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]

Jimmy Ernst - Lumiere [1968]

Jimmy Ernst, born Hans-Ulrich Ernst (June 24, 1920 - February 6, 1984), was an American painter born in Germany. He was the son of surrealist painter Max Ernst and Luise Straus. When he was just two years old, his parents divorced, Jimmy staying with his mother. He first visited his father in France in 1930, where he met many of the surrealists, including André Masson, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel. In February 1933 the Ernst family emigrated to Paris on account of being suspected by the new Nazi regime. In June 1938 Jimmy set sail from Le Havre, eventually arriving in New York. There he met many European exiles and befriended the city's avant-garde. His efforts to transport his father away from Nazi-occupied France finally succeeded in 1941. His mother, however, was sent to Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944, which she did not survive.

[Oil on canvas, 50 x 60 inches]