Edgar Degas - Three Dancers Preparing for Class [after 1878]

Edgar Degas - Three Dancers Preparing for Class [after 1878], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

The seated dancer in this pastel was derived from a study dated December 1878 of the fifteen-year-old Melina Darde. That drawing and those which explored the poses of the two dancers in the foreground belonged to a stock of figure drawings that Degas used for his larger compositions. There is another variant of this pastel also of the mid-1880s (Private collection).

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Pastel on buff-coloured wove paper, 54.6 x 52.1 cm]

Paul Cézanne - Three Bathers [1879-82]

Paul Cézanne - Three Bathers [1879-82], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Cézanne devoted over two-hundred paintings, watercolours and drawings to the theme of bathing men and women. He started working with this subject in the late sixties and carried on developing it until 1906, sometimes taking several years to finish the largest paintings. As the compositions evolve, the descriptive elements disappear in favour of construction. The stocky figures become the members of a rigorously ordered pictorial assembly and not the representatives of corporeal beauty.

[Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York - Oil on canvas, 55 x 52 cm]

Joseph Mallord William Turner - Van Tromp, Going About to Please His Masters [1844]

Joseph Mallord William Turner - Van Tromp, Going About to Please His Masters [1844], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

In this narrative history painting, Joseph Mallord William Turner expressed the power of nature and the heroism of man through the eyes of a Romantic painter. Turner used quick, slanting brushstrokes to describe the stormy sky. The application of scumbled white paint suggests churning, turbulent seas and the heavy spray of waves hitting the ship's bow. Tones of brown paint near the bottom of the canvas give a sense of the sea's violent power. 

On the foredeck of a ship that strains against the waves, a man stands in a white uniform and waves with confidence. While scholars are uncertain of the exact historical event Turner described, one probable interpretation is that the man depicted here is Dutch naval officer Cornelis Van Tromp, who was dismissed from naval service in 1666 after failing to follow orders. Van Tromp was reinstated in service and reconciled with his navy superiors in 1673. In perhaps a symbolic overture signaling his submission to authority, Tromp is shown, in Turner's words, "going about to please his Masters."

[Tate Gallery, London - Oil on canvas, 36 x 48 inches]

Frederick Walker - The Vagrants [1868]

Frederick Walker - The Vagrants [1868], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Frederick Walker (1840 – 1875) painted this after seeing gypsies on Clapham Common, South London. He tried to use the gypsies as models but found that they had moved on. Instead his sister Polly posed for the standing woman. The background landscape was painted in the open air at Beddington, near Croydon. Walker originally made The Vagrants as an illustration in the magazine Once a Week. He worked it up into an oil painting to show at the Royal Academy. It failed to find a buyer, but it had a great influence on younger artists who specialised in social-realist subjects.

[Tate Gallery, London - Oil on canvas, 832 x 1264 mm]

Friedrich Von Amerling - Lost in Her Dreams [1835]

Friedrich Von Amerling - Lost in Her Dreams [1835], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Amerling’s genre paintings are seldom of large-scale scenes, and they usually refrain from any sort of moralisation. In this example, too, the mood is set by nothing more than facial expression and gesture, supported by a few props. The veil of black lace frames the girl’s fine features and puts her in just the right light.

[Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna - Oil on canvas, 55 x 45 cm]

Friedrich Von Amerling - Girl with Straw Hat [1840]

Friedrich Von Amerling - Girl with Straw Hat [1840], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

On October 15, 2008 the hammer came down on a world record price at the Dorotheum in Vienna, resulting in the addition of an absolute masterpiece to the extensive holdings of Biedermeier painting in the Princely Collections, which number around 20 works by Friedrich von Amerling alone. Not only regarded as an icon of Viennese Biedermeier painting but also the talk of the cultural scene in Vienna and beyond in recent weeks, Amerling’s Girl with a Straw Hat is now ensured of remaining in Austria.

Painted in 1835, during Amerling’s most innovative and productive phase, this work is notable not only for its fine technique with partial use of glazing, but also for its choice of subject. As in his painting Lost in Her Dreams, which dates to the same year, Amerling here convincingly conveys the melancholy and pensive mood of the young woman portrayed, an effect emphasised by her gentle upward gaze and the way her head, propped on her right hand, is turned away from the viewer. Draped casually round her right forearm, the green ribbon of her hat accentuates and articulates the picture as does her red shawl and the broad-brimmed straw hat, seen from below. It is however not only the coloration of the painting that is so convincing but above all the subtle construction of its composition.

[Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna - Oil on canvas, 58 x 46 cm]

Johan Christian Dahl - View from Vaekero near Christiania

Johan Christian Dahl - View from Vaekero near Christiania, a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Johan Christian Dahl (Bergen, February 24, 1788 - Dresden, October 14, 1857) was a Norwegian artist. Although Dahl spent much of his life outside of Norway, his love for his country is clear in the motifs he chose for his paintings and in his extraordinary efforts on behalf of Norwegian culture generally. Indeed, if one sets aside his own monumental artistic creations, his other activities on behalf of art, history, and culture would still have guaranteed him a place at the very heart of the artistic and cultural history of Norway. He was, for example, a key figure in the founding of the Norwegian National Gallery and of several other major art institutions in Norway, as well as in the preservation of Norwegian stave churches and the restoration of the Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim and Håkonshallen in Bergen.

[National Gallery of Art, Washington - Oil on canvas, 60.5 x 96.5 cm]

Christen Købke - View from Dosseringen near the Sortedam Lake Looking Towards Nørrebro [1838]

Christen Købke - View from Dosseringen near the Sortedam Lake Looking Towards Nørrebro [1838], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

On the brink of the Sortedam Lake near his home just outside Copenhagen, which was much smaller then, Købke has depicted a quiet summer’s evening shortly before sunset. The painting is infused with a highly Romantic atmosphere, but the study for the painting shows that he actually observed the motif in the middle of the day. He has, then, radically changed the light of the scene.

Købke made numerous additions to the motif, such as the woman on the bridge and the boat on the water. He imbued the image with a narrative, a wordless story about departures and separation. In fact the party in the boat could not have travelled far on the tiny lake, but within the painting’s universe this is unimportant. By adding the Danish flag to the scene Købke accentuates the Danish nature of the scene.

[National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen]

Claude Monet - Water Lilies [1919]

Claude Monet - Water Lilies [1919], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Monet left much of his late work unfinished and released few paintings for sale, reporting that he was not yet satisfied and was still working on them "with passion." This canvas is one of four water-lily pictures that, quite exceptionally, he did complete, sign, and sell in 1919.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil on canvas, 101 x 200 cm]

Thomas Eakins - William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River [1876-77]

Thomas Eakins - William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River [1876-77], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

When Eakins exhibited this painting, first at the Boston Art Club in January 1878 and later that year at the Society of American Artists in New York, it created some controversy. A New York reviewer wrote: "What ruins the picture is much less the want of beauty in the model (as has been suggested in the public prints) than the presence in the foreground of the clothes of that young woman, cast carelessly over a chair. This gives the shock which makes one think about the nudity - and at once the picture becomes improper."

[Philadelphia Museum of Art - Oil on canvas, mounted on masonite, 51.1 x 66.4 cm]

William Bouguereau - Nymphs and Satyr [1873]

William Bouguereau - Nymphs and Satyr [1873], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

A critic once described Bouguereau, one of the most successful academic artists of his era, as "finding the exact tone that pleases fashionable society, the point at which acceptable coquetry degenerates into scandal." The artist’s glossy style is on full display in Nymphs and Satyr.

When the painting debuted at the Salon of 1873, Bouguereau set the scene with a quotation from the first-century Latin poet Publius Statius, describing the goat-god Pan: "Conscious of his shaggy hide, and from childhood untaught to swim, he dares not trust himself to the deep waters." In Bouguereau’s imaginative depiction of Pan’s predicament, four sprites gleefully drag the swarthy satyr into the water as a second bevy of nudes approaches. 

Critics were not entirely convinced by Bouguereau’s "aristocratically seductive" nymphs. As one reviewer wrote: "[They are] very pretty, slim and elegant like high-life Parisian women…I would gladly say that they are too pretty. They have clearly just walked out of the beauty parlour, and the satin quality of their skin could only have been obtained by a long series of baths in almond milk."

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil on canvas, 260 x 180 cm]

William Bouguereau - The Abduction of Psyche [1895]

William Bouguereau - The Abduction of Psyche [1895], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

[Private Collection - Oil on canvas, 120 x 209 cm]

Joaquim Sunyer - Nude, Springtime [1919]

Joaquim Sunyer - Nude, Springtime [1919], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Joaquim Sunyer (1875 – 1956) was a Spanish painter often linked with the Noucentisme movement. In his youth he moved to Paris, where he became acquainted with the neo-impressionist movement and worked extensively in the style. After returning to Spain he travelled to Italy before finally establishing himself in Sitges, his hometown. There he painted numerous landscape paintings in which he highlights his preoccupation with capturing the Mediterranean light through the use of very light colours marking a clear rupture with his darker paintings executed in Paris. His compositions are noted as an example of balance, though sacrificing technical perfection for the benefit of a more intense evocative power.

[Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona - Oil on canvas]

Thomas Mackenzie - Yasmin from Hassan [1924]

Thomas Mackenzie - Yasmin from Hassan [1924], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Watercolour and graphite]

Alfred Sisley - Landscape, Spring at Bougival [c.1873]

Alfred Sisley - Landscape, Spring at Bougival [c.1873], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

[Philadelphia Museum of Art - Oil on canvas, 40.6 x 57.1 cm]

Claude Monet - La Grenouillère [1869]

Claude Monet - La Grenouillère [1869], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Monet noted on September 25, 1869, "I do have a dream, a painting ['tableau'], the baths of La Grenouillère, for which I have made some bad sketches ['pochades'], but it is only a dream. Renoir, who has just spent two months here, also wants to do this painting." Monet and Renoir, both desperately poor, were quite close at this time. 

This painting and one in London (National Gallery) are probably the pochades Monet mentioned; another painting, now lost but formerly in the Arnhold collection in Berlin, may well have been the tableau that he dreamed of. The broad, constructive brushstrokes here are clearly those of a sketch; at this time, Monet sought a more delicate and carefully calibrated surface for his exhibition pictures. A nearly identical composition by Renoir is in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

Monet and Renoir both recognised in La Grenouillère, a spa and working-class resort, an ideal subject for the images of leisure they hoped to sell. Optimistically promoted as a Trouville-sur-Seine, it was easily accessible by train from Paris and had just been favoured with a visit by Emperor Napoleon III and his wife and son.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil on canvas, 74.6 x 99.7 cm]

Colijn de Coter - The Lamentation of Christ [c.1510-15]

Colijn de Coter - The Lamentation of Christ [c.1510-15], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Colijn de Coter (c.1440-45 - c.1522-32) was an early Netherlandish painter who produced mainly altarpieces. De Coter was born around 1440-1445. This can be deduced from a 1479 document in the Brussels archives, naming him as a husband, painter and tenant of a house; in other words, he must have already reached adulthood in that year. The archives of the Brussels Brotherhood of Saint Eloy list three payments to Colijn de Coter in 1509-1511 for painting a church tabernacle. From the archives of this brotherhood, we can also deduce that the painter's death probably fell somewhere in the period 1522-1532.

[Oil on panel, 35.5 x 42.9 cm]

Bernardo Strozzi - The Incredulity of Saint Thomas [c.1620]

Bernardo Strozzi - The Incredulity of Saint Thomas [c.1620], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Thomas, one of the twelve Apostles, declared that he would only believe that Christ had risen from the dead if he could touch his wounds. When Christ appeared a second time to the Apostles he spoke to Thomas: ‘Reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless but believing’ (John 20: 27). The spontaneity and confidence of Strozzi's handling of paint is very apparent in this well-preserved painting. It dates from about 1620.

Strozzi was a native of Genoa, and the leading Genoese painter of the early 17th century. He developed a distinctive bold style in handling and in colour, and painted both religious and secular works. He is best remembered for small-scale compositions, which he often repeated, but he was also an accomplished painter of full-scale narratives and portraits. The last years of his life, after 1631, were spent in Venice; in his work of this period the influence of Veronese becomes notable, while his own vigorous style influenced later Venetian art.

[Compton Verney - Oil on canvas, 89 x 98 cm]

Edgar Degas - Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage [c.1874]

Edgar Degas - Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage [c.1874], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

There are three similar versions of this composition. The largest, painted in grisaille (Musée d'Orsay, Paris), was shown in the first Impressionist exhibition, in 1874. The two other works, tentatively dated the same year, are in the Metropolitan's collection. This painting probably preceded the version in pastel, which is more freely handled. Preparatory drawings exist for almost every figure in the rehearsal compositions.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil colours freely mixed with turpentine, with traces of watercolor and pastel over pen-and-ink drawing on cream-coloured wove paper, laid down on bristol board and mounted on canvas, 54.3 x 73 cm]

Claude Monet - Regatta at Sainte-Adresse [1867]

Claude Monet - Regatta at Sainte-Adresse [1867], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Sainte-Adresse, the well-to-do suburb of Le Havre, was the home of Monet's father. Destitute, Monet spent the summer of 1867 with his father and his aunt Sophie Lecadre at the cost of abandoning his companion, Camille Doncieux, and their newborn son, Jean. Monet attended his birth in Paris on August 8 and returned to Sainte-Adresse on August 12.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil on canvas, 75.2 x 101.6 cm]

Eugène Boudin - Princess Pauline Metternich on the Beach [c.1865-67]

Eugène Boudin - Princess Pauline Metternich on the Beach [c.1865-67], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

The wife of the Austrian ambassador to France and one of the more noteworthy women at the court of Napoleon III, Princess Metternich, the famously homely yet chic style icon known for her sense of wit, referred to herself as "the fashionable monkey." Here, Boudin took her at her word, devoting a scrap of cardboard to capturing the effect of her voluminous skirts billowing in the wind at the Normandy shore.

Boudin achieved success with his scenes of fashionably dressed families taking the sea air at Trouville and other beach resorts, and apart from Empress Eugénie, no woman would have aroused more interest on the beach than Princess Metternich. A close friend of the empress, she became the face of fashion in Second Empire Paris.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil on cardboard, laid down on wood, 29.5 x 23.5 cm]

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - La Promenade [1870]

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - La Promenade [1870], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

La Promenade is in part an homage to earlier artists that Renoir greatly admired. He had spent the previous summer painting outdoors with Claude Monet, who encouraged him to move toward a lighter, more luminous palette and to indulge his penchant for luscious, feathery brushwork. Here Renoir retained something of Gustave Courbet's green-and-brown palette while choosing his subject from the sensual, lighthearted garden jaunts of eighteenth-century painters such as Jean-Antoine Watteau and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, whose works he had studied in the Louvre. 

Unlike the images of seduction created by his predecessors, Renoir's is a fleeting moment caught by chance, middle-class Parisians immersed in nature, possibly a local park, not set before a studio backdrop. The dappled light filtering through the foliage would become a trademark of Renoir's finest Impressionist works of the 1870s and 1880s. He used a thin, oily paint mix, his glazes here floating into each other to create depth. 

[Getty Centre, Los Angeles - Oil on canvas, 32 x 25.5 inches]

Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller - Prater Landscape [1830]

Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller - Prater Landscape [1830], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Compared to his portraits and genre scenes, Waldmüller’s (Vienna, January 15, 1793 - Hinterbruhl, August 23, 1865) landscapes are fewer in number but not less in importance. They demonstrate that plein air painting can even be consistent by doing without an emphatically subjective, spontaneous brushstroke, thus allowing the depiction of minute detail. The harsh light and the abrupt spatial contrasts of Waldmüller’s later paintings are not yet to be found in this early Prater landscape. Spreading out peacefully under the bushy foliage of the elms, the green of the meadow continues into the bright distance. The horizon is remarkably low, delineated by the new blocks of flats in Vienna’s Leopoldstadt. For stylistic reasons the very small, partly obscured signature has usually been read as “1830.” That would make this picture the first in a series of about ten small and four larger landscapes showing Vienna’s Prater. The last one of these, the so-called Large Prater Landscape (1849, Vienna, Österreichische Galerie im Belvedere) clearly seems to have more weight and pathos than the Berlin picture, which is bathed in cool morning light and populated by only one small accessory figure.

[Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin - Oil on wood, 71 x 91.5 cm]

Winslow Homer - Prisoners from the Front [1866]

Winslow Homer - Prisoners from the Front [1866], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

The material that Homer collected as an artist-correspondent during the Civil War provided the subjects for his first oil paintings. In 1866, one year after the war ended and four years after he reputedly began to paint in oil, Homer completed this picture, a work that established his reputation. It represents an actual scene from the war in which a Union officer, Brigadier General Francis Channing Barlow (1834–1896) captured several Confederate officers on June 21, 1864. The background depicts the battlefield at Petersburg, Virginia. Infrared photography and numerous studies indicate that the painting underwent many changes in the course of completion.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil on canvas, 61 x 96.5 cm]

Edgar Degas - Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers [1865]

Edgar Degas - Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers [1865], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

The novelty of this composition has prompted many writers to suggest that the seated woman was an afterthought. Although there remains some doubt, she is probably the wife of Degas's school friend Paul Valpinçon. Degas immensely enjoyed his visits to their country house, Ménil-Hubert, and the presence of dahlias, asters, and gaillardias in the bouquet makes it likely that this work was painted there in August or September 1865. It was preceded by an exquisite pencil drawing of the sitter, also dated 1865. Far from representing an afterthought, her presence in the composition was deliberate and intentionally provocative. As Degas himself once said, "I assure you that no art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament."

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil on canvas, 73.7 x 92.7 cm]

Frederick Carl Frieseke - Woman with a Mirror [1911]

Frederick Carl Frieseke - Woman with a Mirror [1911], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil on canvas, 80.6 x 81 cm]

James Tissot - En Plein Soleil [c.1881]

James Tissot - En Plein Soleil [c.1881], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

This group portrait includes the artist's companion, Kathleen Newton, at left, her children, Cecil George Newton and Muriel Mary Violet Newton, and two unidentified figures, who may be Kathleen's elder sister, Mary Hervey, and one of her daughters, Isabelle or Lilian. The setting appears to be Tissot's garden in St. John's Wood, London. Based on at least one photograph taken by Tissot, this composition was originally known only by means of the artist's etching after the painting.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art - Oil on wood, 24.8 x 35.2 cm]

Gustave Courbet - The Source [1862]

Gustave Courbet - The Source [1862], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Courbet's The Source, painted in a naturalistic style and devoid of the trappings of academic allegory, may have been a response to Ingres's La Source (1856, Musée d'Orsay, Paris), which was exhibited at the Galerie Martinet in 1861. Courbet's version is thought to date to 1862.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil on canvas, 120 x 74.3 cm]

Léon Lhermitte - Market Place of Ploudalmézeau, Brittany [1877]

Léon Lhermitte - Market Place of Ploudalmézeau, Brittany [1877], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Léon Lhermitte (1844 - 1925) was born in Mont-Saint-Père but became a student at the Petite Ecole in Paris, under the supervision of Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, whose classes were also attended by Henri Fantin-Latour and Alphonse Legros among others. He exhibited at the Salon between 1866 and the first decade of the 20th century. He was a founder-member of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1890 and was made officer of the Légion d'honneur in 1894.

This painting is typical of Lhermitte's peasant scenes. It shows a scene of everyday life in the market place of a small village in Brittany, Ploudalmézeau.

[Victoria & Albert Museum, London - Oil on canvas, 40 x 57.2 cm]

Rosa Bonheur - Weaning the Calves [1879]

Rosa Bonheur - Weaning the Calves [1879], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

The scene is probably located on one of the high pasturelands of the Pyrenees. Rosa Bonheur (French, Bordeaux, 1822 - Thomery, 1899) took a trip there in 1850 and brought back many studies that she used throughout her career.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil on canvas, 65.1 x 81.3 cm]

Pierre-Narcisse Guérin - Self Portrait

Pierre-Narcisse Guérin - Self Portrait, a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Pierre-Narcisse, baron Guérin (May 13, 1774 – July 6, 1833) was a French painter. A pupil of Jean-Baptiste Regnault, he carried off one of the three grands prix offered in 1796, in consequence of the competition not having taken place since 1793. In 1799, his painting Marcus Sextus (Louvre) was exhibited at the Salon and excited wild enthusiasm. Part of this was due to the subject, a victim of Sulla's proscription returning to Rome to find his wife dead and his house in mourning, in which an allusion was found to the turmoil of the French Revolution.

[Chateau de Versailles - Oil on canvas]

Vincent van Gogh - Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat [1887]

Vincent van Gogh - Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat [1887], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

In 1886, at age thirty-two, Van Gogh arrived in Paris "not even know[ing] what the Impressionists were." By the time he left, two years later, he had cast off the muddy palette and coarse brushwork that had characterised his earlier efforts and embraced the latest developments in painting. Here he demonstrates his awareness of Neo-Impressionist technique and colour theory, using the back of a Dutch peasant study (The Potato Peeler) he had taken with him to Paris.

Van Gogh produced more than twenty self-portraits during his Parisian sojourn. Short of funds but determined nevertheless to hone his skills as a figure painter, he became his own best sitter: "I deliberately bought a good mirror so if I lacked a model I could work from my own likeness."

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil on canvas, 40.6 x 31.8 cm]

Pieter de Hooch - A Party [1675]

Pieter de Hooch - A Party [1675], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

[Philadelphia Museum of Art - Oil on canvas, 81.8 x 98.9 cm]

Lawrence Alma-Tadema - A Reading from Homer [1885]

Lawrence Alma-Tadema - A Reading from Homer [1885], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Here, a young poet crowned with a laurel wreath reads from Homer to an audience dressed for a festival. The setting is probably Greece toward the end of the seventh century BCE. The Greek letters in the upper right indicate that the place is dedicated to the poet. Through attention to details such as architecture and dress, Alma-Tadema evokes scenes of everyday life in ancient Greece and Rome. However, his pictures are rarely entirely archaeologically accurate. For example, while he accurately rendered the ancient musical instrument on the left, a cithara, he also included a type of rose that did not exist before the nineteenth century.

[Philadelphia Museum of Art - Oil on canvas, 91.8 x 183.5 cm]

John Singer Sargent - A Male Model Standing before a Stove [c.1875-80]

John Singer Sargent - A Male Model Standing before a Stove [c.1875-80], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil on canvas, 71.1 x 55.9 cm]

Goya - The Parasol [1777]

Goya - The Parasol [1777], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

[Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid - Oil on canvas, 104 x 152 cm]

Berthe Morisot - Young Woman Seated on a Sofa [c.1879]

Berthe Morisot - Young Woman Seated on a Sofa [c.1879], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Born to a French upper-middle-class family, Berthe Morisot diverged from societal norms when she established herself as a professional artist. She exhibited at the official Salons and in seven of the eight Impressionist exhibitions. Morisot was at her apogee when she painted this model in her Paris apartment. By then she had melded the bravura brushwork adopted from her mentor and brother-in-law, Édouard Manet, with her own opalescent palette.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil on canvas, 80.6 x 99.7 cm]

Henry Herbert La Thangue - Winter in Liguria

Henry Herbert La Thangue - Winter in Liguria, a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Henry Herbert La Thangue (Croydon, January 19, 1859 - London, December 21, 1929) was an English realist rural landscape painter associated with the Newlyn School.

[Christie’s Auctions - Oil on canvas, 41.75 X 35.25 inches]

Jacob Jordaens - Meleager and Atalanta [1620-50]

Jacob Jordaens - Meleager and Atalanta [1620-50], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

After killing the wild boar that was ravaging the kingdom of Calydon, Meleager offered its head to Atalanta, of whom he was enamoured. But the hunter's uncles considered themselves the rightful recipients of that trophy. They took it from her, provoking such rage in Meleagrus that he killed them.

Jordaens places the figure in the foreground like a long running frieze. In the group on the right, Meleager's hand moves to his sword, ready to begin the attack on his own uncles, while Atalanta, with an expression of fear, tries to stop him. On the left, the group of hunters marks the composition's rhythm. Their weapons, an arm and the movement of their dogs draw the viewer's gaze toward the main event. The two parts of the painting were made separately. First, Jordaens painted the group on the right, and their characteristics belong to his youth, when his works were dominated by forceful and monumental figures in the manner of Rubens (1577-1640). The figures on the left were painted on a piece of canvas that was added to the other group and belong to the artist's late style.

This painting is not documented until 1746, when it was at the La Granja Palace.

[Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid - Oil on canvas, 152.3 x 240.5 cm]

Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse - Louis VII Takes the Standard at Saint-Denis [1840]

Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse - Louis VII takes the Standard at Saint-Denis [1840], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse (Corbeil, November 1784 - Paris, 1844) was a French painter and lithographer. Mauzaisse's specialty was painting historical subjects, especially battle scenes, but he also painted portraits. In 1822, he was commissioned to decorate several ceilings in the Louvre.

[Chateau de Versailles - Oil on canvas]

Camille Pissarro - Jalais Hill, Pontoise [1867]

Camille Pissarro - Jalais Hill, Pontoise [1867], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

The pictures that Pissarro painted in the late 1860s at Pontoise, a small village near Paris, are among his most important early works. These views of lanes, farm buildings, hillsides, and fields are firmly structured in composition and are characterised by strong brushstrokes and broad, flat areas of colour that owe much to the work of Courbet and Corot, whose paintings were then on view in large exhibitions in Paris.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil on canvas, 87 x 114.9 cm]

Claude Monet - The Japanese Footbridge and the Water Lily Pool, Giverny [1899]

Claude Monet - The Japanese Footbridge and the Water Lily Pool, Giverny [1899], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

[Philadelphia Museum of Art - Oil on canvas, 89.2 x 93.3 cm]

Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Hesse - Funerary Honours Rendered to Titian, Who Died in Venice during the Plague of 1576 [c.1833]

Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Hesse - Funerary Honours Rendered to Titian, Who Died in Venice during the Plague of 1576 [c.1833], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Hesse (Paris, September 30, 1806 - Paris, August 7, 1879) was a French painter. He entered the studio of Jean-Victor Bertin in 1820, enrolling at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts the following year. He then travelled in France, visiting the Midi in 1825. In 1830 he visited first Rome, where he met Horace Vernet, Director of the Academie Francaise, and then Venice. In 1833 he exhibited Funeral Honours Rendered to Titian after his Death at Venice during the Plague of 1576 at the Salon, where he won a first-class medal.

This painting is a preparatory sketch for the painting in the Musée du Louvre, Paris.

[Philadelphia Museum of Art - Oil on canvas, 40 x 59.1 cm]

François Louis Joseph Watteau - The Grand Square in Lille During the Siege of 1792 [1794]

François Louis Joseph Watteau - The Grand Square in Lille During the Siege of 1792 [1794], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

François Louis Joseph Watteau, known (like his father) as the Watteau of Lille (Lille, August 18, 1758 - Lille, December 1, 1823) was a French painter, active in his birthplace. He was the son of the painter Louis Joseph Watteau (1731-1798) and grandson of Noël Joseph Watteau (1689-1756) - Noël was the brother of Jean-Antoine Watteau, the painter of fêtes galantes. From 1808 to his death he was deputy curator of the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille, which his father had helped to found.

[Château de Versailles - Oil on canvas, 82 x 65 cm]

Salomon van Ruysdael - A Ferry on a River [1649]

Salomon van Ruysdael - A Ferry on a River [1649], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Salomon van Ruysdael (Dutch, 1600/03 - 1670), one of the leading landscape painters of his generation, was renowned for the atmospheric effects he created in his images of life along peaceful Dutch waterways. In the 1640s he helped lay the foundation for the classical period of Dutch landscape and influenced a generation of artists, including his nephew Jacob van Ruysdael, Meindert Hobbema, and Aelbert Cuyp.

Salomon’s Ferry on a River, signed and dated 1649, is both imposing in scale and visually compelling. It depicts a ferryboat filled with travelers, including some seated in a horse-drawn carriage, crossing a broad river near a turreted castle. A large clump of trees silhouetted against the windswept blue sky provides a framework for the animals and humans activating the scene. Light floods into this harmonious composition, illuminating the leaves of the trees as well as the distant sailboats and village church.

[National Gallery of Art, Washington - Oil on canvas, 39.2 x 52.5 inches]

Camille Pissarro - The Fence [1872]

Camille Pissarro - The Fence [1872], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Pissarro (French, 1830 - 1903), who was committed to socialist principles, identified strongly with the land and with the peasant farmers who worked it. He moved with his family from Paris in the 1860s to a number of small villages like Louveciennes. While many of his fellow impressionists chose subjects from modern life and leisure, sophisticated even if their settings were in the countryside, Pissarro preferred scenes of an older, more rural way of life like this garden fence and the small figures who pause in their work.

It was in the early 1870s that Pissarro made his most purely impressionist pictures, painted, as this one probably was, in a single session on the spot. The paint here is quickly applied, thick in some areas, much thinner in others. We can see, in the trees, for example, where one brushstroke has been pulled through an earlier one that still lay wet on the canvas.

[National Gallery of Art, Washington - Oil on canvas, 37.8 x 45.7 cm]

José Jiménez Aranda - The Small Naturalists [1893]

José Jiménez Aranda - The Small Naturalists [1893], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

[Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid - Oil on canvas, 48.5 x 62.5 cm]

Juan Martín Jiménez - The Toilet of a Roman Lady [c.1875-99]

Juan Martín Jiménez - The Toilet of a Roman Lady [c.1875-99], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Juan Martín Jiménez (1858 - 1901) was a Spanish painter.

[Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid - Oil on canvas, 85 x 146 cm]

Paul Mathey - Felicien Rops in His Studio

Paul Mathey - Felicien Rops in His Studio, a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Paul Mathey (1844 - 1929) was a French artist. He was born in Paris, studied art at the studio of Leon Cogniet, and first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1868.

[Chateau de Versailles - Oil on canvas, 145 x 116 cm]

Henri Lehmann - Faustine Léo [1842]

Henri Lehmann - Faustine Léo [1842], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Lehmann (French, Kiel, 1814 - Paris, 1882), after Chassériau, Ingres's most accomplished student, executed several portraits, both painted and drawn, of his first cousin Faustine Léo. This portrait clearly emulates Ingres's example, notably in its smooth, polished surface and the crisply delineated contours of the figure. Yet, its intensely saturated palette and intimate mood set Lehmann's work apart from that of his master. The portrait bears its original frame.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil on canvas, 100 x 81.3 cm]