The Van Gogh Museum has acquired a major piece of art, which will help put Vincent Van Gogh’s work into context. The museum in Amsterdam disclosed that a pastel artwork made by French artist Edgar Degas entered its permanent collection. It is the first one-of-a-kind work of art by Edgar Degas to get into the national museum’s collection. You can view it when on a Van Gogh Museum tour thanks to the Dutch institution’s effort to acquire it from Degas’s seminal nudes pastel work series. The acquisition came about a year after the museum exhibition devoted to the work and times of many artists, including Vincent Van Gogh and Edgar Degas.
The curator of the museum Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho and its permanent collection employee Anne Steegstra were photographed hanging the work on the wall. ‘Woman Bathing’ is one in a series of ten pastels Degas made from 1884 to 1887. The nude pastels series marked Degas’s artistic transition, from scenes of public life in Paris to intimate women portraits. The work depicts a women’s figure bathing, with the back facing the audience. Similar to the other pieces in the artist’s series, it is notable for the focus on its subject, and the lack of elaborate detail on the setting of it.
Degas displayed one work from his series at an Impressionist show held in Paris city in 1886. In that 1886 exhibition, the piece attracted criticism and acclaim, especially for the awkward poses of the models he depicted. Vincent Van Gogh went to Degas’s exhibition, and the latter’s works put there influenced the former to make his nude studies series. Vincent’s series took cues from Degas’s compositional creativity, and he finished these months later that exposition at his Paris studio. He was an admirer of Degas’s drawings. For your information, Vincent’s best-known works were made after he went away from the City of Lights in 1888.
In a statement, the Van Gogh Museum said that it “has long cherished the wish to add a top-ranking Degas nude to its collection, preferably one from the period in which Van Gogh discovered the French artist’s work.”
That is why the piece of art will stay on the permanent display of the museum. It managed to get a great monotype by Degas in the recent past, and this adds to the collection.
