Purchases advance Getty’s ambitions

A medieval gilt-copper and enamel relief of Christ, thought to have come from a Spanish cathedral, and a 19th century portrait of a lady in her pink velvet dressing gown by French artist James Jacques Joseph Tissot have joined the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum. The new acquisitions -- purchased privately for undisclosed sums in an ongoing effort to build the relatively young institution’s art holdings -- will go on view in May at the Getty Center in Brentwood.

“This is a fabulous piece,” Antonia Bostrom, curator of sculpture and decorative arts, said of the metal work “Christ in Majesty.” About 18 inches tall -- an unusually large example of its type -- the artwork depicts a seated figure in a glass-jeweled robe, with his right hand raised in a blessing, left hand holding a Bible and feet attached to a rectangular enameled panel. The figure has “a sculptural presence,” she says, but it was formed in high relief of a single sheet of copper enhanced by gilding and engraved details.

Made around 1188 in Limoges, France, the artwork was probably designed for the Cathedral of St. Martin in Ourense, in northwest Spain, where Christian pilgrims stopped on their way to Santiago de Compostela, Bostrom says. The Christ figure is thought to have been part of an altarpiece that was dismantled in the early 19th century, possibly during the Napoleonic Wars. The Getty bought the work from a private collector in Spain.

“Christ in Majesty” initially will be displayed in a gallery of sculpture and decorative arts but it is intended as the centerpiece of a “Cathedral Treasury” expected to open early next year. The installation will be “a sacred space,” Bostrom says, putting the new acquisition in the context of Medieval and Renaissance stained glass, sculpture, decorative arts, paintings and manuscripts.

The Tissot painting, “Portrait of the Marquise de Miramon, nee Therese Feuillant,” is an 1866 oil-on-canvas from what scholars call the golden age of fashionable portraiture in France. The 30-year-old subject stands by a fireplace in a room of the Chateau de Paulhac in the Auvergne, her husband’s family seat. She is dressed in a flowing winter peignoir with ruffled borders and is surrounded by decorative objects favored by the rich -- a Japanese screen and ceramics, a terra cotta bust of a family member, a Louis XVI stool holding a pile of needlepoint.

The first painting by Tissot to hang in a public collection in Los Angeles, the work will add an example from the Second Empire (1851-1870) to the museum’s portraits. The De Young Museum in San Francisco has a Tissot self-portrait of the same period.

The Getty picture was exhibited only once, at the Paris World’s Fair in 1867, curators Scott Schaefer and Mary Morton say. The painting was kept in the sitter’s family until the museum bought it, through a French dealer.

“It’s as fresh and perfect as they come,” says conservator Mark Leonard, who cleaned the picture and removed its only flaw, some patches of yellowed varnish. A swatch of pink velvet from the gown, identical to the painted fabric and passed along to the Getty with the artwork, proves the point.

suzanne.muchnic@latimes.com