Van Gogh Museum Acquires Two Remarkable Pastels

Pastel as a medium

The medium of pastel enjoyed a resurgence in the late nineteenth century thanks to the discovery of various of new pigments that had a hitherto unknown intensity of colour. Drawings in pastel could be made relatively quickly and on location, and artists presented them as fully fledged, autonomous artworks, comparable to paintings. The Van Gogh Museum’s two new acquisitions illustrate the expressive range of the medium: Anquetin’s lively, colourful depiction of Parisian nightlife, and Degouve’s hushed nocturne in shades of blue.

Anquetin’s Avenue de Clichy, Five O’Clock in the Evening captures twilight in the artist’s district of Batignolles in contrasting planes of colour and bold contours, from the greenish reflection of the gas lamps to the red glow from the butcher’s shop shimmering on the wet pavement. At the time, five o’clock was also known as the ‘hour of the meat’, the moment when shoppers made way for sex workers. This gives the cuts of meat on display a certain twist.

The title, signature and inscription on the reverse pinpoint the scene precisely: ‘113bis Avenue Clichy, Paris’, a stone’s throw from the apartment where Vincent van Gogh was living and working with his brother Theo. The composition shows striking parallels with Van Gogh’s Terrace of a Café at Night (1888). Anquetin and Van Gogh belonged to the same circle working towards a new style of painting, known as Cloisonnism.

This style was characterised by flat areas of colour bordered by dark lines, inspired by Japanese prints and stained glass.

Lake Como is exceptional in both scale and quality. It is among Degouve’s largest and most important pastels, and was warmly received at the 1897 Salon de La Libre Esthétique. The Belgian artist used powdery pastel in a palette of many tones of blue in this mountain landscape.

Although the title specifies where the work was made, its hushed, meditative mood makes it seem more like a dreamscape that transcends time and place. The artist is considered a Symbolist for good reason. This work evokes inner states of mind that mattered more to him than an exact rendering of the visible reality.

Degouve was self-taught, from a noble French family, and closely connected to the Brussels avant-garde group Les XX. He regarded the original frame as an inextricable part of the work, its warm, golden tones heightening the ‘symphony in blue’.

The Van Gogh Museum has collected pastels and watercolours by Van Gogh’s predecessors, contemporaries and followers for decades. These new acquisitions align seamlessly with the museum’s collection policy to champion the 19th-century drawing as an artwork in its own right.

Avenue de Clichy adds context to the Paris in which Van Gogh and his fellow painters worked, specifically around the Boulevard de Clichy. The scale and quality of Lake Como underscore the equal standing of drawing and painting around the fin de siècle.