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[1513-40]
 Image source: Wikimedia commons | In this work, Mary Cassatt addressed the theme for which she is best known—women and children—while also experimenting with compositional elements of Japanese art. Cassatt saw a large exhibition of Japanese prints at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1890, and produced a series of prints influenced by their aesthetics. The Child’s Bath is the culmination of her investigation of a flattened picture plane and decorative patterning. The intimate scene of everyday life also echoes the subject of many Japanese prints. In Cassatt’s painting, the encircling arms and gentle touch of the mother or nurse convey an overall feeling of protection and tenderness. [Source: artic.edu] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Child’s Bath, The | 1893 | Oil/Canvas | Genre Painting |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Cassatt, Mary | 1844-1926, aged 82 | American painter | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-41] | |
| Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago USA | 100 x 66 |
| When Gauguin returned to France in August 1893, penniless and sick, he settled in a studio in Paris with Annah the Javanese, a mulatto whom he had found wandering in the street and who soothed his nostalgia for faraway lands and races. He decorated his new abode with chrome yellow walls, hung with his paintings and those remaining works from his collection by other artists, including Cézanne and Van Gogh. The decoration also included numerous Polynesian works, which he had brought back, especially idols carved in unknown red, orange, or black woods. Despite her exotic name, the 13-year-old Annah was in fact Singalese. It is generally assumed that this work represents Annah with her pet monkey Taoa. The Tahitian inscription on the painting, which may be translated as ‘the child-woman Judith is not yet breached’, seems at first to have little relevance to the subject. It has been suggested that this refers to Judith Molard, the daughter of his friend William Molard, who was also 13 years old. Perhaps by depicting Annah with all the sangfroid of Manet’s Olympia and referring to the sexually naive Judith in the title, he is poking fun at the constraints imposed by her bourgeois parents. They, of course, would not have understood the title. [Source: wga.hu] |  Image source: wga.hu |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Annah the Javanese (Aita tamari vahine Judith te parari) | 1893 | Oil/Canvas | Portrait |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Gauguin, Paul | 1848-1903, aged 54 | French painter | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-42] | |
| Private Collection | 116 x 81 |
 Image source: Sothebys.com | Paul Gauguin’s Eü haere ia oe (Woman Holding a Fruit) – the enigmatic Maori title translates as “Where are you going?” – was painted in 1893 and offers a verdant vision of an idealized South Seas maiden along with an examination of the colonial judgment under which she falls. It’s housed in Russia’s State Hermitage Museum, and has highlighted their permanent collection since 1948. The painting has a sister work, held in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, completed the previous year. In that more muted composition, the woman represents Iviri, the Maori goddess of death. But Gauguin’s focus on the present work is life and fertility. [Source: sothebys.com] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Woman Holding Fruit, The | 1893 | Oil/Canvas | Genre Painting |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Gauguin, Paul | 1848-1903, aged 54 | French painter | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-43] | |
| State Hermitage Museum, Palace Square, 2, St Petersburg, Russia, 190008 | 93 x 74 |
| Rideau, Cruchon et Compotier, 1893 marks the maturity of great still lifes of Cezanne’s middle and late periods. Beside the others, it seems a return to tradition in its studied outlines and great depth of shadow. It seems also one of the most obviously formal in the sober pairing and centering of objects, from the fruits on the cloth to the foliate pattern on the wall. But through the colour, which has its own pairing of spots, the symmetries of the objects intersect or overlap; the same object belongs then to different groups. The resulting rivalry of axes gives a secret life to the otherwise static whole. [Source: paulcezanne.org] |  Image source: Wikimedia commons |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Rideau, cruchon et compotier (Curtain, jug and fruit bowl) | 1893-4 | 0 | Still Life |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Cézanne, Paul | 1839-1906, aged 67 | French painter Aix-en-Provence | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-44] | |
| Private collection | 60 x 73 |
 Image source: Wikimedia commons | Monet painted more than thirty views of Rouen Cathedral in 1892–93. Moving from one canvas to another as each day progressed, he painted the facade with highly textured brushstrokes that convey the aspect of sculpted stone and make the atmosphere and light palpable. Monet later finished the works in his studio at Giverny, carefully adjusting the pictures both independently and in relation to each other. Hence, most are signed and dated 1894, as is this example. In 1895, Monet exhibited twenty of his cathedral pictures at Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris. [Source: metmuseum.org] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Cathedrale de Rouen, The Portal, Sunlight (part of series) | 1894 | Oil/Canvas | Landscape |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Monet, Claude | 1840-1926, aged 86 | French painter | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-45] | |
| Musée d’Orsay, Rue de la Légion d’Honneur, 75007 Paris, France | 107 x 74 |
| Paul Cezanne is considered one of the most prominent impressionists and modernists. Cezanne often painted still lifes and landscapes, and inspired artists like Pablo Picasso and George Braque to move away from a more figurative style and to experiment with Cubism. Cezanne’s greatness lies in the way he painted, rather than in his choice of subjects. He was also noted for his use of colour and light, and for his experimental approach to perspective. Cezanne’s career lasted more than 40 years, and he was incredibly prolific: around 900 pieces are preserved, though some are incomplete. [Source: barnebys.com] |  Image source: repro-taleaux.com |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Nature morte avec sucrier, poires et nappe | 1894 | Oil/Canvas | Still Life |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Cézanne, Paul | 1839-1906, aged 67 | French painter Aix-en-Provence | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-46] | |
| Private Collection | 0 |
 Image source: museothyssen.org | Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec always harboured a keen fascination with the world of the theatres and cafés-concerts of Paris, which he depicted in numerous works, exhibiting his impressive powers of observation. The famous singer Yvette Guilbert, a genuine star of the Divan Japonais, Ambassadeurs and Moulin Rouge cabarets in fin-de-siècle Paris, had met Toulouse Lautrec at the beginning of 1893 through the writer Maurice Donnay and had become one of the painter’s favourite vedettes. In this portrait, which was used to illustrate Gustave Geffroy’s article on café-concerts in Le Figaro Illustré in 1893, Yvette is depicted on the edge of the stage, in a stiff pose — haughty even — about to perform the de rigueur curtsey between rounds of applause. According to the singer’s memoirs, he had copied her chignon and pale makeup from a wax head in the Musée de Lille and her long V-necked dress from Albert Besnard’s Portrait of Mme Roger Jourdain. [Source: museothyssen.org] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Yvette Guilbert, Portrait of | 1894 | Oil/Canvas | Portrait |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de | 1864-1901, aged 36 | French painter Paris | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-47] | |
| Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Paseo del Prado, 8, 28014 Madrid, Spain | 55 x 38 |
| This is one of Cézanne’s most complex late still-lifes. Beyond the foreground table on which stands a plaster Cupid, the space and the arrangement of figures become highly ambiguous. The green apple on the floor in the far corner seems too large and the floor itself appears tilted. The blue drapery in the painting, propped up against the wall at the left, merges with a similar fabric in Cézanne’s own still-life. Cézanne may have been using these paradoxes to stress the artificiality of the composition, and perhaps, to comment on the act of painting itself. [Source: artandarchitecture.org.uk] |  Image source: khanacademy.org |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Still Life with Plastic Cupid | 1895 | Oil/Canvas | Still Life |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Cézanne, Paul | 1839-1906, aged 67 | French painter Aix-en-Provence | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-48] | |
| Courtauld Gallery, London UK | 71 x 57 |
 Image source: Wikimedia commons | This self-portrait is a variation on Böcklin’s approach to the traditional memento mori theme. The two pictures, referring to a long lineage in portrayals of life’s vanity, are thematically comparable, but the differences in approach are striking: where Böcklin uses colour nuances, and the proximity, facial expressions and gestures of the protagonists, seen against an undefinable background, to create a mysterious atmosphere, Corinth deliberately avoids all unclarity whatsoever. The skeleton on its hook is plainly an anatomical model. The painter is beside it, but no relation is established between him and the skeleton. [Source: wga.hu] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Self-Portrait with Skeleton | 1896 | Oil/Canvas | Portrait |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Corinth, Lovis | 1858-1925, aged 67 | German painter | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-49] | |
| Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Luisenstraße 33, 80333 München, Germany | 66 x 86 |
 Image source: Wikimedia commons |
| In the winter of 1897, Gauguin experienced a psychological crisis. He had left France for Tahiti six years prior, hoping to discover an unspoiled tropical paradise in the French colony, where he could live affordably and advance his art. Instead, he was frustrated by the modernity he witnessed, quarreled with French colonial authorities, struggled financially, and endured a steep mental and physical decline. At a time of heightened personal hardship, Gauguin explored fundamental questions concerning the nature and meaning of life in this monumental painting—the largest he ever attempted—an ambitious effort in decorative mural painting, no doubt made with an eye to his artistic legacy. In his letters, Gauguin described the composition proceeding from right to left, beginning with the sleeping infant and ending with the huddled figure of ‘an old woman nearing death’. Near centre, an androgynous standing figure reaches for a piece of fruit. A blue idol with arms symmetrically outstretched atop a pedestal, Gauguin suggested, ‘indicates the Beyond’. While not planned for integration within a specific architectural setting, Gauguin did intend this decorative painting to ‘look like a mural’, requesting it be exhibited in a simple white frame. The painting’s yellow corners—one bearing an inscription (now the work’s title) in French, and the other his signature—Gauguin felt, made the painting appear ‘like a fresco whose corners are spoiled with age, and which is attached to a golden wall’. [Source: mfa.org] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Where do we come from? What Are We? Where Are We Going? | 1897 | Oil/Canvas | Landscape |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Gauguin, Paul | 1848-1903, aged 54 | French painter | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-50] | |
| Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston USA | 139 x 375 |
| After spending six years in rural Éragny, Pissarro returned to Paris, where he painted several series of the grands boulevards. Surveying the view from his lodgings at the Grand Hôtel de Russie in early 1897, Pissarro marveled that he could ‘see down the whole length of the boulevards with 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 recorded two scenes of the boulevard des Italiens, and fourteen of the boulevard Montmartre, the spectacle of urban life as it unfolded below his window. [Source: metmuseum.org] |  Image source: metmuseum.org |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning | 1897 | Oil/Canvas | Genre Painting |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Pissarro, Camille | 1830-1903, aged 73 | French painter | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-51] | |
| Private Collection | 65 x 81 |
 Image source: Wikimedia commons | In 1893, Monet, a passionate horticulturist, purchased land with a pond near his property in Giverny, intending to build something ‘for the pleasure of the eye and also for motifs to paint’. The result was his water-lily garden. In 1899, he began a series of eighteen views of the wooden footbridge over the pond, completing twelve paintings, including this one, that summer. The vertical format of the picture, unusual in this series, gives prominence to the water lilies and their reflections on the pond. [Source: metmuseum.org] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Bridge over a Pond of Water Lillies | 1899 | Oil/Canvas | Landscape |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Monet, Claude | 1840-1926, aged 87 | French painter | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-52] | |
| Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY USA | 93 x 74 |
 Image source: wga.hu |
| During the last thirty years of his life Monet devoted himself to a series of famous landscape paintings of his water gardens at Giverny. Among these Water Lilies paintings (1897-1926) was a smaller series of eighteen views of the wooden Japanese footbridge over his pond, which he began in 1899. Four of the best-known of these Impressionist paintings include: The Japanese Footbridge (1899, National Gallery of Australia); Bridge over a Pond of Waterlilies (1899, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); The Water-Lily Pond (1899, National Gallery, London); and this work at the Musee d’Orsay. This landscape painting was done at Giverny more than fifteen years after the Impressionist group had started to drift apart [Source: visual-arts-cork.com] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Water Lily Pond: Green Harmony | 1899 | Oil/Canvas | Landscape |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Monet, Claude | 1840-1926, aged 86 | French painter | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-53] | |
| Musée d’Orsay, Rue de la Légion d’Honneur, 75007 Paris, France | 90 x 100 |
| Water Lilies and Japanese Bridge represents two of Monet’s greatest achievements: his gardens at Giverny and the paintings they inspired. Monet moved to Giverny in 1883 and immediately began to develop the property. For him, the gardens were both a passion and a second artistic medium. His Asian garden was not part of the original estate; it was located on an adjacent property with a small brook, which he purchased and enlarged into a pond for a water garden in 1893. He transformed the site into an inspired vision of cool greens and calm, reflective waters, enhanced by exotic plants such as bamboo, ginkgo, and Japanese fruit trees and a Japanese footbridge. It was not until 1899, however, that he began a series of views of the site, of which this is one. [Source: Wikimedia commons] |  Image source: Wikimedia commons |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Water Lillies and Japanese Bridge | 1899 | Oil/Canvas | Landscape |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Monet, Claude | 1840-1926, aged 86 | French painter | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-54] | |
| Princeton University Art Museum, Elm Dr, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA | 90 x 90 |
 Image source: Hermitage Museum | Several of Cezanne’s Impressionist portraits which were painted during the 1890s and early 1900s are distinctive for the slightly strained pose of the sitter, and for the oval-like arrangement of the hands, which impart more stability and significance to the figure painting despite the everyday clothes and unassuming features of the sitter. Among such portraits by Cezanne are Lady in Blue (1899, Hermitage, St Petersburg) and Seated Woman in Blue (with a Book) (1902-6, Phillips Collection, Washington DC), in both of which the same dress is worn. Originally it was believed that Seated Woman in Blue was a portrait of the artist’s wife Hortense Fiquet (1850-1922), from which we might have assumed that the Hermitage portrait also showed Hortense Cezanne, were it not for the lack of facial similarity. Even so, the two paintings were evidently painted at roughly the same time. [Source: visual-arts-cork.com] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Lady in Blue | c1900 | Oil/Canvas | Portrait |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Cézanne, Paul | 1839-1906, aged 67 | French painter Aix-en-Provence | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-55] | |
| State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg | 90 x 74 |
| Young Italian Woman is typical of Cezanne’s late style of figure painting, possessing the profoundly meditative silence and stillness of such great contemporary works as Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1899, Musee du Petit Palais, Paris) and Woman in Blue (1892-6, Hermitage Museum, Leningrad). Although the girl stares blankly into space, and we are offered nothing which might give a clue to the nature of her thoughts, it is difficult not to read her mood as melancholy, and not to see some resemblance between her and the boy who appears to be musing on mortality in Young Man with a Skull (1896-8, Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania). However, the absence of any symbol or anecdotal detail, and the indeterminate nature of the girl’s dress – certainly not contemporary fashion, but not unequivocally a folk costume either – serve to establish a completely timeless, completely generalised ambience, for which the abstraction of her thoughts is an equivalent. Oppositions of dark and light, of warm and cool colours, of patterned and plain surfaces, are perfectly weighted and reconciled. This harmony, the restraint and dignity of the painting and its gravitas, are felt instinctively as ‘classical’, and it is possible that Cezanne had been influenced by Roman frescoes, as well as by mournful, pensive or resting women painted by Nicolas Poussin, Jan Vermeer or Camille Corot. [Source: visual-arts-cork.com] |  Image source: paulcezanne.org |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Young Italian Woman Leaning on Her Elbow | 1900 | Oil/Canvas | Portrait |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Cézanne, Paul | 1839-1906, aged 67 | French painter Aix-en-Provence | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-56] | |
| Private Collection | 92 x 73 |
 Image source: art-gauguin.com | The sitter of this painting was Tohotaua, the wife of the witch-doctor at Hiva Oa. The figure is strangely isolated in space, staring impassively forward with the static quality and crisply delineated shadows that suggest a photographic source. Indeed, Gauguin used a photo when working on the portrait. The model for this work reappeared in Contes Barbares, but the painting itself was based on a photograph of the woman taken in 1901 and found in Gauguin’s effects after his death in Hiva Oa. Although the pose in the painted version is broadly similar to that in the photograph, Gauguin has made a number of important changes. Instead of coolly appraising the viewer as in the photograph, the woman here gazes into space. The pareo with which Tohotaua covered her breasts in the photograph, has been changed and the image becomes much more overtly erotic. The position of the fan has been moved slightly, so that it covers her right breast in a provocative fashion. In making these changes, Gauguin has constructed an image of an archetypal Polynesian woman, passive and sexually available. [Source: wga.hu] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Girl with a Fan | 1902 | Oil/Canvas | Portrait |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Gauguin, Paul | 1848-1903, aged 54 | French painter | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-57] | |
| Folkwang Museum, Hessen | 91 x 73 |
| Blue Nude is one of Pablo Picasso’s early-years masterpieces. It was painted in 1902, after one of his close friends tragically died, he mourned over it for a long time and was in a depressive mode. It is one of Picasso’s paintings that led to his blue period and has without doubt proved Picasso’s talent on highlighting the deepest emotions while using only one color to effectively express it. The seated model has her back to the viewer, as often adopted in life classes. It was depicted from a high perspective, looking down upon the figure. [Source: pablopicasso.org] |  Image source: pablopicasso.org |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Blue Nude | 1902 | Oil/Canvas | Portrait |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Picasso, Pablo | 1881 – 1973, aged 91 | Spanish painter | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-58] | |
| Picasso Museum, Carrer Montcada, 15-23, 08003 Barcelona, Spain | 46 x 39 |
 Image source: metmuseum.org | Between 1899 and 1901, Monet produced nearly a hundred views of the Thames River in London. He painted Waterloo Bridge and Charing Cross Bridge from his room in the Savoy Hotel and the Houses of Parliament from Saint Thomas’s Hospital across the river. The artist continued to refine the paintings until 1903, when he wrote to his dealer Durand-Ruel: ‘I cannot send you a single canvas of London … It is indispensable to have them all before me, and to tell the truth not one is definitely finished. I develop them all together’. In 1904, this work and thirty-six others were shown at Durand-Ruel’s gallery in Paris. [Source: metmuseum.org] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Houses of Parliament, The (Effect of Fog) | 1903-4 | Oil/Canvas | Landscape |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Monet, Claude | 1840-1926, aged 86 | French painter | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-59] | |
| Musée d’Orsay, Rue de la Légion d’Honneur, 75007 Paris, France | 81 x92 |
| After 1885 the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, near his home in Aix-en-Provence, became Cézanne’s favourite landscape motif. He painted it many times from different positions and under different light conditions. This view, which shows the mountain with a hooked outline, was painted from a steeply-terraced slope above his studio. ‘He began with the shadows and with a touch, which he covered with a second more extensive touch, then with a third, until all these tints, forming a mesh, both coloured and modelled the object’, the artist Emile Bernard later recalled. [Source: tate.org.uk] |  Image source: Wikimedia commons |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Monte Sainte-Victoire from Les Lauves | 1904-6 | Oil/Canvas | Landscape |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Cézanne, Paul | 1839-1906, aged 67 | French painter Aix-en-Provence | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-60] | |
| Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Ulitsa Volkhonka, 12, Moscow, Russia, 119020 | 0 |
 Image source: Wikimedia commons | First exhibited in 1906, the painting, which is exhibited in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is the largest of a series of Bather paintings by Cézanne; the others are in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, National Gallery, London, the Barnes Foundation, Pennsylvania, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Occasionally referred to as the Big Bathers or Large Bathers to distinguish it from the smaller works, the painting is considered one of the masterpieces of modern art, and is often considered Cézanne’s finest work. [Source: Wikimedia commons] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Grandes Baigneuses, Les | 1906 | Oil/Canvas | Landscape |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Cézanne, Paul | 1839-1906, aged 67 | French painter Aix-en-Provence | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-61] | |
| National Gallery, London UK | 210 x 251 |
| The famous writer and expatriate Gertrude Stein was among the first Americans to respond enthusiastically to European avant-garde art. She held weekly salons in her Paris apartment populated by European and American artists and writers. For Picasso, Stein’s early patronage and friendship was critical to his success. He painted this portrait of her between 1905 and 1906 at the end of his so-called ‘Rose Period’. He reduces her body to simple masses, a foreshadowing of his adoption of Cubism, and portrays her face like a mask with heavy lidded eyes, reflecting his recent encounter with Iberian sculpture. [Source: metmuseum.org] |  Image source: metmuseum.org |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Gertrude Stein, Portrait of | 1906 | Oil/Canvas | Portrait |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Picasso, Pablo | 1881 – 1973, aged 91 | Spanish painter | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-62] | |
| Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY USA | 100 x 81 |
 Image source: pablopicasso.org | Picasso’s Two Nudes precipitated a radical shift in his artistic practices. Though executed in the warm, pinkish tones of his rose period, the figures are now characterised by their sheer volume and weight, a striking contrast to the frail, emaciated and ethereal bodies of his earlier works. Where the previous figures seemed to float, these more sculptural figures stand foursquare. Picasso has added a sense of three-dimensionality to these figures. Yet the viewer also gains a sense of seeing them simultaneously from several viewpoints. For example, the torso of the right-hand figure is notably twisted and extended width-wise, so that we see both back and side views. The single breast, in particular – oddly positioned in the center of the torso – undermines any sense of a single point of view. [Source: pablopicasso.org] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Two Nudes | 1906 | Oil/Canvas | Portrait |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Picasso, Pablo | 1881 – 1973, aged 91 | Spanish painter | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-63] | |
| MOMA, Museum of Modern Art, 1 W 53rd St, New York, NY 10019, USA | 151 x 93 |
| The theme of a woman at her toilet, an excuse for painting a nude, was still very common in the 20th century. As Degas had done before him with his pastels, Bonnard chose a sophisticated composition to depict his modern Suzanne surprised in her bath, incarnated by Marthe, his companion and sole model, here shown simultaneously from the back and the front thanks to the reflection in the mirror. The viewer’s eye is thus caught in the narrow claustrophobic world whose limits are pushed out by the play of reflections and articulated screens in the midst of which stands the naked woman. The importance of the decor and the presence of truncated or distorted elements, such as the occasional table on which the picture is standing, push the composition towards the decorative abstraction characteristic of this period in Bonnard’s career. Living for much of the year in his house at Le Cannet on the Côte d’Azur, he strove to catch the light of the South of France by pearly patches of colour that smudge shapes. [Source: musee-orsay.fr] |  Image source: Wikimedia commons |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Toilette, La | 1908 | Oil/Canvas | Portrait |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Bonnard, Pierre | 1867 – 1947, aged 79 | French painter | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-64] | |
| Musée d’Orsay, Rue de la Légion d’Honneur, 75007 Paris, France | 119 x 79 |
 Image source: Wikimedia commons | Mornington Crescent nude, contre-jour is one of a series of works that Sickert painted following the murder of a prostitute in Camden Town, the rough North London neighbourhood where he lived and had a studio. It has been argued that the real subject of this work is in fact the effect of natural light. The French term contre-jour means lit from behind that is, almost producing the effect of a silhouette. [Source: nga.gov.au] Sickert took a keen interest in the crimes of Jack the Ripper and believed he had lodged in a room used by the notorious serial killer. He had been told this by his landlady, who suspected a previous lodger. In 1990 Jean Overton Fuller, in her book Sickert and the Ripper Crimes, maintained that Sickert was the killer. [Source: Wikimedia commons] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Mornington Crescent Nude, contre-jour | 1908 | Oil/Canvas | Portrait |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Sickert, Walter Richard | 1860-1942, aged 81 | English painter London | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-65] | |
| Private Collection | 46 x 51 |
| Zorn was one of Sweden’s foremost artists. He obtained international success as a painter, sculptor, and etcher. Among Zorn’s portrait subjects were King Oscar II of Sweden, and three American Presidents, Grover Cleveland, William H. Taft, and Theodore Roosevelt. While Anders Zorn was renowned for his portrait work, he had significant success with his painting of nudes. Most of his works were outdoor nudes, so this painting being set indoors is quite unusual for the artist. What is most striking about Zorn’s work, as he often used a very limited number of colours in his art, yet managed to create scenes of depth. [Source: Wikimedia commons] |  Image source: Wikimedia commons |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Girls from Darlana Having a Bath | 1908 | Oil | Genre Painting |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Anders, Zorn | 1860-1920 | Swedish painter | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-66] | |
| Nationalmuseum, Stockholm Sweden | 0 |
 Image source: metmuseum.org |
| The many variations of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies are probably some of the most beloved works of the 20th century. Millions of people have made the pilgrimage to France to visit Monet’s house in Giverny, where the gardens served as inspiration for hundreds of the artist’s paintings. Water Lilies, or Nymphéas in French, was part of a first concentrated campaign by Monet to capture the delicate blooms at different times of the day, under different atmospheric conditions. When, after much hesitation, he exhibited a suite of 48 water-lily paintings in 1909 at the Paris gallery of his art dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, the series became an enormous financial, popular, and critical success. In conjunction with that exhibition, Monet was asked to define the essence of his art. The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration, he said. Perhaps my originality boils down to my capacity as a hypersensitive receptor, and to the expediency of a shorthand by means of which I project onto a canvas, as if onto a screen, impressions registered on my retina. [Source: artsandculture.google.com] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Water Lilies (Nymphéas) | c1910-1920 | Oil/Canvas | Landscape |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Monet, Claude | 1840-1926, aged 86 | French painter | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-72] | |
| Metropoloitan Museum of Art, NY USA | 101 x 200 |
| The painting shows the artist himself in profile. He is wearing a light coloured hat, sporting a long white beard set on a dark green background. The painting is in the typical Renoir style, though critics think that in his later years, Renoir’s style was more traditional drawing inspiration from Titian and Rubens. (Source: pierreaugusterenoir.net) |  Image source: art-renoir.com |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Self Portrait with a White Hat | 1910 | Oil/Canvas | Portrait |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Renoir, Pierre-August | 1841-1919, aged 78 | French painter | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-67] | |
| Private collection |
 Image source: Wikimedia commons | Ten years after moving to Giverny in 1883, Claude Monet envisioned turning a small pond on an adjacent parcel of land into an Asian-influenced water garden. Overcoming the resistance of locals wary of introducing foreign plants into the region, Monet won approval to expand the pond by diverting water from the Epte River. He encircled the basin with a vivacious arrangement of flowers, trees, and bushes, and the next year filled it with water lilies. He added a Japanese-style wooden bridge in 1895, then a few years later started to paint the pond and its water lilies, and never stopped, making them the obsessive focus of his intensely searching work for the next quarter century. Lush and luminous, The Japanese Bridge immerses us in the physical experience of being in the garden. With the bands of the blue bridge suspended like a canopy near the top of the canvas and no sky to be seen, the water and billowing foliage fill the visual field, immersing the viewer in the verdant, brightly coloured waterscape. Cool blue and green tones predominate, but are balanced by the pink, white, and yellow lilies floating in complex pattern across the surface of the water from near to far. [Source: nga.gov] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Japanese Bridge, The | 1919-24 | Oil/Canvas | Landscape |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Monet, Claude | 1840-1926, aged 86 | French painter | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-68] | |
| National Gallery, London UK | 88 x 93 |
 Image source: metmuseum.org | This painting captures a scene the artist must often have observed. His longtime companion and future wife, Marthe (Maria Boursin), is seated at a table laden with dishes and a fruit bowl. The profile of an attendant or maid is visible at the left. Although Marthe was in her fifties at the time, she appears as ageless as she always does in Bonnard’s paintings. [Source: metmuseum.org] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Green Blouse, The | 1919 | Oil/Canvas | Genre Painting |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Bonnard, Pierre | 1867-1947, aged 80 | French painter | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-69] | |
| Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY USA | 102 x 68 |
| This painting was begun in 1920 at Vaucresson, a residential suburb west of Paris, where Vuillard’s friends Lucy and Josse (Jos) Hessel had recently purchased the house depicted in the background. Jos, a partner in the art firm of Bernheim-Jeune, had become Vuillard’s dealer in 1912. His wife was one of Vuillard’s great loves; their relationship spanned more than three decades, until the artist’s death in 1940. The woman in a housedress standing at right is Lucy’s cousin Marcelle Aron. Lucy kneels across from her, at left, camouflaged by one of the large rosebushes that serve as a decorative screen in the foreground. [Source: metmuseum.org] |  Image source: metmuseum.org |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Garden at Vaucresson | 1920 | Dstmpr/Cnv | Still Life |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Vuillard, Édouard | 1868-1940, aged 71 | French painter | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-70] | |
| Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Ulitsa Volkhonka, 12, Moscow, Russia, 119019 | 151 x 111 |
 Image source: Wikimedia commons | During the 1920s, in the last years of his career, Lovis Corinth’s paintings reached a new peak, both in their quantity and their innovative exploration of colour and texture. Corinth painted Ecce Homo at Easter, 1925, as an act of meditation to mark the festival. It shows the moment that Pilate presents Christ to the hostile crowd, just before the crucifixion. Christ has been scourged, bound, and crowned with thorns, and Pilate’s words are quoted from the Vulgate translation, meaning behold, the man. This painting was bought for the Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 1929, but in 1937 was condemned by the Nazi party as being ‘degenerate art’. Thankfully it escaped destruction when it was bought by the art museum in Basel in 1939. [Source: eclecticlight.co] |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Ecce Homo | 1925 | Oil/Canvas | History Painting |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Corinth, Lovis | 1858-1925, aged 67 | German painter | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1513-71] | |
| Fine Arts Museum Basel, St. Alban-Graben 16, 4051 Basel, Switzerland | 190 x 150 |
| Shortly after 1900, Bonnard redirected his style of painting to more closely follow the Impressionist tradition, modified by his innate sense of decoration and design. He continued to use light to change the substance and colour of form, but he preferred to paint in his studio rather than in the open air and structured his compositions with formal pattern. He so convincingly went beyond the limits of local colour and the laws of natural perspective that in The Terrace at Vernonnet the boldness of his interpretation is barely noticeable. For example, we read the tree trunk that defines the foreground as a beautiful violet strip as well as a tree, and the foliage in the background merges into a tapestry of colour. [Source: metmusuem.org] |  Image source: metmuseum.org |
| TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
| Terrace at Vernonnet, The | 1939 | Oil/Canvas | Genre Painting |
| ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
| Bonnard, Pierre | 1867-1947, aged 80 | French painter | Post-Impressionism |
| LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | ||
| Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY USA | 148 x 195 |
Forward to 1.5.1.4 Naive Art (1885- ) – Forward to 1.5.2 Arts and Crafts (1868-1915)
Back to 1.5.1.3 Post-Impressionism I (1880-1892) – Back to 1.5.1.2.Impressionism II (1874-1897)
Back to 1.5.1 Impressionism Index (1860-1905)