A collector donates to Benidorm her library, pictorial legacy and furniture heritage with more than 3,000 pieces
The French collector Cristina Boissie Charpentier, settled in the region for decades, has donated Benidorm City Hall all her family library, its furniture and decoration heritage, as well as the collection of oil paintings and drawings of her husband, the Sevillian painter Francisco Díaz Diaz. In total, more than 3,000 pieces that have already begun to inventory and catalog the technicians of the Historical Heritage department.
This morning, the mayor, Toni Pérez, and Cristina Boissie signed in the presence of the councilor of Historical Heritage, Ana Pellicer, the donation document, which includes the terms and deadlines for the delivery of the collector's property.
Both the mayor and Ana Pellicer thanked Cristina Boissie "her generosity and that she has trusted in this City Hall to be the legatee and custodian of this important heritage, compiled throughout a lifetime and that presents an unbeatable state of conservation, faithful reflection of her personality and her love for culture and art ".
The donation referred to the section of furniture and objects of decoration is made up of the goods that the donor has collected from the family home, many of them acquired by her father, to which are added those that the collector has incorporated during her professional activity as owner of an antique shop. An "exceptional" collection includes objects that are "very interesting because of their age, rarity and usefulness". Among them, pieces of ceramics and furniture of the XVIII century; abundant ethnographic material; musical instruments; an altarpiece from the XVII-XVIII centuries; or a very good collection of pocket watches.
As for the family library, at the moment 1,427 books have been inventoried, some of them dedicated by authors such as Juan Ramón Jiménez. The oldest volume of the collection is published in Lyon in 1592. In addition, the collection has more than two hundred works dating from the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.
To all this is added the pictorial work of her husband, who died at the end of the 80s. The Department of Historical Heritage has just begun the cataloging of this collection, which among oils, sketches and drawings is calculated to be more than a thousand pieces .
The mayor and the councilor of Historical Heritage have advanced that "as soon as the work of registration and cataloging of this very important donation is complete, we want to show this heritage to the citizens in Boca Calvari Museum and also in l'Hort de Colón where some of the pieces will stay permanently. "