Jayne Wrightsman (1919–2019), who passed away last April, was what you might call "Metropolitan royalty." For more than five decades, she and her husband Charles transformed The Met's holdings of European art by donating and purchasing works of exceptional quality and historical interest. Their objective was to make these marvelous works of art, created for the rich and entitled, accessible to the Museum's vast and diverse audience. Mrs. Wrightsman's bequest shows a more private side of her collecting, as it is composed of the works of art she chose to live with.

Among Mrs. Wrightsman's personal favorites was Anthony van Dyck's 1636 portrait of Henrietta Maria, the twenty-seven-year-old queen of England. It was painted as a diplomatic gift to Francesco Barberini, cardinal protector of England and Scotland, as part of the queen's project to improve relations between King Charles I and the Church of Rome. As the English Civil War (1642–51) approached, Queen Mary threw herself into politics, seeking foreign aid to overthrow the Parliamentarians. In 1642, she sailed to Amsterdam and pawned a great part of the English crown jewels. Returning to England with munitions, she was nicknamed "La Generalissima" because of the military schemes she urged upon her mild-tempered husband. When the Royalist position became hopeless, she fled to France and was living in the Louvre (then a royal palace) when she received word that her husband had been beheaded at Whitehall, on January 30, 1649.

In Van Dyck's depiction, painted ten years prior to these events, she is self-possessed yet demure, elegantly adorned but disarmingly affable. Her intelligence and firm convictions are rendered as charm and wit. The crown is set on a table so that it is visible but not prominent. For fifty years, this marvelous portrait had a privileged place in the Wrightsmans' residence, above the sofa in the sitting room.

In the mid-1980s, Mrs. Wrightsman began collecting French bronze statuettes, mostly made during the reign of King Louis XIV, whose grand taste she admired. She displayed this dramatic equestrian statuette in front of a gleaming mirror at the end of a corridor in the Wrightsman home. Catching viewers' attention from a distance, the statuette's beautifully preserved, translucent red lacquers and opulent, gilded base reverberated in reflected light. One of the finest bronze founders in Europe, Roger Schabol cast this portrait of the Elector of Bavaria Maximilian II Emanuel (r. 1679-1726) on a rearing horse by using a model for a never-executed monument of Louis XIV. The elector is wigged and armored in the French style to associate his rule with the divine right of kings. His casual control of the fierce steed underscores his power. The daring design and flawless execution of this bronze reflects Schabol's artistic mastery, as well as the sitter's sovereignty.

Mrs. Wrightsman was fascinated by the royal women who were taste-setters at the courts of Europe, as well as by the exceptional women who found success as artists in eighteenth-century France. This lushly handled drawing depicts Marie Antoinette, the young Austrian-born queen of France. It was drawn by Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, who was just twenty-three years old when she was first summoned to Versailles to paint the queen's portrait. With characteristic informality, she placed the queen in a garden setting, in a pose that emphasized her elegant and somewhat haughty posture. Marie Antoinette wears a robe à la polonaise, with billowing panels looped up to reveal a striped chiffon petticoat, and a floral-bedecked bonnet atop her upswept hair. The alliance between the painter and queen served to propel the career of the former and to soften the image of the latter—that is, until the events of the French Revolution upended the status quo.

These are just three gifts selected from a bequest of hundreds of works of art. They convey the exceptional eye and generosity of Jayne Wrightsman. Her passion made an extraordinary impact on The Met collection that cannot be overstated.