Collectors
of Dutch and Flemish drawings and prints
This is a new page, still under construction. Here we intend to summarily list living private collectors with their specialties (drawings and/or prints, period, subject) and basic information on their collections, as far as known from publications and the media. Collectors are invited to add information, or have information changed. A portrait can be added, or one of the most cherished sheets.
Most of the past collectors are known because they either had a collector’s mark, included in Frits Lugt’s Marques de Collections, and/or their collections have been bequeathed or sold to a museum, or sold at auction. Some living collectors are known because they are mentioned in publications or in the media, others are only known in the inner circle of specialists but wish to remain anonymous, which we will respect.
Collectors are presented in alphabetical order.
Jean Bonna
Jean Bonna, a successful Swiss banker from Geneva, has been collecting Old Master drawings for forty years. His collection comprises over 400 drawings and is particularly strong in masterpieces from the Italian Renaissance, the French 18th and 19th century, but also works by Dutch and Flemish masters, such as Goltzius, Bloemaert, Rembrandt, Neyts and Jordaens. Bonna employs a part-time curator, Nathalie Strasser. Selections of his collection have been exhibited from time to time, the most important being Raphael to Renoir. Drawings from the Collection of Jean Bonna (with a wonderful catalogue, including an interview with Bonna by George Goldner) in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (afterwards in Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland) in 2009. There is also an extensive interview with Bonna by Louise Nicholson in Apollo. The International Magazine for Collectors, June 2009 issue and a nice introduction by Noël Annesley in the catalogue of the auction at Christie’s in Paris on 27 April 2019, where some 30 of his sheets were sold. Another 70 drawings will come to auction in London and New York later in 2019/20.
Matthijs de Clercq
Dutch-born Matthijs de Clercq, who made his career in the financial business in New York and is still living in Manhattan, is a collector of Old Master drawings, though not for himself but for the Teylers Museum in Haarlem. He has created a foundation which financially supports acquisitions of drawings for Teylers Museum’s famous printroom (which has a wealth of Italian drawings, including many by Michelangelo and Raphael, but lacks early Netherlandish drawings, except those by Goltzius). In 2010 the Teylers Museum staged an exhibition (with catalogue, see image) of a selection of De Clercq’s collection of Netherlandish drawings, mainly from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including sheets by Aertsen, De Vos and Matham. See more in the Dutch daily journal Trouw and on the museum’s website.
Arlene & Arthur Elkind
A collectors couple from New Rochelle, NY, devoted to Northern European prints and drawings. (Dr. Elkind is a renowned specialist in headache management and we surmise collecting OMP & OMD is a good remedy, yet to be universally acknowledged.) The Elkinds had an exhibition in 2006 at the Syracuse University Art Galleries: A Changing Landscape, which was also shown at the Johnson Museum of Art (Cornell University) in Ithaca in 2007. Among their most recent acquisitions is a set of seven etchings by Jacques de Gheyn II, dated 1616, representing The Seven Wise Men of Greece (acquired at the Van Regteren Altena sale in Amsterdam, December 2014).
Roger & Naomi Gordon
Roger and Naomi Gordon from Boston, Massachusetts, are collectors of mainly eighteenth-century Dutch drawings. The Gordon collection has not yet been extensively published. A souvenir catalogue of a selection of his drawings is available, which was written by Wous Niemeijer and Robert-Jan te Rijdt of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, and published by the Gordons on the occasion of a study visit by a group of CODART members on 29 October 2003.
Clement C. Moore
Together with his wife Elizabeth, Chips Moore, a retired businessman living in New York, is a collector of Dutch seventeenth-century drawings since the 1980s. One of his latest acquisitions is a drawing by Avercamp in the Van Regteren Altena sale (Christie’s, London 10 July 2014). A selection of over 90 drawings was exhibited in the Morgan in 2012 and published in the accompanying catalogue Rembrandt’s World: Dutch Drawings from the Clement C. Moore Collection (see our Publications page). His collection is a promised gift to the Morgan Library & Museum in his home city. See more on the Morgan website, a Morgan press release, Pinterest and a review in the New York Times.
Jan & Wietse van den Noort
The Van den Noort brothers, of The Hague, both of whom have taught drawing for many years, have been passionate and knowledgeable collectors of prints and drawings for nearly half a century. In 2012 the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen organised an exhibition of 300 sheets, called Kindred Collections in which the two collections were fused into a single harmonious whole. The main points of focus are French prints of the 19th century and Dutch prints from around 1900 and the twentieth century. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue, which you will find on our Publications page. For an interview with the two collectors on Dutch television, click here.
Sheldon & Leena Peck
For nearly 45 years, Sheldon Peck (1941-2021) has been a serious collector of Dutch and Flemish old master drawings and paintings. The Peck collection started as a collaboration between Sheldon and his late brother Harvey and continued as a joint interest shared with his wife Leena (1945-2019). A segment of their collection was featured from 1999 to 2001 in a traveling exhibition, Fresh Woods and Pastures New, Seventeenth- Century Dutch Landscape Drawings from the Peck Collection in Chapel Hill, at Cornell and in Worcester (link). In 2003, a second exhibition from their collection was mounted in Boston: Rembrandt Drawings: Twenty-Five Years in the Peck Collection (link). Their collectors’ mark is recorded in Lugt Online. The Pecks, both orthodontists and university educators, also collected Finnish modern art and had an impressive collection of rare books on the history of orthodontics and dental medicine (link). In 2017, Sheldon and Leena Peck donated their collection of drawings to the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill (see the Online Collection Catalogue).
For comments and suggestions please contact the webmaster.