La donation Michel Lacoste au musée du Louvre - Orfèvrerie française de Mangot à Puiforcat

Thanks to the generosity of Michel Lacoste, a collection of one hundred pieces of goldsmithing was donated in November 2025 as an endowment of tangible assets to the Louvre Museum. These works, of diverse typologies, reveal the full savoir-faire and refinement of French goldsmithing from the 16th to the 18th century. They will be exceptionally displayed, together, for more than six months in Room 605 of the Department of Objects of Art, opposite the Louvre's collections, silverware and ceramics normally exhibited in that room. These one hundred works represent about a quarter of the collection assembled since the 2000s by its owner, Michel Lacoste, whose passion for goldsmithing was born from the Puiforcat sale catalog that his maternal grandmother had given him. This major sale planned for 1955 never took place, most of the lots having been purchased by the Greek shipowner Stavros Niarchos to offer them to the Louvre Museum subject to usufruct. Today, eager to share in turn his passion for this typology of works, to pass them on to future generations and to participate in enriching the national collections, Michel Lacoste is donating part of his collection to the Louvre Museum, a choice that was natural since it already houses the greatest part of the Puiforcat collection. The hundred selected pieces are distributed as follows: one work from the 16th century, twenty-two from the 17th century, seventy-six from the 18th century, and one from the 20th century. They notably contribute to a substantial enrichment of 17th-century pieces, both Parisian and provincial, and allow for the inclusion of several renowned silversmiths not yet represented in the museum's collections, such as Jean-Baptiste Chéret, Pierre-François Bonnestrenne, or Joseph-Théodore Vancombert. While others complete the corpus of the great masters of French goldsmithing such as Nicolas Delaunay, Claude II Ballin, François-Thomas Germain, or Jacques-Nicolas Roëttiers, to name but a few.