Nicolas Sursock

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Nicolas Sursock was a Lebanese art collector and a prominent member of one of Beirut's aristocratic families. He is best known for bequething his 19th century private villa to the city of Beirut to be transformed into a museum of modern art. His villa is known today as the Nicolas Sursock Museum.

[edit] Last Will and Testament

"As I love fine arts and long for their expansion, particulary in my homeland, Lebanon, as I wish this country would receive a substantial part of fine arts, and my fellow citizens would appreciate art and develop an artistic instinct, for this purpose that I pursue and that I can only be beneficial and contribute to Lebanon's development, I wish there would exist in Beirut, capital of the Republic of Lebanon, museums and exhibition rooms open to everyone, where master-pieces and antiques would be preserved and displayed.

"…I therefore set up in the form of waqf (mortmain) all of the real estate and its contents form a museum for arts, ancient and modern, coming from the territory of the Republic of Lebanon, the other Arab countries or elsewhere, as well as a room where the Lebanese artists' works shall be exhibited. It being understood that this museum shall remain eternally and perpetually (…)"

— Nicolas Sursock ^[1]