The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has acquired four precious prints by Mary Cassatt, the American Impressionist artist and contemporary of Vincent van Gogh. The museum announced this at a press conference on Wednesday afternoon.
It concerns three large color etchings and a black-and-white lithograph depicting women. The museum paid more than 1.4 million euros for these prints, which come from an American collector. Three large funds and a number of private individuals have jointly made the purchase price available.
Mary Stevenson Cassatt (1844-1926) lived and worked in France for a long time. With her impressionist paintings and drawings, she is known as one of the innovators of the Paris art world in the late nineteenth century. The Van Gogh Museum considers its prints ‘among the most beautiful graphically produced in the fin de siècle’.
The three purchased color etchings – Passing through, The letter and Bathing woman – come from a series of ten with which Cassatt definitely established her name as a (print) artist. She made the etchings after visiting an exhibition of Japanese prints in Paris in 1890. About that exhibition, the American wrote to her friend Berthe Morisot, another female impressionist: “We can go and see the Japanese prints in the Beaux-Arts. Really, you can’t miss it. If you want to make color prints, you can’t imagine anything more beautiful. I dream of it and think of nothing more than color on copper.”
‘good women’
Vincent van Gogh, who was also influenced by Japanese printmaking, seems to refer to Cassatt in one of his letters. he did on June 20, 1888 from Arles in a long letter to his sister Willemien. Among the impressionists in Paris, Van Gogh writes, are two “good” women. The experts who annotated Van Gogh’s letters assume that he was referring to Cassatt and Morisot.
Due to the complex and laborious technique, color etching was a bold choice in 1891. And when artists dared to do that, they left the printing to specialists. Cassatt not; she chose to be closely involved in the entire production process.
Her ten color etchings from 1891 were printed in an edition of about 25 copies. American museums have by far the most copies. The few etchings that come to the market cost enormous amounts of money. A copy of Bathing woman (size 36.5×26.5 cm), one of the acquisitions of the Van Gogh Museum, changed hands in 1999 at an auction in New York for the equivalent of 368,000 euros.
Curator Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho calls the acquisitions “the crown on our collection of French graphics”. She praises the intimacy of Cassatt’s choice of subject and qualifies the prints as “unrivaled in terms of experimentation, technical finesse, stylization and subtlety”.
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The museum had been looking for Cassatt’s color etchings for years, says Rosa de Carvalho. If anything was offered, however, the prints were too expensive or the condition left something to be desired. The acquisitions are in top condition. Other etchings by Cassatt that the American collector offered the museum at the same time were rejected because, according to the museum, they are in a less good condition.
As soon as the Van Gogh Museum is allowed to open again, it will show the Cassatt prints. For four months. Because according to the conservation rules for works on paper, the prints must then be hidden from light for at least 44 months.
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