The photo “Montmartre – Rue du Chevalier de la Barre” is among the work by Eugène Atget acquired by the Getty. (photo courtesy of The Getty Museum)

The J. Paul Getty Museum has acquired a collection of 209 photographs by French photographer Eugène Atget, two magnificent busts by French sculptor Charles Cordier, and a pair of rare bronze reliefs by the Italian Renaissance sculptor and architect Bartolomeo Ammannati.

“The transformational acquisition of Atget photographs, a portion of which is a gift to the museum, makes our holdings of this artist among the most significant in the country,” said Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “We are especially grateful to Dan and Mary Solomon for their astute eye in building this collection and their generosity in offering it to Getty, where it will further enrich our representation of late 19th and early 20th century French photography by its most innovative and forward-looking practitioner.”

“The pair of portrait busts by Charles Cordier, representing a man and a woman of North African descent, are the most renowned and splendid of a series of studies the artist made of Black subjects as representations of universal beauty,” Potts said. “These lavishly polychromed bronze and stone portraits will become one of the highlights of our 19th-century sculpture collection and provide a muchneeded opportunity to critique the representation of Black subjects and narratives in colonial times. The two bronze reliefs by Ammannati are rare masterpieces of Renaissance sculpture by one of Michelangelo’s closest colleagues and friends. One of the reliefs is indeed an homage to the greatest of all 16th-century sculptors, and the impact of his achievement on Ammannati is clear in the second relief showing a pair of river gods.”

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For information, visigetty.edu.