Brooklyn Museum/Los Angeles County Museum of Art/Museum of Modern Art, New York
Collection of the Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation

Henry Pearlman began collecting art in 1945 and by the time he died, some three decades later, built up a significant collection of mostly Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting, drawing and sculpture. Since the 1970s most of the collection has been on loan to the Princeton University Art Museum. Now, the foundation, set up by Henry and his wife Rose in 1955, has announced that its entire collection of 63 artworks will be given to three US museums: MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Brooklyn will get 29 of them – including works by Gauguin, Soutine and Modigliani – while MoMA will get 28, including most of the Cézannes in the collection. The gift to LACMA of six works include masterpieces by two artists who have until now been absent from the museum’s collections: Manet and Van Gogh, with Young Woman in a Round Hat (c. 1877–79) and Tarascon Stagecoach (1888) respectively.

Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
La pêche aux écrevisses (c.1870–80), Marie Bracquemond

Marie Bracquemond’s star has risen in recent years as more attention has been given to the women, including Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, who helped shape the Impressionist movement. Walker Art Gallery has become the first institution in the UK to own a Bracquemond, having bought La pêche aux écrevisses (c. 1870–80), a lively depiction of a woman fishing for crayfish with children frolicking in the background. Bracquemond was a Salon painter early in her career and studied under Ingres; her work shifted radically in the 1870s under the influence of Impressionism. This work, distinctly Impressionist in its sense of dynamism, use of colour and freedom of brushwork, constitutes one of her early experiments with this new style.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/Cleveland Museum of Art
18th-century Chinese prints

The Met and the Cleveland Museum of Art have jointly acquired a group of 18th-century Chinese prints from the collection of Christer von der Burg, collector and founder of the Muban Educational Trust, which is dedicated to the preservation and promotion of Chinese woodblock printmaking. The prints – almost all of which were produced in the city of Suzhou, in eastern China – depict an array of subjects, from flora and fauna to people, architecture, antiquities and more. Many of them also observe artistic conventions that were at the time associated with Europe, such as linear perspective and hatching to convey light and dark. Each museum has received around 100 prints; Cleveland will put its new gift on display late next year and the Met will include a selection in its upcoming exhibition Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, which opens on 22 November.

Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth
Still Life with Melon, Watermelon, and Other Fruits (c. 1610–20), Pensionante del Saraceni

Among the artists who flourished in Rome immediately after Caravaggio’s death in 1610 was an elusive painter, possibly French, about whom very little is known today. Known as the Pensionante del Saraceni (‘Saraceni’s lodger’, since he is thought to have lived with the painter Carlo Saraceni for a time), the artist painted a small group of exquisitely detailed paintings that bear the imprint of Caravaggio’s tenebrism. Among them is this still life, recently acquired by the Kimbell from the dealer Nicholas Hall, of melon, grapes, pomegranates and more. It joins several notable still lifes in the museum’s collection, including Jacques de Gheyn II’s Vase of Flowers with a Curtain (1615) and a very recent acquisition, The Cut Melon (1760) by Jean-Siméon Chardin.

ARoS, Aarhus
Four works by Igshaan Adams

The first exhibition in the Nordic countries of the South African artist Igshaan Adams closed last month at ARoS in Aarhus, but Adams’s work can still be seen at the museum. ARoS has acquired four works that appeared in the exhibition, including a large tapestry, Jaime-Lee, Byron, Dustin, Faroll, Lynett (2024), which is made of rope, chains, beads, shells and other materials and is named after his collaborators on the piece: five members of the Garage Dance Ensemble. The other three are all ‘dust cloud’ installations: large-scale sculptures woven together from found objects that hang over gallery-goers in an ethereal mass.