Crowdfunding of Gauguin restoration a success

The restoration of French painter Paul Gauguin’s “Portrait of Suzanne Bambridge” will go ahead, following a successful crowdfunding campaign by the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels. The museum raised the €22,500 it needed in just 15 days.

That sum is being matched by the Leuven-based Baillet Latour fund to pay the total cost of the restoration, which will begin at the end of this month. It is expected to take some six months.

Any additional funds that come in to the crowdfunding campaign will be used to restore other works, said Samir Al-Haddad, the museum’s communications manager. “We are of course delighted that we have reached our goal so quickly,” he said. “We have so few resources to buy and restore works that we had to go in search of creative financing methods.”

Al Haddad noted that the approximately 200 donors to the campaign would be kept up to date with the progress of the restoration of the painting with photos and videos.

Gauguin painted the portrait of the wife of a political leader in Tahiti (detail pictured) during his stay there in 1891. The Royal Museums of Fine Arts purchased the painting from a private collector in France in 1923. It makes up part of the Fin-de-Siècle collection.