A major gift for the Philadelphia Museum of Art

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has acquired five major French paintings - a late Cézanne view of Mont Sainte-Victoire, a Manet still life of fruit, a landscape and a cityscape by Pissarro, and a portrait of a young girl by Berthe Morisot - all as a bequest from longtime museum supporter Helen Tyson Madeira, who died last year.

In addition, the museum has received two early portraits by Marcel Duchamp, of the parents of his lifelong friend, Gustave Candel, donated by Candel's daughter, Yolande Candel.

The paintings already are hanging in the galleries, according to museum officials; some have been there for several years as anonymous loans.

In making the announcement of the acquisitions, museum director Timothy Rub emphasized the importance of donations in building the institution's holdings.

"The distinctive character of our collection is due largely to transformational gifts, almost all of which have come from Philadelphians who cared deeply about both this institution and their city," Rub said in a statement. "The extraordinary paintings bequeathed to us by Helen Madeira had long been promised to the museum and can now be seen in the context of the great collection that was a bequest from her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Carroll S. Tyson Jr. more than five decades ago."

The museum has extensive holdings of Cézanne and has characterized Madeira's Mont Sainte-Victoire bequest as "among the masterpieces of the last decade of the artist's life." The painting, hung in the same gallery as another late view of the mountain near the artist's home in Aix-en-Provence, as well as The Large Bathers (1900-1906), dates from 1902 to 1906.

Édouard Manet's Basket of Fruit (1864), the first Manet still life to enter the museum's permanent collection, joins several sea scenes and portraits by the French master. The two works by Camille Pissarro, Railroad to Dieppe (1886) and Avenue de l'Opéra: Morning Sunshine (1898), join several canvases by the same artist, often characterized as the oldest impressionist.

Berthe Morisot's Girl with Basket (1892) is the second Morisot portrait of a young girl to enter the collection.

The two portraits by Duchamp, dating from 1912, continue to fill out the museum's Duchamp holdings, the largest in the world. Rub characterized 1912 as "a critical year in the artist's career."

The portraits, he said, "represent a welcome addition to a group of paintings through which Duchamp's development as a young artist can be carefully documented."

Yolande Candel, who donated the paintings of her grandparents, recalled that, "while growing up, I vividly recall Marcel expressing to my father his personal satisfaction with the fact that so much of his work remained together at the Philadelphia Museum of Art . . . . Furthermore, I think that both paintings would nicely complement the other early canvases by Marcel already in the museum's collection."

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