A Norwegian Visionary for the Getty

Peder Balke, North Cape, about 1850. Getty Museum

The Getty Museum has purchased a night seascape by Norwegian Romantic painter Peder Balke (1804–1887). Sometimes known as the "Norwegian Turner," Peder was pupil of Johan Christian Dahl and met Caspar David Friedrich. By 1846 his international reputation was such that French king Louis Philippe I bought 30 of his paintings for the Palace of Versailles. By the mid 1850s however Balke abandoned the art market for socialism. He developed Balkeby, a utopian suburb for working people outside of Oslo. Balke continued to paint but not for the market. Many of the late paintings are experimental, small, and monochrome, drawing comparisons to Victor Hugo's visual art.

Balke was largely forgotten until shows at the National Gallery (2014) and Metropolitan Museum (2019). The Getty picture shows North Cape, one of the northernmost points in Europe and now a tourist attraction accessible by car. Balke visited it under more difficult conditions in 1832. North Cape became Balke's Mont Sainte-Victoire, repeated in numerous variations from memory. 

Peder Balke, The North Cape by Moonlight, 1848. Metropolitan Museum of Art

There is just one other Balke painting in an American museum, at the Metropolitan, and it's also a North Cape. The Getty painting, measuring about 16.5 by 21 in., is distinguished by its icy blue palette and use of impasto, for instance in the moon's reflection in the foreground. The picture was in the artist's family until last year. It's now on view in the Getty Center's gallery W201.

Detail of Getty North Cape

Georges Lemmen, Young Woman Crocheting (Julie Lemmen), 1890-1891. J. Paul Getty Museum

The Getty has also acquired an auction surprise by the little-known Belgian Neo-Impressionist Georges Lemmen. "Someone Just Made a Killing on This Obscure 19th-Century Painting" ran a May 2025 Artnet headline. They were speaking of Lemmen's 18-by-15 in. Young Woman Crocheting, auctioned by Sotheby's New York for $698,500. That was 10 times the high estimate. The picture has now turned up at the Getty, which says it purchased it from Gallery 19C.

Georges Lemmen (1865–1916) was a member of Les XX, the Belgian avant-garde group that included James Ensor and Fernand Khnopff. Each is prominently represented in the Getty collection. In 1887 Les XX showed Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte in Brussels. It came as a revelation to the group's artists, Lemmen included. He adopted a Pointillist style for two paintings of his sister Julie. The Getty picture (whose subject recalls Seurat's c. 1882 crayon drawing of his mother sewing, as well as precedents going back to Vermeer) was probably the first. The other, at the Art Institute of Chicago, is now displayed next to Seurat's masterpiece. 

A Seurat painting has long eluded the Getty. Young Woman Crocheting thus becomes the museum' only painting in the Pointillist idiom. Lemmen was admired for his ability to create psychologically convincing portraits from dots. He created only a few such paintings before abandoning Pointillism for Art Nouveau.

Young Woman Crocheting is on view in gallery W205.

Georges Lemmen, Portrait of the Artist's Sister, 1891. Art Institute of Chicago