The Michel Lacoste Donation to the Louvre Museum

Thanks to the generosity of Michel Lacoste, a set of one hundred pieces of silverware was the subject of a donation in November 2025 of present assets, to take effect in the future, to the Louvre Museum. These works, of diverse types, reveal the full craftsmanship 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 Objets d’Art, alongside the Louvre’s silverware and ceramics collections normally shown in this room.

These hundred works represent roughly a quarter of the collection built since the 2000s by their owner, Michel Lacoste, whose passion for silverware was born from the auction catalogue of the Puiforcat collection that his maternal grandmother had given him. This major sale, planned for 1955, never took place, as most of the lots were bought by the Greek shipowner Stavros Niarchos to give them, subject to a usufruct, to the Louvre Museum. Today, wishing in turn to share his passion for this category of works, to pass them on to future generations and to contribute to the enrichment of national collections, Michel Lacoste is offering part of his collection to the Louvre Museum, whose choice was obvious, since it already houses the greater part of the Puiforcat collection.

The hundred selected pieces are distributed as follows: 1 work from the 16th century, 22 from the 17th century, 76 from the 18th century and 1 from the 20th century. They notably add considerable depth to the 17th-century holdings, both Parisian and provincial, and make it possible to show several renowned master goldsmiths not yet represented in the museum’s collections, such as Jean-Baptiste Chéret, Pierre-François Bonnestrenne and Joseph-Théodore Vancombert. Others complete the corpus of great masters of French goldsmithing such as Nicolas Delaunay, Claude II Ballin, François-Thomas Germain or Jacques-Nicolas Roëttiers, to name only a few.