The Gaines Challenge Fund

In 1981, avid horseman, collector, and philanthropist John Gaines issued a $250,000 challenge grant—to be matched by donors and the University—to buy works for the newly created UK Art Museum. The resulting funds enabled the purchase of seventy-three paintings, drawings, and prints, including work by Old Masters and important contemporary artists. 

Gaines and his wife, Joan, personally gifted Jean Baptiste Carpeaux’s sculpture La Négresse, which will be on view along with Agostino Carracci’s Madonna and Child with St. John and the early seventeenth-century Spanish painting A Knight of Santiago and His Lady, among other works.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website