An agreement brokered by Sotheby’s will secure the future of the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art in Jerusalem, which had announced in September 2020 that it would sell a number of selected pieces to shore up its long-term finances. Under the arrangement, announced on 10 March 2021, the works destined for sale will instead be returned to the museum.
The resolution follows the intervention of The Al Thani Collection Foundation, a non-profit organisation focused on promoting art and culture, which was introduced to the museum’s board and the Israeli Ministry of Culture by Sotheby’s. The foundation will also provide the museum with an annual sponsorship for the duration of the agreement.
In exchange, a major work from the museum’s permanent collection will be exhibited for extended periods over the next ten years at the foundation’s new museum space at the Hôtel de la Marine on the Place de la Concorde in Paris, which is due to open in autumn 2021. Further loans will be exchanged between the two institutions.
Founded more than four decades ago, the L.A. Mayer Museum is devoted to the collection, preservation and exhibition of Islamic art and archaeological artifacts spanning the 7th to the 19th centuries, and holds one of the most important collections of Islamic art in the world.
The work to be shown in Paris is a silver vessel from the so-called ‘ Harari hoard’, named for the Anglo-Jewish scholar-collector Ralph Harari OBE (1892 to 1969). The hoard comprises twenty rare silver vessels dating to the 10th and 11th centuries, discovered in the early 20th century concealed in a large earthenware jar and first shown publicly at Burlington House in London in 1931. Scholars regard it as the most important group of Islamic silverware surviving from the early Medieval period.
(Press Release)
