PARIS.- The Musée d’Orsay has announced an exceptional series of new acquisitions, marking one of the most ambitious collection expansions in its recent history. In 2025 alone, the museum completed nearly sixty acquisition projects, adding close to 1,000 works to its holdings. Seven of these newly acquired pieces—ranging from painting and photography to decorative arts, archival letters, and rare drawings—are now being presented to the public, offering a vivid snapshot of the museum’s evolving vision and curatorial ambition.

Together, the works highlight the breadth of the Musée d’Orsay’s collections and its commitment to a multidisciplinary understanding of art, history, and visual culture from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Among the most striking additions is Three Women in the Snow (1892–1894) by Dutch painter George Hendrik Breitner. Painted in Amsterdam, the work captures three working-class women braving a harsh winter, their hurried movement rendered with bold brushstrokes and an unusually cropped composition. Long admired for its raw realism and modern energy, the painting entered the museum as a gift from the Société des Amis des musées d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie, offered in tribute to Sylvain Amic, former president of the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie, who passed away in August 2025. The acquisition strengthens the museum’s representation of European modernism beyond France and places Breitner’s work alongside key figures such as Van Gogh and Mondrian.

Photography also features prominently in this year’s acquisitions with The Stonecutter (1853), a rare and remarkably preserved photograph by Charles Nègre. Considered one of the founding figures of French photography, Nègre sought to capture movement at a time when exposure times made such ambition technically difficult. The image, depicting a laborer frozen mid-action, represents a crucial step toward the development of instantaneous photography and reinforces the museum’s position as a global reference for 19th-century photographic practice.

In the realm of decorative arts, two repoussé metal panels created in 1904 by Emma Schlangenhausen and Hilde van Exner stand out. Originally exhibited at the St. Louis World’s Fair, these works reflect the ideals of the Vienna Secession, where art, design, and craftsmanship were conceived as a unified whole. Their acquisition also brings overdue recognition to women artists whose careers unfolded across Vienna and Paris at the turn of the century.

The museum has also added an extraordinary set of 240 preparatory drawings by Maurice Denis for his illustrated edition of The Imitation of Christ. These works reveal the artist’s creative process and his effort to fuse spiritual devotion with modern graphic language. Though the final publication failed commercially when it appeared in 1903, the drawings themselves stand as a powerful testament to Denis’s role in redefining illustration as an art form in its own right.

More intimate in scale, yet equally evocative, is a watercolor by Marie-Désiré Bourgoin depicting the bedroom of painter Ernest Meissonier immediately after his funeral. Filled with portraits, honors, and personal objects, the scene transforms the private space into a quiet memorial, blurring the line between life, death, and artistic legacy.

The museum’s historical holdings have also been enriched through the acquisition of a remarkable group of letters exchanged between Gustave Eiffel and astronomer Jules Janssen between 1885 and 1905. These documents shed light on an ambitious, ultimately unrealized plan to install an observatory atop Mont Blanc and deepen the Musée d’Orsay’s already significant archive dedicated to Eiffel’s scientific and architectural experiments.

Finally, one of the most unsettling additions is Edgar Degas’s pastel Physiognomy of a Criminal (1880–1881), acquired at auction. Depicting young defendants in a Paris courtroom, the work confronts 19th-century theories of criminality, social determinism, and visual stereotyping. Rare within Degas’s pastel oeuvre, the piece offers a stark reminder of how art once intersected with emerging—and deeply problematic—scientific and social ideas.