Image: Getty Center, Los Angeles
The Getty Museum has installed two newly acquired paintings in its West Pavilion galleries, adding works by Belgian Neo-Impressionist Georges Lemmen and Norwegian Romantic painter Peder Balke to the collection. ‘Young Woman Crocheting (Julie Lemmen)’ by Lemmen is on view in gallery W205, while ‘North Cape’ by Balke is installed in W201. Both paintings are small in scale, but Getty describes them as powerful additions that broaden its 19th-century holdings.
The Lemmen painting, dated 1890–91, is the museum’s first pointillist work and the first work by the artist in the Getty collection. It shows the artist’s sister, Julie Lemmen, absorbed in lacework, and the museum notes that Lemmen rendered the scene in a Neo-Impressionist technique built from tiny dots. The acquisition fills what Getty calls a major gap in its collection while adding context for later European offshoots of Neo-Impressionism. It also strengthens the museum’s representation of the late 19th-century Belgian avant-garde, which already includes works by James Ensor, Fernand Khnopff and George Minne.
According to Getty, ‘Young Woman Crocheting (Julie Lemmen)’ was exhibited in 1891 with the artists’ group Les XX in Brussels and then at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, an important venue for Neo-Impressionism. The museum says the work generated considerable excitement when it appeared at auction in New York in 2025 after 65 years in a private Florida collection. It was then bought by French & Co., consigned to Gallery 19C and sold to Getty. In the museum’s galleries, it joins a small group of Neo-Impressionist portraiture by Lemmen already held in US museum collections.
Balke’s ‘North Cape’, made about 1850, brings a different mood and geography to the galleries. The painting depicts Norway’s North Cape, a dramatic coastal cliff at the northern reaches of Europe, under a moonlit sky filled with dark clouds. Getty describes the image as a hallmark of Balke’s long engagement with the subject, which he visited only once, on an arduous trip in 1832, but returned to repeatedly in memory and imagination. The museum says the work’s limited palette, scraped sky and heavy impasto create a striking example of the artist’s painterly bravura.
The Balke acquisition is especially notable for the Getty’s northern European landscape holdings. The museum says it is the collection’s second painting by a Norwegian artist, after Edvard Munch’s ‘Starry Night’, acquired in 1984. It also aligns with the gallery display beside Joseph Mallord William Turner’s ‘Van Tromp, going about to please his Masters, Ships a Sea, getting a Good Wetting’, underscoring Getty’s interest in placing Balke in conversation with British and German Romantic landscape painting. The museum notes that ‘North Cape’ is one of numerous variants of Balke’s best-known composition and that it had been publicly exhibited only once before, more than 70 years ago.
Both paintings are now on view at the Getty Center until the museum’s temporary closure for major renovations in March 2027. The new installations arrive as Getty continues to foreground collection growth through recent acquisitions, and as it prepares additional public programming connected to the institution’s current exhibitions and events.
