New Acquisitions on View: Paintings by Georges Lemmen and Peder Balke

The Getty Museum has just installed two newly acquired paintings in its West Pavilion galleries: Young Woman Crocheting (Julie Lemmen) by the Belgian Neo-Impressionist Georges Lemmen (in gallery W205), and North Cape by the Norwegian Romantic painter Peder Balke (in gallery W201).

They are small but powerful paintings by little-known artists that contribute significantly to the diversification of the Getty’s 19th-century holdings while simultaneously building on key areas of strength.

The Getty Museum’s first pointillist painting

Young Woman Crocheting (Julie Lemmen) (1890-91) shows the artist’s sister, Julie Lemmen, concentrating intently on a delicate piece of lace work, her small crochet hook largely concealed by her proper right index finger. Lemmen’s portrayal has a degree of photographic exactitude (judging by extant photographs of Julie), but he has painted the whole in the daring Neo-Impressionist, or pointillist, technique, through the application of myriad small dots, a fitting analogue for Julie’s own meticulous handiwork. The portrait’s painstaking technique and brilliant palette—vivid pinks, oranges, greens, and blues—amplify its psychological intensity, just as no extraneous details distract from it. The portrait is a mesmerizing work of great inwardness and concentration, very close in spirit to Georges Seurat’s Madame Seurat, the Artist’s Mother (about 1882-83), one of four Seurat drawings in the Getty collection.

In 1891 Lemmen exhibited Young Woman Crocheting (Julie Lemmen) with the avant-garde artists’ association Les XX (The Twenty) in Brussels and immediately afterwards in Paris at the Salon des Indépendants, the principal forum for Neo-Impressionism. It was the first portrait the Belgian artist executed in the innovative Neo-Impressionist technique, which he had adopted in emulation of the pioneering Seurat. It is one of only a handful of Neo-Impressionist portraits Lemmen painted in the first half of the 1890s, before he took his art in other directions.

Young Woman Crocheting (Julie Lemmen) generated tremendous excitement when it emerged from a private collection in Florida and was put up for auction in New York in 2025—its first appearance on the market in sixty-five years. Bought by French & Co., consigned to Gallery 19C, and then sold to the Getty Museum, the painting will be the collection’s first work by Lemmen, and, more importantly, its first pointillist painting—filling a major gap and providing important context for later European offshoots of Neo-Impressionism, as represented spectacularly in Giovanni Segantini’s Spring in the Alps.

Lemmen’s painting furthermore strengthens the Museum’s representation of the late 19th-century Belgian avant-garde. This began in dramatic fashion with the 1987 acquisition of James Ensor’s crude, riotous masterwork, Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889, which he painted in defiant response to Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte – 1884 and to the Belgian artists, like Lemmen, who hailed Seurat as the new leader of the avant-garde. The Ensor has since been joined by notable works like Fernand Khnopff’s Jeanne Kéfer and George Minne’s Adolescent I, helping to make Getty a leading destination for Belgian avant-garde art in the United States.

Young Woman Crocheting (Julie Lemmen) joins only two other painted portraits from Lemmen’s Neo-Impressionist period in US museum collections, both of which are in the Midwest: Portrait of the Artist’s Sister (Art Institute of Chicago), which also depicts Julie Lemmen, and The Two Sisters, or the Serruys Sisters (Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields).

A romantic obsession

Norway’s massive North Cape (Nordkapp), a thousand feet of sheer cliff at the northernmost reaches of Europe, looms over the horizon in Peder Balke’s dramatic coastal seascape. A brilliant moon high above, at the apex of a theatrical archway of dark, light-fringed clouds, bathes the scene in a cold lunar glow. Serving in the foreground as witnesses to this sublime, awe-inspiring scene are some figures in a rowboat and in two humble sailing craft nestled in a nearby rocky cove.

The North Cape, which Balke visited once on an arduous trip in 1832, became a signature motif in his painting over the subsequent decades, conjured obsessively, time and again, through the filter of memory and imagination. The present work is one of numerous variants of his most iconic composition. With a limited palette of steely blue, white, and dark brown, Balke painted with remarkable fluidity and technical bravura. He scraped the paint in the sky to create the effect of lunar rays and made incredibly liberal use of impasto for his white highlights—at the edges of the clouds near the top and in the reflected moonlight on the water below.

Long neglected outside of his native Norway, Balke’s work has been attracting increasing international attention over the last 20 years, and he is now recognized as one of Norway’s most original painters. North Cape remained with the artist’s family descendants until it appeared on the market in Oslo last year; it was subsequently acquired by Agnews Brussels, which sold it to the Getty Museum. It has been publicly exhibited only once before, more than 70 years ago.

Small in size but big in wall power, North Cape makes a striking addition to the Museum’s collection of 19th-century northern European landscape painting. As a visionary nocturnal scene, it complements A Walk at Dusk by German painter Caspar David Friedrich, whose work was a touchstone for Balke. In its painterly freedom, however, which is so distinct from Friedrich’s minutely detailed handling, Balke’s picture provides an interesting comparison to the liberated facture of English and French Romantics like J. M. W. Turner and Théodore Rousseau, both represented by exciting examples in our galleries. Indeed, Balke is sometimes referred to as the Norwegian Turner, which is why we have installed North Cape next to Turner’s Van Tromp, going about to please his Masters, Ships a Sea, getting a Good Wetting.

North Cape is only the second painting by a Norwegian artist to enter the Getty Museum, the first being Edvard Munch’s Starry Night, acquired in 1984 just as the institution was beginning in earnest to build its 19th-century-painting collection. Only one other US museum features Balke’s work to date: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which added The North Cape by Moonlight to its collection in 2019, two years after mounting "Peder Balke: Painter of Northern Light," the first exhibition devoted to the artist in North America.

As with the Lemmen, it is a great pleasure to help introduce this exceptional painter to a wider audience. Both North Cape and Young Woman Crocheting (Julie Lemmen) are on view until the Getty Center’s temporary closure, for major renovations, in March 2027.