Van Gogh museum acquires important Degas pastel

Van Gogh museum acquires important Degas pastel

Society January 29, 2020

https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2020/01/van-gogh-museum-acquires-important-degas-pastel/

Curator Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho (right) and collection staff member Anne Steegstra. Photo: Jan-Kees Steenman

In a first for the Netherlands, the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam has acquired a fully worked out pastel by French impressionist Edgar Degas, which will be on show from next Wednesday, the museum has announced. The pastel, called Woman Bathing, was bought at Sotheby’s in New York for €6m. The money was raised by the BankGiro Loterij, the Mondriaan Fonds and the Trition Collection Foundation. The pastel is part of a series of over 10 pastels by Degas made between 1884 and 1887 in which female nudes almost fill the entire frame of the picture. Vincent van Gogh, who was working in Paris at the time, greatly admired Degas and went to see his work at the final Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1886. Van Gogh particularly liked the nudes, of which a number were on show, and his own nude studies show the direct influence of the French artist, both in technique and composition. ‘If you look at a pastel by Degas up close you can see that he used an incredible amount of colour, including for the skin tones of the body. It’s like a multi-coloured palette of loose dashes. This cross-hatching, with Degas superimposing and complementing colour, clearly inspired Van Gogh,’ curator Roos Rosa de Carvalho told the NRC.( https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2020/01/29/van-gogh-museum-koopt-pastel-van-edgar-degas-a3988530)

The work is not only important for the connection between the artists’ work but also for the link with Vincent van Gogh’s art dealer brother Theo. ‘One of the first exhibitions mounted by Theo van Gogh as an ambitious art dealer in Paris was of works by Degas, in 1888. He also sold a number of his pastels and Vincent is sure to have seen them there,’ Rosa de Carvalho said. Bathing Woman will be exhibited among other works from Van Gogh’s Parisian period and other works by contemporaries such as Claude Monet and Gustave Caillebotte.