Acquisitions round-up: a rediscovered 19th-century self-portrait, Van Gogh’s ‘Mona Lisa of Brabant’ and a painting by a contemporary Tanzanian artist

Rosario Weiss’s La Atención (1841)

Museo del Prado, Madrid

The Prado has unveiled a self-portrait by Rosario Weiss (1814-43) that was believed lost until its recent rediscovery through a drawing held in the Museo del Romanticismo in Madrid. Weiss conceived this allegorical self-portrait on the theme of attention as part of a diptych paired with her self-portrait as silence, which belongs to the city of Bordeaux. Described by the Prado as “a prodigy of her time”, she trained during her childhood with Francisco de Goya in Madrid and Bordeaux, while her mother worked as Goya’s housekeeper. Weiss achieved rare success as a female artist and was appointed Queen Isabel II’s drawing teacher just one year before her premature death from cholera, aged 28.

Vincent Van Gogh’s Head of a Woman (Gordina de Groot) (1885)

Het Noordbrabants Museum, ‘s-Hertogenbosch

A crowdfunding campaign involving more than 3,000 people and a host of public and private funders helped Het Noordbrabants Museum in the Netherlands raise the €8.6m needed to buy Van Gogh’s “Mona Lisa of Brabant”. The artist was born and raised in the southern Dutch province. He made multiple paintings of a local peasant woman, Gordina de Groot, also known as Sien. This portrait prefaces Van Gogh’s early masterpiece The Potato Eaters (1885), which depicts the De Groot family around their dinner table. Purchased from the private collection of the London-based dealer Daniel Katz, Head of a Woman will serve as a centrepiece of the museum’s Van Gogh collection.

Everlyn Nicodemus’s The Wedding 45 (1991)

National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh

The Tanzanian-born artist Everlyn Nicodemus is presenting her first UK retrospective in Edinburgh, where she has lived for the past 15 years. The exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland (until 25 May 2025, then travelling to WIELS, the Brussels contemporary art centre, in autumn 2025) is supported by the Freelands Award for underrepresented women artists, which Nicodemus won in 2022. To mark the opening of the show, the galleries acquired this 1991 painting from a group of large-scale symbolic works created during Nicodemus’s recovery from a traumatic breakdown. The Wedding 45 evokes healing and renewal with its upright female figure and motifs of green leaves. The artist and Richard Saltoun Gallery also donated a second work, Eva (1981), to the galleries.