Sharjah 24 – WAM: Louvre Abu Dhabi will be welcoming 59 new loans and 56 new acquisitions to its galleries in the coming months, continuing to enrich the museum’s universal narrative by sparking new dialogues around shared history and cultural connections.

The latest acquisitions installed are two paintings: Georges de La Tour’s A Girl Blowing on a Brazier (1646-1648) and The Bolt by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. These two stand-out artworks were chosen to be part of the museum's world-class collection for their exceptional representation of aesthetic influence and art-historical importance.

Georges de La Tour was a French baroque painter known for his meditative candlelit scenes, and this is the last of his "night" series. Influenced by the chiaroscuro style of Caravaggio, his paintings had a palpable sense of wonder and stillness. A Girl Blowing on a Brazier is a late masterpiece by the artist and is part of the very small corpus of paintings attributed to the artist, which comprises just over 48 works, and is one of the few paintings with a faint, discernable signature by the artist.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard was a French painter and printmaker whose late-Rococo manner was distinguished by remarkable exuberance and energy. He was one of the most prolific painters of the Ancien Régime. He showed a great talent for art at an early age and was sent to study with the Rococo painter Francois Boucher. The painting is considered as one of his most famous, speculated to be one of three in a series chronicling a romance between the two subjects.

As the first universal museum in the Arab world, Louvre Abu Dhabi has been growing its permanent collection since opening in 2017, with over 600 works on display at any one time, and exhibited in dialogue with regional and international loans. This means the display of its permanent collection is always changing, as new loans and acquisitions are installed on rotation.

Louvre Abu Dhabi’s semi-permanent collection is displayed according to theme rather than strict chronology or geography, allowing visitors to experience global cultural connections and creativity across geographies and time. The dialogues between the artworks reveal how we all have more in common than we think.