Claude Monet - Houses on the Achterzaan [1871]

Claude Monet - Houses on the Achterzaan [1871], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

This light-filled, en plein air scene is one of twenty-four landscapes that Monet painted during his sojourn in the Netherlands in 1871. Painted near the village of Zaandam, the Achterzaan river occupies the foreground of the painting while windmills and industrial buildings can be seen in the distant background. The water reflects the multi-coloured houses and willow trees that line the river bank as well as a white sail boat that floats along the water. A woman dressed in a white diaphanous gown stands beneath a willow tree on the left, gazing by the water. 

Employing a distinctly blonde colour palette reminiscent of that used by landscape painter Corot, Monet renders this scene with attention to atmospheric detail and palpable light. This painting also evokes a sense of leisure and pastoral beauty typical of Dutch seventeenth century paintings that Monet would have seen during his stay in Holland. The artist’s colour palette, portrayal of leisurely pursuits, and increasing attention to the surface of the canvas, all practices that Monet explored during his stay in Holland, were significant and influential in the development of his increasingly modern approach to painting.

Monet postdated this work, marking the canvas in his studio in the year after it was painted. The fact that Monet held on to the canvas for many years after he completed it contributes to the pristine condition of the unlined, unvarnished painting.

[Oil on canvas, 45.7 x 67 cm]

Claude Monet - Île aux Fleurs near Vétheuil [1880]

Claude Monet - Île aux Fleurs near Vétheuil [1880], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

This is one of two views of the Île aux Fleurs, an island in the Seine near Vétheuil, that Monet painted in the summer of 1880. The other, slightly larger version is in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. A variety of formal problems engaged the artist's attention during this period. Here the rapid, flickering brushstrokes create a strong pattern in the foreground that diminishes the illusion of space and emphasises the abstract character of the painted surface.

[Oil on canvas, 66 x 81.3 cm]

Childe Hassam - Winter in Union Square [1889-90]

Childe Hassam - Winter in Union Square [1889-90], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

[Oil on canvas, 46.4 x 45.7 cm]

Childe Hassam - The Water Garden [1909]

Childe Hassam - The Water Garden [1909], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

This intimate landscape, with its strong rhythmic composition, flattened space, and tapestry-like application of paint, illustrates the modification of Hassam's style at the turn of the century when he absorbed Post-Impressionist developments. The painting is thought to have been executed on the property of a friend in East Hampton who had a beautiful lily pond surrounded by irises. Hassam was later to buy his own home in East Hampton, where he spent long periods during the last sixteen years of his life.

[Oil on canvas, 61 x 91.4 cm]

John William Godward - Reverie [1904]

John William Godward - Reverie [1904], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Lost in her thoughts, a languid young woman lounges on a smooth, veined marble bench terminating in a figure, probably representing the type of the poet Homer with its heavy beard, thick hair and narrow ribbon around the head. The cloth wrapped around her hips, over her silky chiton, or tunic, is not an authentic element of ancient costume, but it bears a repeated palmette (fan-shaped leaves) border based on a common ancient design. The fluffy, spotted animal fur is almost tactile but has no specific connection to antiquity. John William Godward (British, 1861 - 1922) probably included it for the delight of juxtaposing such varied textures and colors. He painted the silk, fur, and marble with great accuracy, approaching photographic realism, and arranged them to enliven the subtly colored composition. 

[Oil on canvas, 23 x 29 inches]

Charles-Théodore Frère - Jerusalem from the Environs [c.1881]

Charles-Théodore Frère - Jerusalem from the Environs [c.1881], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Frère (French, Paris, 1814 - Paris, 1888) began his career painting French landscape scenes, but after a stay in Algeria in 1837, he exhibited only scenes and landscapes of North Africa and the Middle East. In 1861 he made his final visit to the eastern Mediterranean, travelling in the party of the Empress Eugénie. It is thought that Frère exhibited this painting at the Salon of 1881 as View of Jerusalem from the Valley of the Jehoshaphat. It was undoubtedly executed from an earlier study or a photograph. The meticulous style, similar to that of Gérôme, was based on the technique and paint handling of Ingres and his pupils.

[Oil on canvas, 74.9 x 110.5 cm]

Charles Sprague Pearce - Arab Jeweller [c.1882]

Charles Sprague Pearce - Arab Jeweller [c.1882], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Charles Sprague Pearce (Boston, October 13, 1851 - May 18, 1914) was an American artist. He painted Egyptian and Algerian scenes, French peasants, and portraits, and also decorative work, notably for the Thomas Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress in Washington.

[Oil on canvas, 116.8 x 89.9 cm]

John William Godward - Mischief and Repose [1895]

John William Godward - Mischief and Repose [1895], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

A young woman reclines on a tiger skin on a marble ledge while her companion teases her with a dress pin. They are dressed in diaphanous robes fashioned after chitons worn by women in ancient Greece. Another dress pin and the reclining woman's hair ribbon lie scattered on the marble floor. 

For over half a century after the continued excavations of Pompeii began in 1748, artists were fascinated with Greek and Roman life. John William Godward painted many scenes like this one of idealised beauties in calm, often sterile environments. In this painting, the figure of Repose is arranged seductively, with her breast and nipple showing through the thin material of her dress. But there is something distinctly untouchable about these women; they do not engage the viewer with an inviting gaze nor solicit personal contact. Like their antique setting, they possess a monumental, marmoreal quality, resembling Greek statues frozen in time.

[Oil on canvas, 23 x 51.5 inches]

Georges Michel - Stormy Landscape with Ruins on a Plain [after 1830]

Georges Michel - Stormy Landscape with Ruins on a Plain [after 1830], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Michel worked mainly in the outskirts of Paris. This painting probably dates from after 1830 when he began to adopt a bold and vigorous approach to landscape painting which was based on his studies in the open air. Michel always painted in a small area around Paris, including Montmartre and the plains of Saint-Denis. He became increasingly interested in the dramatic use of light and shade, and his mature work is characterised by stormy skies, broad brushstrokes and vivid contrasts. His paintings had a decisive impact on the Barbizon artists.

[Oil on paper mounted on canvas, 55.7 x 81 cm]

Eugene Boudin - L'Hopital-Camfrout, Brittany [c.1870-72]

Eugene Boudin - L'Hopital-Camfrout, Brittany [c.1870-72], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

L'Hôpital-Camfrout is a small market town near Plougastel in western Brittany. Boudin visited this area on several occasions in the early 1870s.

[Oil on wood, 20.3 x 39.4 cm]

John Everett Millais - The Ransom [1860-62]

John Everett Millais - The Ransom [1860-62], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Standing on the right, a kidnapper firmly grasps the arm of a young girl while an armoured knight tries to hand over precious jewels. In this theatrical painting, John Everett Millais (Southampton, 1829 - London, 1896) depicted a sixteenth-century scene of a father paying ransom for his two daughters. 

The subject matter and technique are typical of the Pre-Raphaelite movement founded by Millais. Although he wanted to express a moral seriousness in his work, the drama is unconvincing: the figures are stiff and too large for the room they inhabit. The Ransom received criticism of this kind when it was exhibited, but no one could find fault with Millais's painting technique. The sharp, near-photographic rendering of objects, materials, and individuals display Millais's technical brilliance. 

Millais's painting was a group effort of sorts. His mother made and designed the costumes, his friend Mr. Miller posed for the head of the knight and he drew the body from a gigantic railway guard named Strong. The girls were painted from one model, Miss Helen Petrie, and Major McBean posed as one of the kidnappers. The artist, however, did not much care for the painting and referred to it as "the picture with the dreadful blue-and-white page in the corner." 

[Oil on canvas, 51 x 45 inches]

Jan Lievens - Prince Charles Louis of the Palatinate with his Tutor Wolrad von Plessen in Historical Dress [1632]

Jan Lievens - Prince Charles Louis of the Palatinate with his Tutor Wolrad von Plessen in Historical Dress [1632], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Wearing a gold medallion around his neck, an elderly man leans forward and extends a hand towards a youth who sits in front of a book. The man looks neither at the boy nor at the large open volume but instead gazes sympathetically at the viewer. Wearing a laurel wreath upon his head and dressed in a golden yellow robe with a richly embroidered cape, the daydreaming boy stares off into the distance. 

Jan Lievens (Leiden, 1607 - Amsterdam, 1674), who shared Rembrandt's interest in historical portraits featuring characters in fanciful costumes, here depicted Prince Charles Louis of the Palatinate being taught by his tutor Wolrad von Plessen. Previously thought to be a biblical depiction of Eli instructing Samuel, current research reveals that these figures were meant to allude to the classical figures of Aristotle instructing the young Alexander. Both Prince Charles Louis and Alexander the Great were about fourteen years old when they received instruction from their respective mentors. 

[Oil on canvas, 40.75 x 38 inches]

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - Young Girl in a Pink-and-Black Hat [1890s]

Auguste Renoir - Young Girl in a Pink-and-Black Hat [1890s], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

This is one of many paintings that Renoir made in the 1890s of stylish young women in modish hats. He repeated the subject often, even at the end of the decade, when the extravagant hats had become unfashionable and his dealer tried to discourage him from producing more.

[Oil on canvas, 40.6 x 32.4 cm]

Vincent van Gogh - A Wheatfield, with Cypresses [1889]

Vincent van Gogh - A Wheatfield, with Cypresses [1889], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

This was painted in September 1889, when Van Gogh was in the St-Rémy mental asylum, near Arles, where he was a patient from May 1889 until May 1890. It is one of three almost identical versions of the composition. Another painting of the cypresses (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art) was painted earlier in July 1889, and was probably painted directly in front of the subject.

[Oil on canvas, 72.1 x 90.9 cm]

Jan Steen - Satyr and the Peasant Family [c.1660-62]

Jan Steen - Satyr and the Peasant Family [c.1660-62], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

A peasant family sits around a wooden table in a Dutch kitchen. The room's exposed rafters, assorted domestic objects on shelves, and cobbled floor are all rendered in careful detail. A woman serves a man who blows on his soup to cool it. A young child faces her, holding a spoon in his upraised hand and begging for food. A lively young woman wearing a large straw hat and an old woman fill the space between the eating man and the standing woman. A crude fellow in the background spoons soup into his grinning mouth. Next to the open door, a satyr leans on a staff and points an admonishing finger at the peasant family. The satyr has noticed that the peasant blows both on his hands to warm them and on his soup to cool it. He will turn to leave the house because he cannot trust someone who blows "both hot and cold with the same breath." 

The artist Jan Steen painted this subject, known originally from Aesop's Fables, many times. Throughout the 1600s, this moralistic tale was a popular subject for Dutch and Flemish painters.

[Oil on canvas, 20 x 18.125 inches]

Jan Steen - Bathsheba After the Bath [c.1665-70]

Jan Steen - Bathsheba After the Bath [c.1665-70], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Bathsheba stares brazenly out at the viewer while a maidservant trims her toenails. King David, who saw her beauty and desired her, sent her a summons to appear at his palace. Although she was married, Bathsheba was forced to comply. 

A popular subject, artists often portrayed Bathsheba as distraught about her dilemma. Here, Jan Steen (Leyden, c.1626 - Leyden, c.1679) depicted her as a temptress, rather than the innocent victim of the king's passion. In this moralizing painting, Steen commented on the foolishness of human behavior. 

Bathsheba's robe is casually arranged to reveal her breast and bare legs. The shoe in the right foreground symbolises lasciviousness; the fountain on the left probably alludes to female fecundity. She is so lost in her thoughts that she holds King David's note loosely in her right hand and pays no attention to the small dog or to the old woman grasping her shoulder.

[Oil on panel, 22.875 x 17.69 inches]

Gerrit van Honthorst - Christ Crowned with Thorns [1620]

Gerrit van Honthorst - Christ Crowned with Thorns [1620], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

As was customary for promising Dutch painters in the 1600s, Gerrit van Honthorst travelled to Italy to complete his artistic training. In Rome he fell under the spell of Caravaggio's revolutionary style and adopted his use of realistic figures and dramatic lighting, known as chiaroscuro. In Italy he acquired the nickname Gherardo delle Notti (Gerrit of the Nights) because he painted so many night scenes lit by candles or torches. 

This recently discovered painting may have been made as an altarpiece. It shows the Crowning with Thorns, one of the last of the series of events comprising the trial of Christ. His crude features illuminated by a torch, a jeering soldier mocks Christ, who humbly accepts the soldier's derision. In the shadows, another soldier places the crown of thorns on Christ's head, using a cane to protect his own hands. At the left, two dimly lit figures, perhaps Pontius Pilate and an advisor, discuss Christ's fate. 

[Oil on canvas, 87.5 x 68.3 inches]

Valentin de Boulogne - Christ and the Adulteress [1620s]

Valentin de Boulogne - Christ and the Adulteress [1620s], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Light illuminates the neck and shoulders of a woman looking down at the figure of Christ kneeling on the ground. The Pharisees had brought to Christ a woman caught in the act of committing adultery. When they asked whether she should be stoned, he stooped down and began to write with his finger on the ground. When they continued to ask, Christ said, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her." The male accusers watch with varying expressions; some absorb Christ's words, while others recollect their own transgressions. 

Profoundly influenced by Caravaggio's realism and dramatic lighting, Valentin de Boulogne (Coulommiers, 1591 - Rome, 1632) used light and shadow and a shallow frieze-like arrangement of figures to convey the scene's emotion. Figures fade into the dark background, while faces, hands, and even a knee emerge from the dimness. The figures are highly individualised, especially the old man at the right who holds his glasses firmly to his nose in order to see better and the elderly man with the weathered face and scraggly hair who holds his cape back against his shoulder. For this biblical narrative, Boulogne used contemporary, working-class people as models, a practice initiated by Caravaggio at the turn of the century. 

[Oil on canvas, 66 x 86.5 inches]

Camille Corot - Landscape with Lake and Boatman [1839]

Camille Corot - Landscape with Lake and Boatman [1839], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

After a long day, a solitary boatman poles his boat ashore across the water's placid surface. An array of colours, citron, lavender, turquoise, and rose, fills the sky as the sun slowly sets. Light reflects against the trees, turning the edges and foliage yellow-orange; the pool of water shimmers with reflections. The dramatically colored backlighting and the tiny, lone man create a sense of melancholy and longing that appealed to the Romantic critics of the time.

Composing from memories and from drawings made during his travels in Italy, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot painted this view for the Paris Salon of 1839. It may be a pendant to Italian Landscape, which he painted the same year. Until they were offered to the Getty Museum in 1984, scholars thought both paintings were lost. The two paintings depict ideal Italian views that contrast different times of day, emulating the works of Corot's seventeenth-century countryman Claude Lorrain. 

[Oil on canvas, 24.625 x 40.5 inches]

Bernardo Bellotto - The Fortress of Königstein [1756-58]

Bernardo Bellotto - The Fortress of Königstein [1756-58], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

The painting is one of five large views of an ancient fortress near Dresden commissioned from Bellotto (Italian, 1722 - 1780) by Augustus III, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony. The panorama encompasses a broad expanse of the picturesque, craggy landscape known as Saxonian Switzerland, which Bellotto invested with a monumental quality rarely seen in eighteenth-century Italian painting. The great castle sits atop a mountain that rises precipitously from the Elbe River Valley, hundreds of feet below. In the distance on the left is the Lilienstein, one of the prominent sandstone formations scattered across the countryside.

Bellotto began working at Königstein in the spring of 1756. He was commissioned to paint five views of the interior and exterior of the fortress that were intended to complete the twenty-five views of Dresden and Pirna he previously painted for the royal collection. His work was interrupted when Frederick II of Prussia opened hostilities in the Seven Years War by invading Saxony in August 1756. It is thought that Bellotto completed the canvases by 1758, but none were delivered to the court and all five paintings were recorded later in the century in England where two remain in a private collection and two in the City Art Gallery, Manchester.

[Oil on canvas, 133 x 235.7 cm]

Christen Købke - View from a Window in Toldbodvej Looking towards the Citadel in Copenhagen [c.1833]

Christen Købke - View from a Window in Toldbodvej Looking towards the Citadel in Copenhagen [c.1833] , a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Købke (1810 - 1848) spent most of his childhood at the Citadel in Copenhagen where his father was a baker. In 1832 he rented a studio on Toldbodvej (now Esplanaden), which offered him a new view on his childhood home. From the studio window he could look over the neighbour opposite to the Citadel. It was not, however, the home as such that interested the artist; his main concern was for pictorial effect. Above the treetops he could see the Citadel mill, the ridge turret of the Citadel Church, the red rooftops of the military buildings, and the Oresund coastline in the far distance. In order to create depth in the small picture he added the edge of the neighbouring house’s roof and a chimney in the foreground. The chimney in particular is quite a stroke of genius, testifying to artistic boldness.

It is unlikely that any other Danish painter working at the time would have let something as unimportant as a chimney occupy such a central position in a picture. To Købke, however, the reasons were clear. Without the chimney in the foreground the rest of the picture would not make sense. The sky arching overhead is, however, every bit as important as the view of the Citadel. Købke was clearly keenly interested in the cloud formations with their many, endless varied hues.

Camille Pissarro - Two Women Chatting by the Sea, St. Thomas [1856]

Camille Pissarro - Two Women Chatting by the Sea, St. Thomas [1856], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

See: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPjlFPZ0C8Y

[Oil on canvas, 27.7 x 41 cm]

Winslow Homer - The Gale [1883–93]

Winslow Homer - The Gale [1883–93], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Most late-nineteenth-century artists skirted the theme of modern labour by describing pre-industrial toil, often by European peasants and other traditional workers. Even Homer (American, 1836–1910), who eschewed cosmopolitanism, pursued such subjects when he worked in Cullercoats, an English fishing village on the North Sea, in 1881–82. Upon his return to New York, he began this canvas depicting a Cullercoats woman striding along the seawall with the Life Brigade House, several men in foul-weather gear, and a rescue boat in the background. Disappointed by the critics' response, Homer reworked the painting after settling in Prouts Neck, Maine, in summer 1883, paring down the narrative, especially by painting over the background details, and leaving only an emblematic image of female fortitude, a powerful woman confronting the elements with a baby strapped to her back.

[Oil on canvas, 76.8 x 122.7 cm]

Pieter Aertsen - The Fat Kitchen, An Allegory

Pieter Aertsen - The Fat Kitchen, An Allegory, a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

The table is groaning under its load of meat, fish, bread, and fresh vegetables. To the right, behind the table, a peasant stands by his family, regarding us with an eloquent look. He pointedly turns his back to what goes on in the left half of the picture where we get a glimpse of a room with two couples, one young and the other old, gathered around the fireplace. The young man is in high spirits, raising his jug of ale as he puts his arm around the girl. The old couple stare into space with a melancholy air, making them the key to understanding the picture: it is a warning against gluttony, drunkenness, and moral looseness.

The still life genre was created by Pieter Aertsen in an Antwerp that was the leading commercial centre in Europe at the time. To Aertsen, the arrangements of food, the symbolism of which was explained in the figure scenes in the background, were a necessary alternative to religious painting. During the early years of his career he created a number of altarpieces that he, to his great wrath and sorrow, saw destroyed during the iconoclastic riots of the Reformation.

Eugene Boudin - On the Beach, Trouville [1887]

Eugene Boudin - On the Beach, Trouville [1887], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

[Oil on wood, 18.4 x 32.7 cm]

Ernest Proctor - On the Beach at Newlyn

Ernest Proctor - On the Beach at Newlyn, a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Ernest Procter was born in Tynemouth, Northumberland. During the First World War Procter served with the British Red Cross Society as an orderly in Dunkirk, documenting his experiences in works of art. After the war he and his wife were commissioned to decorate the Kokine Palace in Burma (1919-20). By the end of the 1920s he turned to more allegorical and religious subjects. He designed a screen which was in place at St. Mary's Church, Penzance until it was destroyed by fire on Saturday 23rd March 1985. Along with other Newlyn artists he produced works to decorate the Parish Church of St. Hilary, Cornwall.

Laurits Andersen Ring - Harvest [1885]

Laurits Andersen Ring - Harvest [1885], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

The labourer is the brother of Ring (1854 - 1933), Ole Peter Andersen, and the picture was painted at his farm in Tehusene at Fakse on South Zealand. Many of Ring’s works depict common people in everyday situations, often scenes from those Zealand village communities that he was so closely linked to through his childhood and subsequent homes in adulthood.

It is a monumental portrait, not of the brother, whose face is virtually hidden, but of the agricultural labourer as a type, as a powerful bearer of Ring’s hopes of revolution. It is also, however, a picture of the Reaper mowing down the cornfields, thereby presenting an image of man’s position suspended between life, the ripe cornfield, and inevitable death. The extremely high horizon is very typical of Ring’s works. Here it serves to prevent the reaper from reaching up into the sky, keeping him firmly grounded.

Laurits Andersen Ring - The Artist’s Wife [1897]

Laurits Andersen Ring - The Artist’s Wife [1897], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Ring (1854 - 1933) was married in 1896, the year before he painted this portrait of his wife, Sigrid Kähler (1874-1923). At that time he was 42, while she was 22. Thus, it seems natural to join several other art historians in interpreting this image as a declaration of love for the artist’s pregnant wife, with the promise of spring acting as a symbol of the consummation of love. 

With so much new-found happiness, hope, and flowering plants gathered in one place it seems as though the awareness of the opposite of life, death, becomes the underlying theme or perhaps the experience that Ring attempts to handle or exorcise with his painting. An experience that Ring, an atheist, expressed in many works. Here, he addresses the theme by contrasting Sigrid’s belly against stunted, gnarly branches. A reminder of the fragility that also encompasses the budding life sensed in both man and nature.

Camille Pissarro - Harvest, Pontoise [1881]

Camille Pissarro - Harvest, Pontoise [1881], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

At the centre of this painting are three figures gathering potatoes; they are united in the composition as they occupy a green, grassy knoll and toil under the shade of a tree. A fourth figure can be seen on the left, his actions unrecognisable from such a distance. All are labouring on a hill that slopes down to the right and occupies the majority of the canvas. 

The theme of potato gathering recurs in Pissarro’s oeuvre in a number of mediums, pencil, gouache, oil, and prints, over a period of thirty years. In the Lehman painting, Pissarro’s treatment of the subject is carefully structured while remaining expressive in tone and in brushwork. The artist is both borrowing a traditional subject matter from the great Barbizon painter Camille Corot, while anticipating the more staccato, broken brushwork of later artists such as Georges Seurat.

[Oil on canvas, 46 x 55.2 cm]

Jan van Bijlert - Portrait of an Elderly Man and Two Women c1660s

Jan van Bijlert - Portrait of an Elderly Man and Two Women c1660s , a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

The younger woman is presumably the couple's daughter. She grasps the stem of a rose bush in her left hand while the older woman holds a peach. Jan Harmensz. Bijlert was born in Utrecht and he travelled to France and Italy. In Rome he was a founding member of the 'Bent', the society of Netherlandish painters. He returned to Utrecht in 1625 and became a prominent figure in the artists' guild there. He painted history scenes, genre subjects and portraits.

[Oil on canvas, 127 x 101 cm]

James Tissot - Women of Paris, The Circus Lover [1885]

James Tissot - Women of Paris, The Circus Lover [1885], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Like the Impressionists, particularly his friend Edgar Degas, Tissot chose his subjects from modern urban life. His precise, detailed, and anecdotal style, however, was more closely related to conservative academic painting. This work belongs to a series called La Femme à Paris (Women of Paris), eighteen large paintings that depict women of different social classes encountered as if by chance at various occupations and amusements. Here, the woman engages the viewer as a participant in the action by her direct glance out of the picture. The event is a "high-life circus," in which the amateur performers were members of the aristocracy.

[Oil on canvas, 147.3 x 101.6 cm]

Gerard ter Borch - A Woman Playing a Theorbo to Two Men [c.1667-68]

Gerard ter Borch - A Woman Playing a Theorbo to Two Men [c.1667-68], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

The painting is anecdotal in character, with two men present, one singing to the accompaniment of the theorbo. The association between music and love is a frequent subject in Dutch genre painting. Here, as in many of ter Borch's pictures, the relationship between the figures is deliberately ambiguous. The viewer is invited to decide whether is is just a happy domestic scene, or possibly a scene taking place in brothel. Though influenced by the work of Metsu, the painting is more elaborate in composition and psychological resonance than comparable paintings by Metsu. Judging from the style and the fashionable clothes, the painting is probably a relatively late work, dating from the late 1660s.

[Oil on canvas, 67.6 x 57.8 cm]

Henri Matisse - Study for ‘Luxe, Calme et Volupte’ [1904]

Henri Matisse - Study for ‘Luxe, Calme et Volupte’ [1904], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Matisse painted this oil sketch in the summer of 1904, while working alongside fellow artist Paul Signac on the French Riviera, and he completed the final painting (now at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris) the following winter. Both Signac and Matisse were influenced by the elder painter Paul Cézanne, whose discrete strokes of colour emphasised the materiality of the painted surface over naturalistic illusion. But Matisse went further, using a palette of pure, high-pitched colours (blue, green, yellow, and orange) to render the landscape, and outlining the figures in blue. The painting takes its title from a line by the nineteenth-century poet Charles Baudelaire and shares the poems subject of an escape to an imaginary, tranquil refuge.

[Oil on canvas, 32.7 x 40.6 cm]

Pelle Åberg - Girl with Cigarette

Pelle Åberg - Girl with Cigarette, a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Pelle Åberg (1903 - 1964) was a Swedish painter.

[Oil on canvas, 73 x 59.5 cm]

Georges Seurat - Study for 'Bathers at Asnieres [1883-84]

Georges Seurat - Study for 'Bathers at Asnieres [1883-84], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

This oil sketch is one of several Seurat made for his monumental painting, 'Bathers at Asnieres', of 1884. In contrast to the other sketches the artist has here concentrated on the figures themselves at the expense of the landscape setting. The reclining man and the figure in a swimming costume reappear in the final painting.

[Oil on wood, 15.2 x 25 cm]

Workshop of Giulio Romano - The Infancy of Jupiter [mid 1530s]

Workshop of Giulio Romano - The Infancy of Jupiter [mid 1530s], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

The nine figures in the background, who are variously styled the Corybantes or the Curetes according to different versions of this legend, are shown making music so that the noise will distract Jupiter’s father, Saturn, from devouring his offspring. The picture was formerly in the collection of King Charles I, and is one of a series of twelve pictures, of which four are in the Royal Collection.

[Oil on wood, 106.4 x 175.5 cm]

Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo - The Building of the Trojan Horse [c.1760]

Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo - The Building of the Trojan Horse [c.1760], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

This is part of a series of sketches illustrating a famous passage from Virgil's Aeneid. The Greeks build a wooden horse, fill it with armed men and leave it outside the enemy city of Troy. Painted presumably about 1760, the two pictures are close in style to the work of the artist's father Giambattista. Giovanni Domenico (1727 – 1804) was born in Venice, the eldest surviving son of Giambattista Tiepolo, whose assistant he became. He worked in Venice, Würzburg and Vicenza. In 1762 he accompanied his father to Madrid, and on his death in 1770 returned to Venice.

[Oil on canvas, 38.8 x 66.7 cm]

Charles Loring Elliott - Anthony Van Corlear [1858]

Charles Loring Elliott - Anthony Van Corlear [1858], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Although he was an accomplished portraitist, Elliott (American, 1812 – 1868) had received little formal training apart from six months in 1829 spent in the studio of John Quidor (1801-81), who had broken with the traditional realism prevailing in the first half of the 19th century to produce highly fanciful scenes taken from the literature of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. In this scene, Elliott appears to acknowledge his indebtedness to Quidor who, by then, had been almost completely forgotten by the public. In this work, Elliott had depicted the rotund Anthony Van Corlear, who won "prodigious favour in the eyes of the women by means of his whiskers and his trumpet."

[Oil on canvas, 30.7 x 25.4 cm]

Simon Alexandre-Clement Denis - Study of Clouds with a Sunset near Rome

Simon Alexandre-Clement Denis - Study of Clouds with a Sunset near Rome, a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

This painting is one in a series of cloud studies, in fact the 48th, that Simon Denis (Flemish, 1755 - 1812) made to hone his observational and painting skills. Denis' confident paint handling and sensitive rendering of light capture the awe-inspiring power of nature. Using a warm palette, he juxtaposed light and dark tones to imply both the clouds' airy buoyancy and moisture-laden heaviness. Lively brushstrokes convey the constantly shifting forces of wind and light. 

This dramatic cloudscape predates by a century the Impressionists' celebration of outdoor landscape painting in which they recorded specific, yet fleeting, effects of weather and time and exhibited those results as finished paintings. But in Denis' time, oil sketching on paper while outdoors offered the artist an opportunity to test and sharpen his skills. Denis would have kept his cloud studies in the studio for future reference for his finished paintings. 

[Oil on paper, 13.31 x 15.25 inches]

After Carlo Dolci - The Virgin and Child with Flowers [after 1642]

After Carlo Dolci - The Virgin and Child with Flowers [after 1642], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

The Virgin holds an entwined branch of lilies and carnations and the Christ Child a red rose. The rose symbolises martyrdom, the Passion (Christ's sufferings before the Crucifixion) and the sorrow of the Virgin. The lily represents the Virgin's purity. Other versions of the design are signed and dated 1642 and 1649. This painting seems to be rather later and may not be entirely by the hand of this artist.

[Oil on canvas, 78.1 x 63.2 cm]

Nicolai Abildgaard - The Wounded Philoctetes [1775]

Nicolai Abildgaard - The Wounded Philoctetes [1775], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

From 1772 Abildgaard (1743 - 1809) spent five years in Rome thanks to a scholarship granted by the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. It was while in Rome that he created this depiction of the legendary hero Philoctetes, whose screams of pain caused by a festering snakebite made his comrades-in-arms abandon him on a Greek island during the Trojan war. The dominant and deeply rooted movement within figure painting at this time was neoclassicism with its emphasis on self-command and calm. Abildgaard challenges this pattern with his depiction of a body convulsively curved around an axis of pain; a body that feels like it is forcefully restrained within the picture field with its tense musculature and twisted limbs.

The 1770s brought with them an increased emphasis on grand passions among the Northern European avant-garde, and this new outlook also left its mark on Abildgaard’s circles in Rome. The interest in pathos and Weltschmerz is clearly evident in his works from this era. In this case he used a principal work of classical sculpture as the basis for his rendition of Philoctetes’ tormented state: The Torso Belvedere in the Vatican museum served as the model for the plastic and mannered rendition of the hero’s upper body. With this move, Abildgaard’s stylistic innovation was imbued with features of a work canonised by neoclassicism – without, however, reducing the tensions in the painting.

Giovanni Paolo Panini - The Interior of St Peter's, Rome [before 1742]

Giovanni Paolo Panini - The Interior of St Peter's, Rome [before 1742], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Panini specialised in architectural views and painted several pictures showing the interior of Saint Peter's in Rome. The viewpoint he has adopted here shows the vast scale and the splendour of the building. At the far end is Bernini's bronze canopy, erected between 1624 and 1633 over the tomb of Saint Peter. Certain details of the decoration of the basilica allow the work to be dated to the 1730s. Among the visitors are a cardinal with his party, members of various religious orders and lay people who kneel in prayer. In spite of the signature (which actually gives the artist's name incorrectly) the painting was probably executed with much assistance from Panini's studio.

[Oil on canvas, 149.8 x 222.7 cm]

Attributed to David Bailly - Portrait of a Man, Possibly a Botanist[1641]

Attributed to David Bailly - Portrait of a Man, Possibly a Botanist [1641], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

This impressive portrait was once ascribed to Ferdinand Bol (1616–1680), until Sturla Gudlaugsson more plausibly proposed Bailly (Dutch, 1584 - 1657). It is compositionally similar to and consistent in quality and handling with two other works by Bailly: the Portrait of Anthony de Wale, Professor of Theology at the University of Leiden of 1636 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) and the Portrait of an Unknown Professor or Pastor, signed and dated 1642 (Van Heeckeren van Wassenaer collection, Kasteel Twickel).

The identity of the sitter is not known. He could be a cleric or a professor (although his attire is not academic), an amateur of botany, a doctor, or an apothecary. The book, which shows two views of a narcissus, cannot be identified and is probably the artist's invention. This type of scholar portrait, which has sixteenth-century North Italian roots, was popular in the Netherlands during the first half of the seventeenth century and was employed for amateurs as well as professionals.

[Oil on wood, 83.8 x 62.2 cm]

Vincent van Gogh - Olive Orchard [1889]

Vincent van Gogh - Olive Orchard [1889], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

During the last six or seven months of 1889, Van Gogh did at least fifteen paintings of olive trees, a subject he found both demanding and compelling. He wrote to his brother Theo that he was "struggling to catch [the olive trees]. They are old silver, sometimes with more blue in them, sometimes greenish, bronzed, fading white above a soil which is yellow, pink, violet tinted orange...very difficult." He found that the "rustle of the olive grove has something very secret in it, and immensely old. It is too beautiful for us to dare to paint it or to be able to imagine it."

In the olive trees, in the expressive power of their ancient and gnarled forms, Van Gogh found a manifestation of the spiritual force he believed resided in all of nature. His brushstrokes make the soil and even the sky seem alive with the same rustling motion as the leaves, stirred to a shimmer by the Mediterranean wind. These strong individual dashes do not seem painted so much as drawn onto the canvas with a heavily loaded brush. The energy in their continuous rhythm communicates to us, in an almost physical way, the living force that Van Gogh found within the trees themselves, the very spiritual force that he believed had shaped them.

[Oil on canvas, 73 x 92.1 cm]

Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi - Red Sunset on the Dnieper [1905-08]

Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi - Red Sunset on the Dnieper [1905-08], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Arkhip Kuindzhi (Mariupol, 1842 - St. Petersburg, 1910) is considered one of the most talented Russian landscape painters of his generation. Born in Ukraine, he was associated during the second half of the 1870s with a group of Russian Realist painters known as the Wanderers. In the 1890s, he was hired to teach landscape painting at the Academy of Fine Arts but was later dismissed for sympathizing with student agitators. He ultimately founded his own painting society. 

This late major painting is typical of Kuindzhi, who is best known for his large, nearly empty landscapes. The scene shows a sunset over the banks of the Dnieper, a great river that originates west of Moscow and runs far south into the Black Sea. The dark shapes in the foreground represent a cluster of thatched-roof huts, typical of the region.

[Oil on canvas, 134.6 x 188 cm]

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo - Alexander the Great and Campaspe in theStudio of Apelles [c.1740]

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo - Alexander the Great and Campaspe in the Studio of Apelles [c.1740], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

A boyish artist gazes longingly at the regal woman whose portrait he is painting. The young artist is Alexander the Great's court painter, Apelles, whom ancient writers considered the greatest artist of their time. According to Pliny's Natural History of 77 A.D., Alexander commissioned Apelles to paint a portrait of his favorite concubine, Campaspe. The story illustrates art's transformative powers: Apelles fell in love with his sitter as he captured her beauty on canvas. Alexander so esteemed his painter that he presented Campaspe to Apelles as a reward for the portrait. 

The tale of Alexander and Apelles, a favorite of Renaissance and Baroque painters, celebrates the power and nobility of painting. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (Venice, 1696 - Madrid, 1770) painted this episode at least three times. For this, the third rendering, he adopted a classic style in which antique architectural elements and relief sculptures evoke a sumptuous palace setting. The background provides a focal area for the gaze of Alexander the Great, who appears handsome and self-confident, yet unaware of the charged glances shared by Apelles and Campaspe. 

[Oil on canvas, 16.55 x 21.25 inches]

Théodore Géricault - Portrait Study [c.1818-19]

Théodore Géricault - Portrait Study [c.1818-19], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

This portrait was made as a study for Théodore Géricault's most famous painting, The Raft of the Medusa, made in 1819 and now in the Louvre. In a clear case of ineptitude, the ship named Medusa foundered in the sea off the coast of Africa in 1816. A raft with 140 passengers drifted for thirteen days before being rescued; only fifteen people survived. In preparation for his disturbing and controversial painting of the incident, Géricault (Rouen, 1791 - Paris, 1824) made many studies from life, like this one, to achieve a sense of realism and specificity. 

The sitter wears a shirt similar to those worn by the survivors of the Medusa. Géricault captured the man's character with great sympathy and spontaneity; his watery eyes do not focus on anything outside the canvas but appear to express an internal torment. Shades of brown, gray, and beige blend together to imitate his dark complexion. Dabs of white and beige paint are used to indicate reflective light in his eyes and on the tip of his nose, his bottom lip, and his chin. 

[Oil on canvas, 18.375 x 15 inches]

Camille Pissarro - Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning [1897]

Camille Pissarro - Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning [1897], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

After spending six years painting in the rural setting of Éragny, Pissarro returned to Paris, where he produced several series of the "grands boulevards." As Pissarro surveyed the view from his lodgings at the Grand Hôtel de Russie in early 1897, he marveled that not only could he "see down the whole length of the boulevards" but he had "almost a bird's-eye view of carriages, omnibuses, people, between big trees, big houses that have to be set straight." From February through April, he set out to record, in two views of the Boulevard des Italiens to the right, and fourteen of the Boulevard Montmartre to the left, the spectacle of urban life as it unfolded below his window.

[Oil on canvas, 64.8 x 81.3 cm]

Franz Xaver Winterhalter - Portrait of Leonilla, Princess ofSayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn [1843]

Franz Xaver Winterhalter - Portrait of Leonilla, Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn [1843], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

In a daring pose reminiscent of harem scenes and odalisques, the Princess Leonilla of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn reclines on a low Turkish sofa on a veranda overlooking a lush tropical landscape. Only her unassailable social position made it possible for Franz Xaver Winterhalter (Menzenschwand, 1805 - Frankfurt, 1875) to use such a sensual pose for a full-length portrait in Paris in 1843. 

Known for her great beauty and intellect, the Princess is resplendent in a luxurious gown of ivory silk moiré with a pink sash around her waist. A deep purple mantle wraps around her back and falls across her smooth arms. Under carefully arched eyebrows, her heavy lidded eyes gaze languidly at the viewer while she artfully toys with the large pearls around her neck. Winterhalter contrasted sumptuous fabrics and vivid colours against creamy flesh to heighten the sensuality of the pose, the model, and the luxuriant setting.

[Oil on canvas, 56 x 83.5 inches]

Camille Corot - Bacchante by the Sea [1865]

Camille Corot - Bacchante by the Sea [1865], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

In his study of Corot, the German art historian Julius Meier-Graefe extolled the series of Odalisques that the artist painted throughout his career, beginning in 1837: "The progressive development of his Odalisques continued until he was past sixty; a development not of a type but of the painting. . . . In the course of fifty years, this figure seems to grow and take on broader, more majestic contours. The forms become rounder, the limbs learn movement, the flesh becomes more elastic and finally, perfected beauty emerges. His women painted in the sixties take on a brilliant loveliness." Corot exhibited this work, along with another, also of a reclining nude, at the 1865 Paris Salon.

[Oil on wood, 38.7 x 59.4 cm]