Acquisitions

Thanks to a generous donation from private individuals in 2008, the Fondation Toms Pauli acquired The Picnic, the final piece of the Toms Collection. This English tapestry was part of a three-piece lot acquired by Reginald Toms in 1962, whose subject was Children’s Bacchanals (London, ca. 1700). It had decorated the walls of the Toms flat in Monaco, which is why it did not feature in the Château de Coinsins inventory and was not part of the Mary Toms donation in 1993.

In 2010, the Fondation Toms Pauli acquired a small format Flemish tapestry, woven in 1660 in the Brussels workshop of Gerard van der Strecken, a piece that supplemented an important ensemble in the Toms Collection. This above-door piece, depicting Apollo the Sun God, belongs to the thirty-nine-piece sequence of the series The Deeds of Scipio, commissioned by the Marquis of Benavides. The Fondation Toms Pauli already boasted three large historiated tapestries of this baroque rendering of one of the most famous series of the Renaissance illustrating the Punic Wars against Hannibal, designed by Gianfrancesco Penni and Giulio Romano.