Norman Rockwell - The Connoisseur [1962]

Norman Rockwell - The Connoisseur [1962], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

Norman Percevel Rockwell (February 3, 1894 – November 8, 1978) was an American painter and illustrator. He was a prolific artist, producing over 4,000 original works in his lifetime. Most of his works are either in public collections, or have been destroyed in fire or other misfortunes. Rockwell's work was dismissed by serious art critics in his lifetime. Many of his works appear overly sweet in modern critics' eyes, especially the Saturday Evening Post covers, which tend toward idealistic or sentimentalized portrayals of American life; this has led to the often-deprecatory adjective Rockwellesque. Consequently, Rockwell is not considered a serious painter by some contemporary artists, who often regard his work as bourgeois and kitsch.

Norman Rockwell - Triple Self-Portrait [1960]

Norman Rockwell - Triple Self-Portrait [1960], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

Hendrick ter Brugghen - The Concert [c.1626]

Hendrick ter Brugghen - The Concert [c.1626], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

This painting has a strong claim to be ter Brugghen's finest treatment of a secular subject. He has taken a scene favoured by Caravaggio and his Roman followers (a group of flamboyantly dressed musicians seen by candlelight) and treated it in his own distinctive manner, placing the dramatically lit half-length figures against a light background. 

Paintings of the same subject by Caravaggio (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Bartolommeo Manfredi (Florence, Uffizi) are among the prototypes for this composition. Their large-scale, half-length figures, their crowding together within the composition and their closeness to the edge of the canvas, as well as the bright, colourful palette can all be found in this painting. Ter Brugghen brings to this existing format an individual fluency in modelling the soft edges of his forms and a remarkable subtlety of palette.

[Oil on canvas, 99.1 x 116.8 cm]

Isabel Bishop – Unknown Title

Isabel Bishop – Unknown Title , originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

Isabel Bishop (Cincinnati, Ohio, March 3, 1902 – New York, February 19, 1988) was an American painter and graphic artist. Bishop's mature works depict the inhabitants of New York's Union Square area, where she maintained a studio between 1934 and 1984. Her subjects are nearly always women who come from a blu-collar background, yet she was also known to produce panoramic landscape studies and social scenes. Bishop also delighted in multiple-figure compositions, often containing two females engaged in various workaday interactions. In the post-war years Bishop's interest turned to more abstracted scenes of New Yorkers walking and travelling, in the streets or on the subways.

Isabel Bishop - Unknown Title

Isabel Bishop - Unknown Title, originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

Louis-Leopold Boilly - A Game of Billiards [1807]

Louis-Leopold Boilly - A Game of Billiards [1807], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

Boilly's painting encapsulates the era of social change in France after the Revolution of 1789, with its affirmation of new tastes and norms of behaviour. During the period of the Directory and the First Empire, billiard rooms became like clubs to which people came not only to play the game but also to meet friends, to make new acquaintances, to gossip and flirt. Here tidbits of family and society news were exchanged, the latest political and social events were discussed.

The main character of the painting is a woman playing billiards, which testifies to the liberal manners of Napoleon I's age, since before that only men were fond of this game. Boilly's fine observation and presentation of characteristic figures of different ages and social groupings, as well as his skill in conveying light, space, details of the interior and costume, rank him among the greatest genre painters of the 17th and 18th centuries.

[Oil on canvas, 56 x 81 cm]

Balthus - Nude in Front of a Mantel [1955]

Balthus - Nude in Front of a Mantel [1955], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

Balthus painted landscapes, portraits, and interiors, but the female sitter in various states (daydreaming, reclining, or sleeping, often nude or partly clothed, and typically charged with erotic content) is the subject most frequently depicted in his oeuvre. Nude in Front of a Mantel is striking for the sculptural monumentality of the model, who looks as if carved from marble, and for the soft silvery light that bathes the figure and fills the room.

[Oil on canvas, 75 x 64.5 cm]

Balthus - Farmyard in Chassy [1960]

Balthus - Farmyard in Chassy [1960], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

[Oil on canvas, 130.5 x 162 cm]

Fernand Khnopff - Jeanne Kefer [1885]

Fernand Khnopff - Jeanne Kefer [1885], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

Fernand Edmond Jean Marie Khnopff (Grembergen near Dendermonde, September 12, 1858 – Brussels, November 12, 1921) was a Belgian symbolist painter. Although not a very open man and a rather secluded personality, he already achieved cult status during his life. Acknowledged and accepted, he received the Order of Leopold. His sister, Marguerite, was one of his favourite subjects. His most famous painting is probably The Caress (L'Art ou Des Caresses). His art often portrayed a recurring theme found in symbolist art: the dualistic vision of woman as either 'femme fatale' or angelic woman.

[Oil on canvas, 31.5 x 31.5 inches]

Jean-Leon Gérôme - Bashi-Bazouk Singing [1868]

Jean-Leon Gérôme - Bashi-Bazouk Singing [1868], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

An Albanian soldier, called an Arnaut, is seated beside his hookah (water pipe), playing an oud (a lute-like instrument) accompanied by the cawing of a pet raven perched on its cage. Seated in the background are three Bashi-Bazouks, or members of the Ottoman Empire's irregular troops, who were noted for their ferocity. Gérôme visited Greece and Turkey in 1854, sailed up the Nile River in 1857, and returned to the Near East on a number of occasions. Much of his work was devoted to orientalist paintings, which he imbued with a sense of reality by providing a wealth of details.

[Oil on canvas, 46.3 x 66 cm]

Francisco de Zurbarán - Saint Francis in Meditation [1635-39]

Francisco de Zurbarán - Saint Francis in Meditation [1635-39], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

The painting is one of the starkest and most austere of Zurbarán's representations of saints. The face is largely obscured by the cowl and its shadows and the light is concentrated on the coarse patched habit and on the skull clasped to the saint's body. It is probably of the early or mid-1630s, preceding a second picture of Saint Francis in the National Gallery which is signed and dated 1639. In that picture the figure, wearing the same habit, is placed in a landscape and directs attention outside the painting, holding a skull on a rocky ledge. Meditation on death was favoured, especially by the Jesuits, as a religious exercise, and saints contemplating skulls are frequent in Spanish and Italian painting in the early 17th century.

Zurbarán was born in Fuente de Cantos, near Badajoz, Spain. In 1617, after training in Seville, he returned to Llerena in his native province. By 1629 he was back in Seville, where he became the city's official painter. His pictures were mostly painted for Spanish religious orders. The distinctive style of Zurbarán was influenced by the realism of Caravaggio and his followers. His best work is both very direct and intensely spiritual. 

[Oil on canvas, 152 x 99 cm]

Amédée Ozenfant - Still Life, Dishes [1920]

Amédée Ozenfant - Still Life, Dishes [1920], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

Amédée Ozenfant (Saint-Quentin, Aisne, April 15, 1886 – Cannes, May 4, 1966) was a French cubist painter. He was born into a bourgeois family and was educated at Dominican colleges in Saint-Sébastien. After completing his education he returned to Saint-Quentin and began painting in watercolour and pastels. In 1904 he attended a drawing course run by Jules-Alexandre Patrouillard Degrave at the Ecole Municipale de Dessin Quentin Delatour in Saint-Quentin. He moved to London in 1936, where he set up the Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts in May of that year, before moving to New York some two years later.

[Oil on canvas, 72 x 60 cm]

Anna Petrovna Ostroumova-Lebedeva - Chain Bridge in St Petersburg [Early 20th century]

Anna Petrovna Ostroumova-Lebedeva - Chain Bridge in St Petersburg [Early 20th century], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

Anna Petrovna Ostroumova-Lebedeva was born in St Petersburg on May 17, 1871 into the family of a high official who subsequently became a senator; the second part of her name, Lebedev, she added after her marriage. Ostroumova is best known for her woodcuts and engravings, the main theme of her art was St Petersburg. Her impressions of her frequent travels abroad (Italy, France, Spain, Holland) are imprinted in interesting and striking works: woodcuts, engravings and water-colours. A gifted and well-educated painter, Ostroumova was not able to work with oils, to which she was allergic and which caused severe asthma attacks. She died on May 5, 1955 in Leningrad (St Petersburg).

[Colour xylograph, 10 x 16.8 cm]

Jan Steen - The Card Players [c.1660]

Jan Steen - The Card Players [c.1660], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

Jan Havickszoon Steen (c.1626 – buried February 3, 1679) was a Dutch genre painter of the 17th century (also known as the Dutch Golden Age). Psychological insight, sense of humour and abundance of colour are marks of his trade. Steen was born, and died, in Leiden. Many of Steen's paintings bear references to Old Dutch proverbs or literature. He often used members of his family as models. Jan Steen painted also quite a few self-portraits, in which he showed no tendency of vanity.

Paul Cezanne - The Card Players

The Card Players - Paul Cezanne, originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

Franz von Lenbach - Portrait of Marion Lenbach [1901]

Franz von Lenbach - Portrait of Marion Lenbach [1901], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

Franz von Lenbach (December 13, 1836 – May 6, 1904) was a German painter. Lenbach was born at Schrobenhausen, in Bavaria, although he spent most of his career in Munich. He also spent short periods of time working in Italy and Vienna. Although he painted a variety of subjects, he is remembered as a portraitist. His Venetian tradition of painting appealed to the aristocracy and rulers of Germany. He made the acquaintance of Bismarck in 1878 and formed a lasting friendship. Lenbach painted close to one hundred paintings of him over his career. After his death, Lenbach’s self-designed house in Munich was turned into a museum.

[Oil on canvas, 93 x 70.5 cm]

John Opie - Portrait of Miss Frances Vinicombe [1790s]

John Opie - Portrait of Miss Frances Vinicombe [1790s], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

John Opie (St. Agnes, 1761 – London, 1807) was an English painter. He was born in a tin-mining district in Cornwall, where his father was a mine carpenter. He was launched in London in 1781 as the Cornish Wonder, an untutored natural genius, by John Wolcot, doctor and skilful impresario. The young Opie's talent lay in painting peasant types in strong chiaroscuro, and he is best with old people and children, whom he treats with Rembrandtesque effects of light. His second marriage, in 1798, to the novelist Amelia Alderson led to his painting more literary subjects. From 1799 he had a studio in Norwich. He became a Royal Academician in 1787, was made a Professor at the Royal academy in 1805 and gave a series of lectures, published posthumously in 1809. 

[Oil on canvas, 92 x 71 cm]

Lorella Paleni - Cut Flowers II [2010]

Lorella Paleni - Cut Flowers II [2010], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

Lorella Paleni was born in Trescore, Bergamo, Italy in 1986, she currently lives and works in Venice, Italy.

[Oil on canvas, 140 x 140 cm]

Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville - An Episode from the Franco-Russian War [1875]

Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville - An Episode from the Franco-Russian War [1875], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

[Oil on canvas, 51 x 74.5 cm]

Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville - Street in an Old Town [1873]

Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville - Street in an Old Town [1873], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville (Saint-Omer, May 31, 1835 – May 18, 1885) was a French Academic painter who studied under Eugene Delacroix. His dramatic and intensely patriotic subjects illustrated episodes from the Franco-Prussian War, the Crimean War, the Zulu War, and portraits of soldiers. 

[Oil on panel, 51 x 34.5 cm]

John Singer Sargent - An Interior in Venice [1899]

John Singer Sargent - An Interior in Venice [1899], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

An Interior in Venice reflects America’s continuing infatuation with the picturesque and evocative city. Sargent (American, 1856–1925) invites the viewer to observe members of a prominent Boston expatriate family in the elegantly decorated salon of the Palazzo Barbaro, where they had lived since 1881. Sunlight from the unseen windows overlooking the Grand Canal flickers over the furnishings and the four figures: the American painter Ralph Wormeley Curtis, his wife, and his parents. While the younger couple seems to exchange pleasantries over tea, the senior members of the family are detached both from them and from each other - he leafs through a portfolio and she notices only Sargent. The casual composition and vivacious brushwork prompted James McNeill Whistler to dismiss "the little picture" as "smudge everywhere." The writer Henry James stayed at the Palazzo Barbaro in 1899 and re-created it as the Palazzo Leporelli in his novel The Wings of the Dove (1902), telling candidly, as does Sargent, a tale of the most refined end of Venice's social spectrum.

[Oil on canvas, 66 x 83.5 cm]

Edouard Manet - At The Cafe [c.1879]

Edouard Manet - At The Cafe [c.1879], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

Manet was the quintessential "painter of modern life," a phrase coined by his contemporary, the French poet Charles Baudelaire. Although he declined to participate in the Impressionists' group shows, Manet had been a key participant in their gatherings from the beginning. 

In 1878-79, he painted a number of scenes set in the Cabaret de Reichshoffen on the Boulevard Rochechouart, where women on the fringe of society freely intermingled with well-heeled gentlemen. The most developed of these, "At the Café," shows an older gentleman and a young woman seated at the counter of the crowded café. An image of the singer is reflected in the mirror on the back wall. In this composition, Manet captures a sense of the fleeting, disjointed quality of the pleasures of Parisian nightlife. The handling of the paint seems rapid, and the figures are crowded into the compact space of the canvas, each one seemingly oblivious of the others. The top-hatted dandy with the walking stick sits next to a despondent young woman, who likely is a prostitute. 

When exhibited at the gallery of "La Vie Moderne" in 1880, this work was praised by some for its unflinching reality and criticized by others for its apparent crudeness.

[Oil on canvas, 47.3 x 39.1 cm]

Ivana Lomová - A Woman with Long Legs [2008]

Ivana Lomová was born in Prague, November 11, 1959 where she lives and works. She studied at the Faculty of Architecture, Technical University in Prague (1978-83). She is the author of a comics strip series for children, and work for animated film. Since 1991 she began to work on her own creative art, such as drawing, painting and lithography. She started with a focus on a grotesque reflection of the world which surrounds her with a sense of irony and patience and an always-present consciousness of the absurdity of human existence. Later she began to work with photography, and this is what led her to a certain artistic asceticism, a sort of self-denial. The sense of absurdity of the world seemed to be replaced by humility towards it. [Oil on canvas, 100 x 100 cm]

Camille Pissarro - Fox Hill, Upper Norwood [1870]

Towards the end of 1870 Pissarro and his family took refuge in England from the Franco-Prussian war. He stayed in Upper Norwood, London until June 1871, and painted several views of Norwood and Sydenham including this painting. Many of the houses in this street have been rebuilt but the general character of this view and the distinctive bend still correspond with Pissarro's painting. [Oil on canvas, 35.3 x 45.7 cm]

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret - An Accident [1879]

After training with Alexandre Cabanel and Jean-Léon Gérôme, Dagnan-Bouveret (French, 1852 - 1929) turned from classical themes to subjects drawn from everyday life. In this scene, a country doctor bandages a boy's injured hand, while his family looks on with varying degrees of concern. The artist actually witnessed this incident while traveling with a doctor friend in the Franche-Comté region of eastern France. When this painting was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1880, it established the artist's reputation as an excellent reporter of rural customs and as a Realist who explored the psychological aspects of his subjects.

[Oil on canvas, 90.7 x 130.8 cm]

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo - Two Women Behind a Grille

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (baptised December 31, 1617 – April 3, 1682) was a Spanish Baroque painter. Although he is best known for his religious works, Murillo also produced a considerable number of paintings of contemporary women and children. These lively, realist portraits of flower girls, street urchins, and beggars constitute an extensive and appealing record of the everyday life of his times. Murillo was born in Seville, the youngest son in a family of fourteen. His father was a barber and surgeon. His parents died when Murillo was still very young, and the artist was largely brought up by his aunt and uncle. Murillo married Beatriz Cabrera in 1645; their first child, named Maria, was born shortly after their marriage.

[Oil on canvas, 41 x 58.6 cm]

Pablo Picasso - Glass Vessels [1906]

Picasso spent the summer of 1906 in Spain, where he produced a group of still lifes to which this painting belongs. Prior to this the artist had not been attracted by still life as an independent genre, but from now on it was to occupy a firm place in his work. This first look at still life was evidence of Picasso's growing interest in revealing the constructional essence of his subject. In this simple composition, of classical clarity, each object exists within its own spatial zone whilst being subordinate both to the strict compositional overall rhythm and to the rationale of confrontation and interaction.

Volume is brought to the fore and this in turn leads to a change in colouring, now built up of reddish-browns, yellowish-reds and greyish-white hues. This tonality, like the clear composition, gives the still life a sense of monumentality and unity.

[Oil on canvas, 38.5 x 55.5 cm]

Vladmimir Ezhakov - A Model

Vladmimir Ezhakov was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia in 1975.

[Oil on canvas, 100 x 114 cm]

Colleen Browning - Mother and Child

Colleen Browning (born 1929, Cregg, County Cork, Ireland) is an American realist painter. Browning attended London's Slade School of Art before moving to the United States in 1949, becoming an American citizen a year later. She was a major figure in the contemporary realist movement in the United States. In 2003, after surviving serious illness, she gave a substantial collection of her paintings to the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art. Her oil paintings are mostly of women set in various indoor and outdoor settings. In the past fifteen years she has painted her own massive frames as an incorporated part of the painting.

[Oil on canvas mounted on panel, 30.2 x 61.6 cm]

Jim Dine - The Toaster [1962]

In the early 1960s Dine (born June 16, 1935) produced pop art with items from everyday life. These provided commercial as well as critical success, but left Dine unsatisfied. In 1967 he moved to London where he was represented by the art dealer Robert Fraser, spending the next four years developing his art. Returning to the United States in 1971 he focused on several series of drawings. In the 1980s sculpture resumed a prominent place in his art. In the time since then there has been an apparent shift in the subject of his art from man-made objects to nature.

Davide Puma - Athens [2010]

Davide Puma was born in San Remo, Italy in 1971; he currently lives and works in Imperia, Italy.

[Oil on canvas, 200 x 200 cm]

Sid Smith - Machine

Sid Smith (born Brooklyn, New York, 1968) is an American artist.

“My intent in creating is to have poetic expression through the physicality of painting and my sculpture. I am very much into the process of building a painting, and lose myself in the creation of my paintings. If pressed for an explanation of why I did a certain piece a certain way I would have to say I was compelled to make it that way. Colour is an integral part of my work and I consider carefully my combinations and placement, finding inspiration in memories of things I have seen, and mood. Each piece begins as blocks and marks of colour with no concrete direction other than letting my brush and knife and colour find the canvas as they evolve along the way. I may add words, numbers, geometries and paint over them, rework them again, sand and carve through layers to excavate them to the surface again. I try to bring my memories, emotions and desires into a physical state on the canvas and hope that some of this is conveyed through my craft to the viewer. Bringing to my work those things that we carry with us and memories of what we have left behind. Ultimately my work comes into being for my love of creating and released so that I may keep evolving and honing my way of creating these pictures.”

[Oil on canvas, 60 x 36 inches]

Jonathan Viner - Irena [2009]

Jonathan Viner was born in 1976 in New York, and was raised up and down the east coast of the United States. After receiving a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1998, he moved to New York City where he continues to live today. Viner’s work draws upon a broad range of cultural influences that include a variety of Old Masters, contemporary American pop culture, and psychology. A significant theme in his work is the exploration of power relationships, particularly as they relate to safety and danger. The subtle hues and rich value ranges of Viner’s skilfully crafted oil paintings help to create an atmosphere of palpable tension. While his subjects are carefully delineated, Viner’s work offers the viewer space for contemplation, introspection, and conversation.

[Oil on panel, 12 x 12 inches]

Elizabeth Peyton - Jarvis

Elizabeth Peyton (born 1965) is an American painter who rose to popularity in the mid-1990s. She is a contemporary artist best known for stylized and idealized portraits of her close friends and boyfriends, pop celebrities, and European monarchy. Her work is characterized by elongated, slender figures with androgynous features. Her work at times resembles fashion illustration. The artist, interviewed in the catalogue for the exhibition The Painter of Modern Life at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2007, has indeed acknowledged the importance of photography as an inspiration source for her art. Her work is most often executed in oil paint, applied with washy glazes that are sometimes allowed or encouraged to drip. Several other works in coloured pencil have also found notoriety, and recent work has included etchings. The idealization and stylization of known celebrities has led some critics to characterize her work as being in the tradition of Andy Warhol. The artist has cited influence by David Hockney.

Frank Charles Peyraud - Twilight [1900]

A hard-working fine-art painter, muralist and panoramist, Frank Peyraud (Bulle, Switzerland, 1858 – 1948) earned a lasting reputation for rural landscapes, especially snow scenes in broadly defined forms and glowing colours. Excepting a trip from 1921 to 1923 to Italy and Switzerland, he was based in Chicago, where a Registrar of the Chicago Art Institute in a materials for a travelling exhibition, described him as the "dean of Chicago landscape artists."

William Thon - Twilight in Rome [1961]

William Thon (New York City, 1906 - Port Clyde, Maine, 2000) had no formal art training apart from thirty days at the Art Students League. He discovered his individual style through trial and error. He began painting in oil in a fairly realistic mode, but during his stay at the American Academy in Rome he discovered watercolour as a serious medium and began to loosen his style some. His work became more abstract, although the sources were still recognizable. Perhaps the major breakthrough for his painting came with the discovery of an abandoned quarry near his home in Maine.

[Oil on fibreboard, 73.6 x 119.4 cm]

Albert Edelfelt - In the Nursery [1885]

Albert Edelfelt (July 21, 1854 - August 18, 1905) was a Finnish-Swedish painter. He married Baroness Ellan de la Chapelle in 1888 and they had one child. Edelfelt was selected as the main motif in a recent Finnish commemorative coin celebrating the 150th anniversary of his birth. The reverse shows an embossed face of the artist.

[Oil on canvas, 73 x 109 cm]

Albert Edelfelt - Laundresses [1893]

[Oil on canvas, 97 x 128 cm]

Henri Le Sidaner - The Italian Boutique [1924]

Henri Le Sidaner (Port Louis, Mauritius, August 7, 1862 – July 1939) was an Intimist painter born to a French family. In 1870 he and his family settled in Dunkirk. Le Sidaner received most of his tutelage from the Ecole des Beuax-Arts under the instruction of Alexandre Cabanel but later broke away due to artistic differences. He travelled extensively throughout France and also visited many cities around the globe such as London, New York, Venice and Paris as well as some small villages throughout Europe.

Richard Haley Lever - Chelsea, England [c.1900-10]

Richard Haley Lever (Adelaide, Australia, 1875 – Mount Vernon, New York, 1958) was known for his town-shore landscapes and still-life painting in a style that combined impressionism with vivid colours and strong lines of realism - post impressionism. In his use of colour, he was deeply influenced by Vincent van Gogh. He freely explored numerous styles based on impressionism but was never locked into any particular style.

[Oil on canvas, 16.51 x 23.81 cm]

Jose Villegas y Codero - A Mystical Apparition [1900]

Jose Villegas y Codero (Seville, 1844 – Madrid, November 9, 1921) was a Spanish painter. His subjects were varied – historical, folklore and anecdotal. His brushwork was loose and spontaneous. Among his influences were Fortuny, Madrazo, and Eduardo Rosales.

[Oil on canvas, 52.71 x 80.65 cm]

Morris Graves - Wheelbarrow [1934]

Morris Cole Graves (Fox Valley, Oregon, August 28, 1910 – Loleta, California, May 5, 2001) was an American expressionist painter. Along with Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, William Cumming, and Mark Tobey, he founded the Northwest School. Graves' early work was in oils and focused on birds touched with strangeness, either blind, or wounded, or immobilized in webs of light. In later years and especially at the end of his notable career, Graves returned to sculpture, originally created forty years earlier, and received critical acclaim for his Instruments of a New Navigation, works inspired by NASA and space exploration. Morris Graves died the morning of May 5, 2001 at his home in Loleta, hours after suffering a stroke.

[Oil on canvas, 79.0 x 89.1 cm]

Thomas Eakins - William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River [1908]

This is one of several paintings in which Thomas Eakins (American, 1844 – 1916) provided an imaginary glimpse of the Philadelphia sculptor William Rush carving The Water Nymph and Bittern, which was installed in PhIladelphia's Centre Square In 1809. Although Eakins's initial motives came from a desire to restore Rush's name to the history of American art, his primary focus on the back of a strongly highlighted nude model also calls into play issues about traditional methods of art instruction. Rush was a founder of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where Eakins taught for many years until 1886, when he was dismissed in a controversy about his allowing female students to attend life classes.

[Oil on canvas, 91.30 x 121.50 cm]

Georgio Morandi - Metaphysical Still Life [1918]

Georgio Morandi (Bologna, June 20, 1890 – Bologna, June 18, 1964) was an Italian painter who specialised in still life. In 1915, he joined the army but suffered a breakdown and was indefinitely discharged. During the war, Morandi's still lifes became more reduced in their compositional elements and purer in form. A Metaphysical painting (Pittura Metafisica) phase in Morandi's work lasted from 1918 to 1922. This was to be his last major stylistic shift; thereafter, he focused increasingly on subtle gradations of hue, tone, and objects arranged in a unifying atmospheric haze, establishing the direction his art was to take for the rest of his life.

[Oil on canvas, 71.5 x 61.5 cm]

Georgio Morandi - Still Life [1925]

[Oil on canvas, 51 x 57.5 cm]

John Lavery - Bathing in the Lido, Venice [1912]

John Lavery (1856 – 1941) was born in Belfast, and studied in Scotland at the Glasgow School of Art from about 1874. Lavery achieved his pinnacle in the 1880s, with exhibitions in Europe and America, and as a leading portraitist, he was chosen to paint the State visit of Queen Victoria to the Glasgow International Exhibition in 1888 - there were some 250 portraits in that picture. From 1890 he visited Morocco frequently, and he changed his British base to London in 1896, where he used a studio belonging to Alfred East. During the First World War Lavery was an Official War Artist, and the Imperial War Museum has examples of his work.

Lucien Freud - Girl Sitting in the Attic Doorway [1995]

Lucien Freud (born Berlin, December 8, 1922) is a British painter. Lucian Freud is the son of an Austrian Jewish father, Ernst Ludwig Freud, an architect, and a German mother, Lucie née Brasch. He is the grandson of Sigmund Freud, brother of the late broadcaster, writer and politician Clement Freud (thus uncle of Emma and Matthew Freud) and of Stephan Gabriel Freud. He moved with his family to England in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism. He became a British citizen in 1939, having attended Dartingdon Hall school in Totnes, Devon, and later Bryanston School.

[Oil on canvas, 131.5 x 118.8 cm]

Grahame Sydney - Self Portrait at Fifty [1999]

Grahame Sydney (born Dunedin, 1948) is a New Zealand artist, based in the South Island region of Otago. His landscapes, which concentrate largely on sparse elements of human impact on Otago's wild natural beauty and the loneliness of individuals in this scenery, possess a style which could be described as magic realism, and have been compared to works by artists such as Edward Hopper. His work encompasses many media - oils, watercolours, etchings, tempera and lithographs.

[Oil on canvas, 121 x 91.5 cm]

Claude Monet - Grand Quai at Havre [1872]

In 1872, Monet travelled to his native Havre. The purpose of the trip was to prepare new works for the forthcoming exhibition. The present picture is one of the four paintings produced during his stay in Havre. Not without prompting from Japanese woodcuts, Monet "carved" his compositional structure. With this forest of masts and smokestacks, and the piles of barrels and bales of goods in the foreground, he conveys the sense of an extremely busy port, with ships departing for the ends of the earth as well as for Caen, the main city of the neighbouring département of Calvados. The juxtaposition of tall smokestacks of the ships in front with the masts of the fishing vessels behind reveals the onset of the industrial age, in spite of Monet's residual Romanticism. The picture shows a sunny day. Unfortunately, the weather changed and the painting remained not quite finished - the artist evidently did not want to spoil it by trying to complete it without consulting nature.

[Oil on canvas, 61 x 81 cm]