure of a masterpiece from the walls of the museum to private hands. In 2012, Carmen Cervera sold John Constable’s landscape Castle at Christie’s auction in London for £ 22.4 million. This caused outrage from the Spanish art world.

It is now known that Carmen Cervera has already received permission from the authorities to export the work of Gauguin from the country. Claude Monet’s 1899 Charing Cross Bridge, valued at € 15 million ($ 17 million), as well as paintings by Degas and Hopper, can make a company for Gauguin’s masterpiece. And, despite the pandemic and the wave of cancellations and rescheduling of the main auction houses in the world, it is very likely that before the end of this year or early next year we will be able to see the works from the Thyssen-Bornemisza – Cervera collection as a part of the catalogs of the main auction of the season.