Impressionnist NFT pastels in Boston
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) and laCollection.io are offering for sale a series of "unique digital copies of physical artworks" (NFT) of rarely exhibited impressionist pastels from the museum's collection. Presale registration will begin June 26, 2022 and will include NFTs from some of the greatest artists of the 19th century.
The profits from this sale will go to the conservation of two paintings by Edgar Degas:
Edmondo & Therese Morbilli (circa 1865) and Monsieur Degas senior listening to Lorenzo Pagans play the guitar (1869-72).
Among the works presented:
Wide Landscape (c.1862) and View of the Sea at Sunset (c.1862) – landscapes by Claude Monet which were among the first pastels he showed at the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1874
Dandelions (1867-1868), Farmyard by Moonlight (1868) and seven other pastels by Jean-François Millet, whose work with this medium struck Vincent van Gogh so much that he said he had to take off his shoes because he stood on "holy ground" observing these magnificent works of art
Depictions of ballerinas made by Edgar Degas over several decades of his career, including Danseuses au repos (1881–85) and Danseuses en rose (c. 1900), which feature various aspects of his pastel techniques
In addition, this summer, laCollection.io and MFA will present from July 29 this collection of NFT pastels in the house of Claude Monet in Giverny.
By the end of the 19th century, avant-garde artists in France and elsewhere were using pastels to capture the instantaneous - fading smiles, passing rain clouds or vibrant flowers about to wilt. Pastel works by artists such as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Odilon Redon, Jean-François Millet, Édouard Manet or Edgar Degas are essential to understanding the Impressionist movement, which transformed art from 1860 until in the early 1900s.
Bostonians were among the world's first collectors of French Impressionists. The MFA received its first three paintings by Claude Monet as gifts in 1906 and today has one of the largest collections of paintings by the artist outside of Paris. Boston's love of Impressionism was not limited to Monet. He expressed himself through donations and wise purchases – works by artists from Edgar Degas to Gustave Caillebotte – for what is recognized as one of the finest collections of Impressionist art in the world.
In his art history lectures, Fabrice Roy combines the past with the present, in a poetic and playful evocation of the French 19th century...