The story
Specialists who handle old drawings anywhere in the world reach for a reference known simply as "Lugt". It is a survey of collectors' marks, the small stamps owners pressed onto their sheets, compiled by the Dutch art historian Frits Lugt, and it is still how a drawing's past owners are traced. Lugt also collected on a grand scale. In 1947, with his wife Jacoba Lugt-Klever, he placed everything in a foundation and called it Custodia, Latin for safekeeping.
The foundation lives in the Hôtel Turgot, an 18th-century mansion on the rue de Lille in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, which Lugt bought in 1953. Visitors come for the exhibitions staged in its rooms. Its core is Dutch and Flemish art of the 16th and 17th centuries, with some 7,000 drawings, sheets by Rembrandt among them, about 15,000 prints and around 450 paintings. One of the prints is The Rabbit Hunt, the only etching Pieter Bruegel the Elder made with his own hand. Lugt also gathered artists' letters, now more than 40,000 of them, from Dürer and Michelangelo to Gauguin and Matisse.
The collection keeps growing, above all in small oil sketches painted outdoors in the 19th century. Recent arrivals include a view of the Quirinal in Rome by the young Edgar Degas and a study of the dunes near Arcachon, on the Atlantic coast, by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
