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Water Mirror
This monumental work is without doubt part of the magnum opus of the Swedish painter Johan Axel Gustav Acke and a beautiful example of that union of arts...
Hail Mary
Eugène Emmanuel Amaury Pineu Duval, who painted under the name of Amaury-Duval from 1833, was one of Ingres' most famous pupils and closest followers. Like...
Madame de Loynes
When Amaury-Duval painted her portrait, the Comtesse de Loynes was still just Jeanne de Tourbey. The daughter of working-class parents from Reims, she took...
Snowy Landscape
A large painting, measuring more than four square metres, Snowy Landscape by the Swiss painter Cuno Amiet is astonishing for the disproportionately large area...
Music
The critic Claude Roger-Marx successfully defined the charm of this painting by pointing out that "the communion established between the figures and the...
Henri Samary
Originally from Normandy, Anquetin moved to Paris in 1882 and joined the studio of the painter Léon Bonnat (1833-1922), where he immediately became a close...
Remorse
Here, Baader depicts an episode from the life of Orestes, son of Agamemnon, the mythical king of the Mycenae. In order to avenge the murder of his father by...
The Exiles of Tiberius
Inspired by the Lives of the Twelve Caesars by the historian Suetonius, The Exiles of Tiberius shows a frieze of people banished by Tiberius, the tyrant who...
In the Greenhouse
Presented at the Salon of the Société des Artistes français in 1881, this portrait belongs to a style of painting inspired by Classicism, whilst also...
A Meeting
When A Meeting was exhibited at the 1884 Salon, it was acclaimed by both the public and the press. But this success did not satisfy Marie Bashkirtseff at all,...
Hay Making
Dubbed the "grandson of Millet and Courbet" by Zola, Jules Bastien-Lepage specialised in agricultural scenes which were a far remove from the affected...
Family Reunion
Before his early death in battle during the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, Frédéric Bazille was close to Renoir and Monet, particularly admiring their...
Bazille's Studio
Born into a notable family in Montpellier, Bazille moved to Paris in 1862 to study medicine, before turning to painting. While at Charles Gleyre's studio,...
The Pink Dress
Originally from Montpellier, Bazille moved to Paris in 1862 to continue studying medicine. While attending the university, he used to visit Gleyre's studio...
The Improvised Field Hospital
This painting of Claude Monet confined to bed with an injured leg, was painted in the summer of 1865. At the beginning of that year, Bazille was sharing his...
Pilgrims going to Mecca
For this work, regarded, from the moment it was presented, to be a masterpiece of Orientalist painting, Belly chose to present an ambitious subject on a...
Christian Martyrs
Benouville first presents a small picture on this subject at the Salon of 1852. The subject, the martyrdom of the early Christians, glorifies the virtues of...
The Newsroom
The Journal des Débats was founded in 1789, the year of the French Revolution. In 1812, it had the highest circulation of any newspaper, with 32,000...
Madeleine in the Bois d'Amour
Emile Bernard was only twenty when he painted this life-size portrait of his sister Madeleine, then aged seventeen. He portrayed her lying in the Bois d'Amour...
Breton Women with Umbrellas
The Pont-Aven school brought together a very diverse group of artists who met regularly in this little village in South Finistere from the mid 1880s onwards....
Stoneware Pots and Apples
Searching for a pure style of painting in a reaction against Naturalism, and also against Impressionism and the dissolution of forms, Emile Bernard...
Symbolic Self-Portrait
Between 1886 and 1941, Emile Bernard produced a self-portrait almost every year. For him, it was an opportunity to demonstrate his stylistic development, and...
Harvest by the Sea
Between1886 and 1893, Emile Bernard regularly took his family on holiday to Saint-Briac, a small Breton village between the Bay of Mont-Saint-Michel and the...
A Family
In the late 19th century, the official portrait of a painter in his studio was sometimes exchanged for a more intimate view of the artist surrounded by his...
Portrait of Marcel Proust
Jacques-Emile Blanche, an admired portraitist in the 1880s, portrayed Proust as a young man, aged 21, when he was still only a social chronicler. Blanche...
The Halévy Family
Jacques-Emile Blanche was the most sought-after painter in artistic, intellectual and bourgeois circles at the end of the 19th century. In 1903 he produced...
Thaulow and his Children
Against a rapidly painted, indistinct background, evoking a cluster of trees that might appear in a "Conversation Piece" painting from 18th century England,...
Diana's Hunt
The Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin is one of the major figures in Germanic symbolism. Throughout his career he worked to inject new life into history painting...
Count Robert de Montesquiou
In 1897, Boldini was engaged, through a mutual friend, Madame Veil-Picard, to paint the portrait of Count Robert de Montesquiou. The painter could not fail to...
Scène de fête
Born in 1842 in Ferrara, a town in northern Italy, Boldini became firmly established in Paris from 1871 onwards, where he very quickly became a fashionable...
Ploughing in Nevers
This scene, dated 1849, shows the first ploughing or dressing, which was done in early autumn to break the surface of the soil and aerate it during the...
Child Making a Sand Castle
This strangely shaped canvas is the fourth leaf of a folding screen dismantled after the artist's death; the three other leaves, decorated with a landscape,...
Woman Dozing on a Bed
A veritable hymn to voluptuousness, The Indolent Woman is a painting which relies on contrasts: the title already clashes with the young woman's posture. Her...
The Toilet
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,...
Twilight
The Game of Croquet is one of the first works by Pierre Bonnard, one of the founders of the Nabi group in 1888. It was exhibited in 1892 at the Salon des...
The Chequered Blouse
When he painted this piece in 1892, at the beginning of his career, Pierre Bonnard had just discovered Japanese art thanks to two exhibitions in Paris, the...
In a Boat
After buying a house in Vernon, a town in Normandy on the banks of the Seine, Bonnard bought a boat. It gave him an opportunity to paint a commonplace scene...
A Bourgeois Afternoon
"This stunning Bourgeois Afternoon is where Bonnard really started to find himself", wrote Thadée Natanson, in 1951, in Le Bonnard que je propose. Did the...
Water Games
This decorative panel is part of a set of four large paintings produced by Bonnard between 1906 and 1910 for the dining room of Misia Sert, a muse for many...
Lunch by Lamplight
Very early on in his career, Bonnard revealed himself to be an acute observer of family life. He portrays this intimacy with humour and tenderness. Here, the...
The White Cat
Here, Bonnard uses distortion to create a humorous image of this cat arching its back. A strange animal, exaggeratedly arched on its paws, with its head drawn...
Intimacy
This charming, subtle painting features one of Bonnard's regimental friends, the composer Claude Terrasse (1867-1923), hunched up in a sort of thick...
The Box
Originally an art dealer in Brussels, Alexandre Bernheim moved to Paris in the late 1880s. He opened a gallery there, where his two sons, Joseph, known as...
Interior of the Sistine Chapel
Various gifts and bequests from Mrs Edouard Kann and her sister, Mrs Albert Cahen from Antwerp, between 1925 and 1929, have given the the Musée d'Orsay a...
The Beach at Trouville
Boudin, a great admirer of Corot's landscapes, is famous above all for his pictures of the Normandy coast. The growth in leisure in the late nineteenth...
The Beach at Trouville
Born in Honfleur and the son of a sailor, Boudin tried to paint the world he knew so well: the beaches, ships and changeable skies of the Normandy coast. He...
The Port of Camaret
Boudin went to paint in Camaret in Brittany every year between 1870 and 1873, and subsequently made occasional visits there. He liked to capture the light in...
The Assault
The Assault is one of the works that brought the artist enormous commercial success during his lifetime, particularly in America. When exhibited at the Salon...
The Oreads
The Oreads are the nymphs of mountains and grottoes (the most well known is Echo), who were said to come out in joyful, lively groups to hunt deer, chase wild...
Compassion!
Bouguereau was particularly proud of his painting Compassion! He presented it twice: firstly at the Salon des Artistes français in 1897, and then at the 1900...
Dante and Virgil
Having failed on two occasions to win the Prix de Rome (1848 and 1849), Bouguereau was hungry for revenge. His early submissions to the Salon reveal this...
Equality before Death
Equality is Bouguereau's first major painting, produced when he was a young man of 23, after two years at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris. Subjected to...
Moonlight
The painter George Hendrik Breitner was born in Rotterdam in 1857, but received most of his training in Amsterdam where, about 1880, he was a pupil of Willem...
Calling in the Gleaners
With Calling in the Gleaners, Jules Breton represented an ordinary scene of peasant life in Courrières, his native village in Artois. He did not show the...
The Blessing of the Wheat
Presented at the 1857 Salon, at the same time as Millet's Gleaners, this enormous painting won Jules Breton a second class medal. This was a mark of official...
The Wheel of Fortune
"My wheel of Fortune is a true-to-life image; it comes to fetch each of us in turn, then it crushes us," was Burne-Jones' heartfelt or disillusioned comment....
Princess Sabra
This work was part of a decorative ensemble commissioned from Burne-Jones by the watercolourist Miles Birket Foster (1825-1899) and depicts the legend of...
The Birth of Venus
The Birth of Venus was one of the great successes of the 1863 Salon where it was bought by Napoleon III for his private collection. Cabanel, a painter who...
The Death of Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta
This tragic scene was inspired by an incident that occurred in Rimini in Italy in the mid-thirteenth century and was put into verse by Dante in Canto V of The...
The Floor Planers
This painting is one of the first representations of urban proletariat. Whereas peasants (Gleaners by Millet) or country workers (Stone Breakers by Courbet)...
Sailing Boats at Argenteuil
Caillebotte was passionate about sailing. From 1879 onwards, he won regattas on the Seine and attracted attention for his luxurious and innovative boats. At...
Rooftops in the Snow (snow effect)
At the fourth Impressionist Exhibition in 1879, Caillebotte presented over twenty-five works. These included two roofscapes of which this is one. The large...
Henri Cordier
One of the most delightful aspects of Caillebotte's work is the series of portraits of personalities from his wealthy entourage. The identity of many of these...
The Lady with the Glove
The Lady with the Glove, a life-sized full-length portrait of the artist's young wife, was a great success at the 1869 Salon, where it won a medal. Regarded...
The Convalescent
This painting perpetuates the memory of the painting Carolus-Duran submitted to the Wicar de Lille competition, entitled Visiting the Convalescent....
Costume Ball at the Tuileries
In 1853, when Carpeaux was still a student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, he sought the patronage of Napoleon III. To this end, he produced a model of The...
Intimacy
Eugène Carrière started his career in the Salon in Paris in 1876. Until the 1880s he mainly exhibited portraits. With Intimacy also called The Big Sister,...
Paul Verlaine
In the 1880s and 1890s, Carrière made intimist portraits of people he met among the Symbolists, in left-wing political milieus or literary circles. He thus...
The Sick Child
In his book La Vie artistique published in 1892, Gustave Geffroy wrote of Carrière: "He has taken the Holy Mother and Child, the religious motif that runs...
The Painter's Family
This painting sums up both the life and work of Eugène Carrière. In one huge family portrait, the painter brings together his favourite themes: childhood,...
Girl in the Garden
A light, lively palette is characteristic of the work of Mary Cassatt, an American painter who introduced art lovers and collectors on the other side of the...
Bathers
From the 1870s until the end of his life, Cézanne multiplied paintings of bathers, both male and female. His great ambition was to achieve a complete fusion...
Achille Emperaire
Born in Aix, like Cézanne who was his elder by ten years, Achille Emperaire was also an artist. The two men met in Charles Suisse's studio in Paris in the...
Maincy Bridge
Maincy Bridge is an unusual painting in Cézanne's oeuvre. Problems of dating and identifying the site have long heightened the ambiguity surrounding it. It...
Woman with a Coffeepot
The model for this portrait has not been precisely identified but she was probably one of the employees at the Jas de Bouffan, the Cézannes' family home near...
Apples and Oranges
Though Cézanne painted still life compositions from the start of his career, it was only in later years that this genre began to occupy an essential place in...
The Hanged Man's House
The Hanged Man's House was one of the three canvases that Cézanne presented at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. The influence of his friend...
Gustave Geffroy
During 1894, Gustave Geffroy wrote several articlespraising Cézanne's painting. To show his gratitude, Cézanne offered to paint the critic's portrait in the...
The Lawyer
In November 1866, Valabrègue, a friend of Cézanne's from Aix en Provence, told Zola about the extraordinarily rapid way the young Paul was painting at this...
Portrait of Mrs Cézanne
"The success of art is the face" declared Cézanne confidently to the art dealer Ambroise Vollard. On many occasions during his adult life, the painter...
The Cardplayer
At the beginning of the 1890s, Cézanne produced five paintings on the theme of card players. They differ in size, in the number of characters and in the...
The Cardplayers
Cézanne had certainly seen The Cardplayers, attributed to the Le Nain brothers, at the museum in Aix-en-Provence, his home town. During the 1890s, the artist...
Rocks above Château Noir
In the 1890s, missing the light and harsh landscapes of Provence, Cézanne was drawn back to the place where he was born, and remained there for the rest of...
Farmyard
Cézanne painted this canvas in the early 1880s, a period when he used to stay in Auvers and Pontoise with Camille Pissarro. Pissarro was also painting...
Poplars
This painting probably depicts a scene outside the grounds of the château de Marcouville, very close to Pontoise. Cézanne's interest in this landscape may...
Christ in Limbo
During the 1860s, Cézanne turned his hand to murals to decorate the family home, Jas de Bouffan, near Aix-en-Provence. One year after the artist's death, the...
A Modern Olympia
Cézanne's early works, executed in dark colours, were largely inspired by the old masters and by the paintings of Delacroix, Daumier and Courbet. A painting...
Still Life with Onions
Still lifes, which suited both Cézanne's character and his method of working, held the artist's interest throughout his career. Following on from the...
The Village Road, Auvers
From 1872 to 1874, Cézanne went to Pontoise to work with Pissarro. Whilst working with Pissarro, he gradually moved closer towards the Impressionist style,...
The Blue Vase
Rather than representing flowers in bloom, Cézanne was more interested here in the modulation in colour. Once again, the subject is used to further one of...
The Bay of Marseille seen from L'Estaque
Born in Provence, Cézanne remained deeply attached to his native region, and found inspiration there for some of his recurrent and emblematic motifs. The two...
The Milliner
Its large size and the fact that it is on canvas make The Milliner unusual in Charpentier's work. This raises the question of why it was painted - could it...
Tepidarium
Chassériau explicitly sets this scene in Roman antiquity, since the decor takes its inspiration from the baths of Venus Genitrix, a recent archaeological...
Arab Chiefs
In 19th century western art, the archetypal image of the oriental woman is that of the passive odalisque of the harem, whereas the man was embodied in the...
Divina Tragedia
Immediately after the 1848 Revolution, the Director of Fine Arts, Charles Blanc, commissioned a decoration from Paul Chenavard for the Pantheon in Paris,...
Rain and Sun
When this impressive painting was exhibited at the 1873 Salon, the art critic Castagnary, a champion of Courbet and the Realists, paid it a glowing tribute:...
The Burning of the Tuileries
The Burning of the Tuileries is a spirited sketch recounting an episode of the Paris Commune. On 24 May 1871, as the government troops moved from Versailles...
Julius Meier-Graefe
This painting brings together two major figures in German art in the early 20th century: the artist Lovis Corinth and the writer and art critic Julius...
Cain
This painting illustrates the miserable destiny of Cain, the elder son of Adam and Eve, who after the murder of his younger brother Abel was condemned to...
A Forge
This is an unusual work for Corman who was known above all for his history painting and large decorative works such as those at the chateau of...
A Morning. The Dance of the Nymphs.
The Dance of the Nymphs represents a turning point in Corot's career, announcing his move from "historical" to "lyrical" landscapes where the natural world is...
Bringing in the Nets
Corot had a great feeling for the poetry of the calm water of the ponds and rivers whose very presence in the landscape invited meditation. In Bringing in the...
Willows at the Water's Edge
Following the death of his first teacher, Achille-Etna Michallon, a winner of the Prix de Rome for his historical landscape in 1817, Corot worked under...
In the Land of the Sea. Grief
Bought by the State at the Salon des Boursiers de Voyage in 1912, this large painting called either In the Land of the Sea, Grief or The Victims of the Sea,...
Evening Light
Although light and colour seem to be the principal elements, this painting is in fact a triumph in the use of line. Leaving movement and uncertainty to the...
A Burial at Ornans
At the end of summer 1849, Courbet started work on his first monumental painting. He wanted to make it his "statement of principle" and made this clear by...
The Spring
Courbet escaped from the traditional norms of painting by subordinating the description of nature to an eminently personal experience. His motifs were mainly...
The Origin of the World
The first owner of The Origin of the World, who probably commissioned it, was the Turkish-Egyptian diplomat Khalil-Bey (1831-1879). A flamboyant figure in...
The Wounded Man
Self-portraits occupied a central place in Gustave Courbet's youthful works. They were aesthetic and moral statements in which Courbet both claimed the...
The Artist's Studio
The enormous Studio is without doubt Courbet's most mysterious composition. However, he provides several clues to its interpretation: "It's the whole world...
The Etretat Cliffs after the Storm
Etretat had attracted painters since the early nineteenth century, drawn by the clarity of the air and the quality of the light. In summer 1869, Courbet...
The Trout
After serving six months in prison for his participation in the 1871 Commune, Courbet spent some time in his native Franche-Comté before finally going into...
The Stormy Sea
During the summer of 1869, Courbet stayed at Etretat, the small Norman town where Delacroix, Boudin and Jongkind had already spent time painting the sea. The...
Spring Rut
Of all Courbet's hunting and forest scenes, Spring Rut has the greatest breadth in both its physical size and in the spirit that animates it. Regarded for a...
Nude Woman with a Dog
Although this painting is dated 1868, the year it was first publicly exhibited, it was certainly painted around 1861-1862. The model is in fact Léontine...
Champfleury
Jules-François-Félix Husson (1821-1889), a novelist and art critic better known under the pseudonym of "Champfleury", was one of Courbet's first supporters....
The Hunted Roe Deer on the Alert
Hunting was one of Courbet's favourite pastimes. It enabled him to observe nature and wild animals. Both in the Franche-Comté region of France and in Germany...
The Black Stream
Near Ornans, in a narrow gorge shaded by luxuriant vegetation, the Brème stream flows gently along. This place, known as the Puits-Noir, was one of Courbet's...
Hector Berlioz
It was through mediations of Francis Wey, a great friend of Berlioz, that the musician agreed to sit for a portrait at Courbet's studio in 1850. Courbet must...
Romans during the Decadence
It took Thomas Couture three years to complete The Romans of the Decadence the proportions of which betray grand artistic ambitions. He wanted to give fresh...
The Golden Isles
An exhibition of the work of Henry-Edmond Cross opened at the Druet Gallery in Paris on 21 March 1905. Emile Verhaeren, in a letter prefacing the...
Hair
In this work, entitled Hair, Cross, used his future wife Irma as a model when she was still Mrs Hector France. The face disappears behind a thick curtain of...
The Evening Air
In April 1893, Henri-Edmond Cross, who had been living in the South of France for two years, received a letter from his friend Paul Signac saying: "Since we...
Mrs Hector France
With this large, full-length portrait of Irma Clare, who was then married to the writer Hector France, and the future wife of the painter, Cross moved...
Afternoon at Pardigon
For Henri-Edmond Cross, landscape painting was closely linked to his experiments into light and colour. As Maurice Denis noted, he opted to "represent...
Snow
This painting of the plain of Auvers-sur-Oise haunted by starving crows during the previous winter drew scathing criticism at the Salon of 1873. The...
Harvest
From 1843, attracted by Plein Air painting, Daubigny frequently used to stay at Barbizon. This large, light painting – a long way from the dark tones of...
The Grape Harvest in Burgundy
During the 1863 Salon, Castagnary, the theoretician of Naturalist painting, wrote a long article about this painting and concluded: "This Grape Harvest, with...
The Laundress
Daumier often painted urban labourers under the Second Empire. Although famous for his caricatures, often published as lithographs, he was nonetheless an...
The Republic
The Republic was proclaimed on 24 February 1848. A new political regime had begun. The official image of the State had to be changed. A competition was...
The Thieves and the Ass
For the subject of this painting, Daumier turned to the eponymous fable by Jean de La Fontaine: while two thieves are arguing over a stolen ass, a third one...
The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian
In February 1849, the Beaux Arts committee commissioned a painting from Daumier, leaving him to choose the subject. He suggested a Martyrdom of Saint...
Turkish merchant
Street scenes were easily accessible to painters on their travels, and Decamps takes the opportunity here to capture this picturesque, small shop filled with...
Rustic Courtyard in Fontainebleau
Decamps, a reputed orientalist painter, used to stay regularly at Fontainebleau, his "beloved land" where he produced animal paintings and genre scenes which...
The Bellelli Family
Between the ages of 22 and 26, Edgar Degas completed his training in Italy, where part of his familly lived. Here he painted his father's sister, Laure, with...
In a Café
Unlike his Impressionist friends, Degas was an essentially urban painter, who liked to paint the enclosed spaces of stage shows, leisure activities and...
Women Ironing
Degas often made portraits of his family and friends but he was also an attentive observer of the working world in millinery workshops or laundries. Only...
Mrs Jeantaud in the Mirror
About 1875, Degas made a portrait of Berthe-Marie Bachoux, Jean-Baptiste Jeantaud's wife, who had been the painter's comrade in arms during the...
The Orchestra at the Opera
With great subtlety, Degas has obscured what is usually shown in a theatre and focused on the area reserved for the audience, particularly the orchestra pit....
The Ballet Class
Degas regularly went to the Paris opera house, not only as a member of the audience, but as a visitor backstage and in the dance studio, where he introduced...
Semiramis Building Babylon
Started about 1860, Semiramis Building Babylon stayed in Degas' studio until his death. The painting shows a mythological scene: Semiramis, the Queen of...
The Parade
The theme of horse racing is recurrent in Degas's work, drawing its inspiration from the lifestyle of his contemporaries. This theme allowed him to tackle the...
Billiard Room
From the 1860s, Degas regularly used to spend his summers in Normandy at Ménil-Hubert (Orne Department), on the country estate of his childhood friend Paul...
Thérèse de Gas
This is a portrait of the painter's sister, Thérèse de Gas (1840-1912), of whom the artist was very fond. It was probably painted just before Thérèse...
Portraits at the Stock Exchange
In his manifesto The New Painting that appeared in 1876, the art critic Edmond Duranty recommended that a portrait should be "the study of moral reflections...
Ballet Rehearsal
For Ballet Rehearsal, Degas' chosen a viewpoint slightly from above, to one side, with the focus on the stage bordered by the footlights. The lightness of the...
King Boabdil Bids Farewell to Granada
In the late 1840s, Dehodencq visited Spain then Morocco. More often than not, these trips inspired him to produce picturesque or orientalist scenes. For this...
The Lion Hunt
In 1854, Delacroix was asked by the director of the Fine Arts Department to execute "a painting, first submitting the subject and the sketch to me for...
Tiger Hunt
This Tiger Hunt is in many ways similar to the sketch for another painting kept at the Musée d'Orsay: Lion Hunt. The two paintings were produced during the...
Plague in Rome
The first preparatory drawings for this painting date from 1857 and were inspired by the artist's visit to the Roman Church of San Pietro in Vicoli, where a...
Plato's School
In the late 19th century, Belgium was one of the great centres of European symbolism. Jean Delville's paintings and writings expressed the most esoteric side...
Princess Maleine's Minuet
This is one of the first portraits of Marthe Meurier (cf. Young Girls With Lamp), Maurice Denis's fiancée he was to marry on June 12, 1893. The pages of the...
The Muses
In the guise of women dressed in contemporary clothing, Maurice Denis updates a subject taken from classical mythology – the muses who inspire the arts and...
A Game of Shuttlecock
Under trees with mauve trunks, shuttlecock players, who gave the painting its name, are mingled with women picking flowers and bathers in the background....
Homage to Cézanne
This painting rings out like a manifesto. Maurice Denis has assembled a group of friends, artists and critics, in the shop of the art dealer, Ambroise...
Calvary
Maurice Denis painted Calvary in November 1889. At the time he was reading Sagesse, a collection of poems by Verlaine. Denis' carving illustrated the first...
Portrait of the Artist Aged Eighteen
In 1889, the vocation of Maurice Denis, nicknamed "the Nabi with beautiful icons", was already clear. In July 1888, he had already represented himself in a...
October Night
Painted in 1891, October Night dates from a key period in Denis' career when he began to adopt a more synthetic approach. He belonged to the young Nabis group...
Landscape with Green Trees
1893 was for Maurice Denis a highly significant year both personally and professionally; his marriage took place to Marthe Meurier, whom he took on honeymoon...
Child with Blue Pants
This painting portrays Noëlle, the painter's eldest daughter, born 30 June 1896, in the arms of Marthe, Denis' first wife. The painter was very fond of the...
Degas and his Model
Maurice Denis, who had regularly visited Degas since 1901, here presents us an informal scene in the master's life. Degas is portrayed with his thick beard,...
Triple Portrait of Yvonne Lerolle
While frequenting the circle of the painter, patron and music publisher Henry Lerolle in the early 1890s, Maurice Denis became friendly with one of his...
Charing Cross Bridge
At the 1905 Salon d'automne, Derain shared the same gallery as Matisse, Vlaminck and Van Dongen. A critic, noticing a sculpture by Albert Marque in the middle...
The Dream
Detaille, like his friend de Neuville, specialised in military painting, celebrating the "glorious vanquished" of 1870-1871. Yet this large painting,...
The Charge
The Charge by André Devambez shows a confrontation between the forces of power and demonstrators. The political leanings of the latter is not easily...
The Only Bird That Flies above the Clouds
In 1909, Devambez was asked to produce twelve decorative panels for the French Embassy in Vienna. He chose recent innovations such as the blimp, motor racing,...
Concert Colonne
In 1873, Judas Colonna, known as Edouard Colonne (1838-1910), a violinist and conductor, founded the Association Artistique des Concerts Colonne, whose aim...
The Heights of Le Jean de Paris
A French artist of Spanish descent, Narcisse Diaz de la Peña worked for a while in a porcelain factory before devoting his time wholly to painting. From his...
The Edge of the Forest
Diaz discovered Barbizon in 1837, and was enchanted by it. He very soon moved there and met up with his friends Jules Dupré, Théodore Rousseau, Constant...
The Enigma
For Gustave Doré, born in Strasbourg, France's defeat by Prussia in 1870, and the consequential loss of Alsace-Lorraine, was a great source of distress. Just...
Oak Trees and Pond
After training as a decorator on porcelain in his father's factory, Dupré turned to painting in 1829. His meeting with Théodore Rousseau was a decisive...
The Oak Tree
For many years Jules Dupré shared the experiences of the painters of the Forest of Fontainebleau. He was Théodore Rousseau's closest friend, before a...
Louis Pasteur
Like many of his contemporaries from Northern Europe, the Finn Albert Edelfelt came to France when he was scarcely twenty to study at the fine arts school in...
At the Conservatory
In 1880, when Brussels became the capital of Wagnerism, James Ensor discovered Richard Wagner's music. He was inspired by it and drew The Ride of the...
Wrestlers
From the 1870s, Alexandre Falguière worked simultaneously as a painter and sculptor. Wrestlers, which was his first large painting, caught the critics' eye...
A Studio at Les Batignolles
Les Batignolles was the district where Manet and many of the future Impressionists lived. Fantin-Latour, a quiet observer of this period, has gathered around...
Woman Reading
The young woman reading a book is one of the artist's sisters. At the beginning of his career, Fantin-Latour chose his models from his family circle. He also...
By the Table
By the Table is a group portrait as much as a testimony to the literary history of the 19th century, and the Parnassus poetry group in particular. A group of...
Homage to Delacroix
On a visit to the galleries in the Musée du Château de Versailles in July 1838, Baudelaire came across Delacroix's painting The Battle of Taillebourg. It...
Charlotte Dubourg
Charlotte Dubourg (1850-1921) was the sister of Victoria (1840-1926), Fantin-Latour's wife. She features in many of Fantin-Latour's paintings, alone or in...
Flowers and Fruit
Alongside his work as a portrait painter, Fantin-Latour produced a large number of still lifes. In the 1860s, these even played a major role in his career. It...
Night
For a long time, Wagner's music was believed to have influenced this painting, unusual in Fantin-Latour's work. But it seems that here the artist painted a...
The Ages of the Worker
Throughout his career, Léon Frédéric, a Symbolist painter from Brussels, inscribed his work in the great Flemish baroque tradition. He readily used...
Cast Shadows
In 1891, Friant presented four paintings at the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. One of these was Cast Shadows which he was careful to place...
Portrait of Karin
Karin (1927-2005), the model for this portrait, was the eldest daughter of Max Kaganovitch (1891-1978), an eminent dealer and collector. In 1939, he asked...
Reminiscence of Esneh (Egypt)
On 17 November 1869, Eugène Fromentin, through the good offices of Napoleon III's private secretary of Charles-Edmond Chojecki, figured among the official...
Falconry in Algeria: the Spoils
Although from 1846 Eugène Fromentin carried on the tradition of travels to North Africa instituted by Eugène Delacroix, for him the discovery of exotic...
View of the Nile
Whereas at the beginning of the 19th century, many painters were content to represent an imaginary Orient, Eugène Fromentin produced a more authentic view...
La Belle Angèle
Marie-Angélique Satre, who kept a hotel at Pont-Aven, was regarded as one of the most beautiful women in the area. About 1920, she explained the...
Les Alyscamps
In October 1888, Gauguin arrived in Arles where his friend Vincent Van Gogh had invited him to come and work. The two artists had been writing to each other...
The Artist with the Yellow Christ
Painted on the eve of Gauguin's first trip to Tahiti, Portrait of the Artist with the Yellow Christ is a veritable manifesto. In fact it is a triple...
The White Horse
Gauguin painted this famous picture during his second stay in Tahiti. He liked to roam through the countryside and explore the mountains and forests of the...
The Meal
Gauguin painted The Meal in the first months after his arrival in Tahiti. Despite his desire to paint life on the island, his first canvases are contrived....
Breton Peasant Women
Back in Pont Aven between two trips to Tahiti, Gauguin enjoyed working on the naïve, rural subjects which had inspired him before he left for the Pacific....
Arearea
In April 1891, Gauguin set off for his first visit to Tahiti, in search of traces of a primitive way of life. He took his inspiration for imaginary scenes in...
Landscape in Brittany
Just like Cézanne and Van Gogh, Gauguin was convinced that painting should not be limited to reproducing what the eye saw. That is why, just like Odilon...
Tahitian Women
In 1891, Gauguin went to Tahiti, an island he imagined to be a primitive paradise. The artist wanted "to live there in ecstasy, calm and art". His financial...
Self-portrait with a hat
When Gauguin returned to Paris on 1 September 1893, after his first stay in Polynesia, he decided to present his Tahitian works and to justify his "savage"...
Schuffenecker's Studio
Gauguin and Emile Schuffenecker, a minor painter of the Pont-Aven school, first met in 1872. Both were then employed in a stockbroker's office. Until the...
Calvary
Nikolaï Gay is a Russian artist belonging to the generation of the Itinerants, a group of painters hostile to academic painting and determined to use art as...
Young Greeks
Gérôme started work on this canvas in 1846 when he was still smarting from his failure to win the Prix de Rome which would have opened the doors of the...
Jerusalem
After exploring with great success the exotic, sensual attractions of the Orientalist repertoire, Gérôme returned in 1867 to his first ambition, history...
Reception of Condé in Versailles
The year is 1674, and on the great Escalier des Ambassadeurs, in Versailles, Louis XIV is welcoming the Grand Condé, who has just defeated William of Orange...
The Baroness N. de Rothschild
The baroness Charlotte de Rothschild (1825-1899), who married her cousin Nathaniel (1812-1870) in 1842, was brought up surrounded by the artists her parents...
Before the Operation
Before the Operation, more correctly known as Dr Péan Teaching His Discovery of the Compression of Blood Vessels at St Louis Hospital, presented at the Salon...
Rolla
In the Spring of 1878, a month before the inauguration of the Salon, Rolla was brutally excluded from the event by the Beaux-Arts administration. Yet, Henri...
View of Capolago
Less well known in France than his sons Alberto and Diego, Giovanni Giacometti was nonetheless a significant figure in the arts scene in Switzerland in the...
The Women of Gaul
This spectacular painting (over six metres long) illustrates the siege of Gergovia, a famous battle in which the emperor Julius Caesar established his...
A Box at the Theatre des Italiens
The theatre auditorium, and in particular the box, a popular place for society exchanges, was a subject frequently chosen by the Impressionists. The most...
Morning
This painting shows a view of Lake Maggiore and the town of Intra from the Miazzina hills. Grubicy once again uses a composition found elsewhere in his...
Washerwoman
Guigou was 26 years old when he painted La Lavandière. He was still at the very beginning of his career, studying at the Beaux-Arts school in Marseille. This...
The Sahara
An eye-catcher at the Salon of 1868, this work by Guillaumet makes a break with Orientalist paintings of the time. Whereas many of his contemporaries gave a...
Evening
Charles Guilloux, a modest employee at the Bibliothèque Nationale, was a self-taught artist placed in the Symbolist movement by the critics of the time. From...
Rest
A descendent of Vermeer or a forerunner of Hopper? Hammershøi, a Danish painter who made his reputation in the 1880s, is without doubt neither. The...
Séverine
Given to the Musées Nationaux by its model, the journalist Severine, this painting and its frame are among the most remarkable works by the painter Louis...
Portrait of a Young Man
There is an inscription on the back of this painting confirming that Hawkins presented it at a Paris Salon. However, it is not possible to identify it with...
The Eiffel Tower
Built for the 1889 Universal Exhibition, the Eiffel Tower immediately became an object of fascination for artists. In 1888, Seurat produced a pointillist work...
The Haymakers of San Germano
After being awarded first prize in the 1839 Prix de Rome for painting, Ernest Hébert moved to Italy and was quickly captivated by the country he discovered....
Chaste Suzanne
The Biblical episode of Suzanne bathing, often treated since the Renaissance, was above all an opportunity for the artist to paint a handsome nude. This aim...
Andey Peak, Arve Valle
Painted in 1909 and exhibited 1912 in Munich under the title Landscape, this painting by the Swiss artist Ferdinand Hodler is now called Andey Peak, Arve...
The Woodcutter
In April 1908, the Banque Nationale Suisse commissioned Ferdinand Hodler to illustrate the new 50 and 100 franc banknotes, which were to take the subject of...
Madame Valentine Godé-Darel, ill
From 8 December 1914 to 25 January 1915, Hodler depicted the agony of his partner, Valentine Godé-Darel, suffering from a terrible cancer in a series of...
Portrait of Werner Miller
Aged seven in this portrait, Werner Miller (1892-1959) later became a painter. He was the son of Oscar Miller, a manufacturer from the Swiss canton of...
Portrait of Mathias Morhardt
Mathias Morhardt (1863-1939) was a journalist, writer, poet and playwright. He supported Hodler throughout his career and helped make him known in France. In...
Summer Night
Winslow Homer started his career as a graphic reporter during the American Civil War, before going on to paint scenes of army life and the rural world with...
The Abyss, Landscape
Paul Huet, who often described the terrifying face of nature in views of gigantic waves or infernal stormy skies, has here shown the earth gaping open as in a...
The Spring
This canvas was started about 1820 but not finished until 1856. Ingres was then assisted by two of his pupils, a common practice for large formats. The...
Venus at Paphos
As the title indicates, this painting represents Venus, the Roman goddess of love and fertility. In the background, behind the abundant greenery painted by...
Landscape with flock of sheep
During the 1861 Salon, the writer Alfred Nettement went into raptures about this painting by Charles Emile Jacque, writing: "See how the light dances under...
Proletarian Lodgings
Eugene Jansson is one of those artists from the North of Europe little known in France. Unconcerned by traditions and the influence of French painters of the...
The Seine and Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris
The sweeping diagonal of the Seine and the large area left for the sky in this composition remind us that Jongkind, a Dutch painter, was trained in the...
Portrait of Marie Monnom
Fernand Khnopff made this Portrait of Marie Monnom, the daughter of a publisher in Brussels, in 1887. Monnom published the magazine L'Art moderne, the organ...
Incense
Here, as he often did, Khnopff used his sister Marguerite as his model. The painting is close framed, with Marguerite set in the centre of his composition....
Rosebushes under the Trees
Rosebushes under the Trees was produced, as were most of Klimt's landscapes, during the summer holidays of 1904 and 1905, when he stayed in Litzlberg. The...
Chimneys
The study of the sky, a genuinely separate genre within landscape painting, has inspired many painters. Although Kupka here devotes a major part of his...
The Excommunication of Robert the Pious
Jean-Paul Laurens was one of the last great history painters of the late 19th century, when the genre was in inexorable decline. The author of several very...
An Honourable Penitent
An enthusiastic visitor to the Louvre, Alphonse Legros was greatly influenced by two paintings by the Spanish Golden Age painter, Zurbarán that had come from...
Saint Lawrence, Martyr
Initially, Pierre Lehoux wanted to produce great paintings. So he was naturally attracted to history painting and, unusually, religious history. David and...
Beach at Heist
In the second half of the 1880s, after Georges Seurat and other Neo-Impressionists had exhibited their paintings at the Salon des XX in Brussels, several...
Quai des Célestins
Stanislas Lépine painted many views of Paris in which the Seine and the surrounding area feature prominently. These urban landscapes mostly fall into two...
Landscape
Given the very low position of the horizon in this Landscape, it is very probable that Lépine set his easel up at the waterline to paint this picture. In...
Calanque (Six o'clock in the Evening)
In 1936, at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-arts, Lévy-Dhurmer exhibited a series of four paintings of calanques (rocky inlets) at different...
Paying the Harvesters
Léon Lhermitte was born in the Aisne and lived there until he was about twenty, which explains his deep attachment to rural life and the focus of his...
Country Pub
During his visit to Italy in the spring of 1893, Liebermann stopped in Bavaria, very near to Brannenburg. There he found the tables of a pub set out in the...
The Quai Saint-Michel and Notre-Dame
At the turn of the century, Maximilien Luce, who was part of the Neo-Impressionism movement between 1887 and 1897, used the technique of divisionism, separate...
Woman with a Parasol
Maillol, who studied under Gérôme and Cabanel at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, became a renowned sculptor, but he began his career as a painter. He admired and...
Berthe Morisot With a Bouquet
Manet was profoundly marked by the Franco-Prussian war and the Commune, throughout which he had remained in Paris, serving in the garde nationale, and unable...
On the Beach
Manet painted this canvas in the summer of 1873, during three weeks spent with his family in the little coastal town of Berck-sur-Mer. He had his wife and...
The Fife Player
Manet, who found in a Spanish manner and subject matter an outlet for his own talent, did not visit Spain and the Prado Museum until 1865. He was particularly...
Rochefort's Escape
This painting is the smaller of the two versions of Rochefort's Escape painted by Manet after December 1880. The other version is in the Kunsthaus, Zurich....
Emile Zola
Emile Zola, Cézanne's boyhood friend, showed an early interest in painting. He was particularly interested in the artists rejected by the official critics....
Stéphane Mallarmé
This portrait was painted in 1876, the year of the publication of Mallarmé's Après-midi d'un faune, a long poem illustrated by engravings by Manet. The...
Luncheon on the Grass
Rejected by the jury of the 1863 Salon, Manet exhibited Le déjeuner sur l’herbe under the title Le Bain at the Salon des Refusés (initiated the same year...
The Balcony
When Manet painted this piece, scenes of bourgeois life were in vogue. Yet The Balcony went against the conventions of the day. All the subjects were close...
Olympia
With Olympia, Manet reworked the traditional theme of the female nude, using a strong, uncompromising technique. Both the subject matter and its depiction...
Asparagus
The delightful story of this painting is well known: Manet sold Charles Ephrussi A Bunch of Asparagus for eight hundred francs. But Ephrussi sent him a...
Clemenceau
"Manet's portrait of me? Terrible, I do not have it and do not feel the worse for it. It is in the Louvre, and I wonder why it was put there". These final...
Woman with Fans
Manet drew to a close a long series of "women on a sofa" with this picture from 1873. His model is Nina de Callias (1844-1884), a capricious woman,...
Serenity
Presented at the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français in 1899, this monumental canvas depicts the Elysium Fields that the Latin poet Virgil spoke of...
Portrait of the artist
In this self-portrait dated just after 1910, Henri Martin makes reference to both the new techniques introduced by the Neo-Impressionists and to the grand...
The prophetess Libuse
Libuse is a mythical Czech princess. Venerated for her wisdom and her gift of prophecy, she is regarded as the originator of the first national dynasty and...
Woman and Child in an Interior
In this painting, the composition uses successive planes to lead the eye through the interior of the apartment and out into the street. In fact, the right...
Heracles Killing the Birds on the Stymphalian Lake
The extermination of the birds that lived on human flesh and destroyed the crops around Lake Stymphalus in Arcadia, was the fifth of Heracles' twelve tasks....
Breton Legend
Breton Legend is one of Edgard Maxence's most ambitious Symbolist compositions, painted during his period of artistic maturity. Sheltering under a dolmen, in...
The Golden Age
Emile-René Ménard, raised to admire antique Greece, systematically drew on its literature and landscapes in the many decorative panels commissioned by the...
Campaign of France, 1814
This painting—in a small format rather unusual for a painter of military history—indicates Meissonier's taste for seventeenth-century Flemish and Dutch...
The Seige of Paris (1870-1871)
At the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, Ernest Meissonier sketched out an initial idea for a painting that would symbolise the Siege of Paris. He would...
The Family
In 1900, the architect Georges Chedanne (1861-1940) was appointed to renovate the Watel-Dehaynin family town house in rue de la Faisanderie in Paris' 16th...
Sunset
Since the period of the Restoration, the French state, through its Fine Arts Department bought works displayed at the Salon each year. Anxious not to raise...
In the Black Country
The title of the painting, In the Black Country,refers to the name popularly given to the Borinage, a region in the Hainault, to the west of Mons in Belgium....
The Angelus
A man and a woman are reciting the Angelus, a prayer which commemorates the annunciation made to Mary by the angel Gabriel. They have stopped digging...
Gleaners
True to one of Millet's favourite subjects – peasant life – this painting is the culmination of ten years of research on the theme of the gleaners. These...
Spring
This painting was part of a cycle of the seasons that Millet worked on during the final years of his life. It was commissioned by Frédéric Hartmann, a...
A Winnower
This painting is a later variation of a work exhibited by Millet at the Salon of 1848, under the same title, and bought by Ledru-Rollin, then Minister of the...
Shepherdess with her Flock
Calm, serenity and harmony triumph in this painting. Wearing a woollen cape and a red hood, the young shepherdess (perhaps the painter's own daughter) is...
The Church at Gréville
In 1870-1871, Millet happily returned to his native region where he took refuge with his family to escape the disasters of the Franco-Prussian war. All the...
The Spinner
A young peasant girl, sitting on a bank, is spinning a length of wool on a spindle, while minding her goats. She is wearing a dress of rough material and a...
Norman Milkmaid
Although the Norman Milkmaid is one of Millet's last paintings, it was a subject that interested him throughout his life. Robert L. Herbert, who studied the...
Madame Lecourtois
Millet was anxious to perfect the art of portraiture, in order to earn a better living and chose the members of his family as his first models. In November...
Blue Water Lilies
"Nymphaea" is the botanical name for a water lily. Monet grew white water lilies in the water garden he had installed in his property at Giverny in 1893. From...
Regattas at Argenteuil
Boating became fashionable from 1830 in the Ile de France region. Racing boats competed at Argenteuil from 1850 because the Seine widened out into a basin...
The Argenteuil Bridge
In 1874, the year of the first Impressionist exhibition, Claude Monet painted the Argenteuil Bridge seven times, and the railway bridge which spans the Seine...
London, Houses of Parliament
The London Houses of Parliament crop up regularly in Monet's work in 1900. At first the artist observed them from the terrace of St Thomas Hospital, on the...
Women in the Garden
In 1866, Claude Monet started painting a large picture in the garden of the property he was renting in the Paris suburbs. He faced a twofold challenge:...
Hôtel des roches noires. Trouville
During the summer of 1870, on the eve of the Franco-Prussian war, Claude Monet was staying in Trouville with his young wife, Camille, whom he had married on...
The Coalmen
Monet shared the preoccupations of some of his contemporaries, such as the painter Degas or the novelist Zola, who were trying to describe all the facets of...
The Magpie
In the late 1860s, Monet started to extend the need to capture sensations and render "the effect" to all transitory, even fleeting states of nature. Taking...
Wind Effect, Series of The Poplars
This painting, acquired by Paul Durand-Ruel as early as 1893, remained for a long time in the family of the famous art-dealer and friend of the...
The Saint-Lazare Station
When he painted The Saint-Lazare Station, Monet had just left Argenteuil to settle in Paris. After several years of painting in the countryside, he turned to...
The Rue Montorgueil in Paris
The Rue Montorgueil, like its twin painting The Rue Saint-Denis (Rouen, musée des Beaux-arts), is often thought to depict a 14 July celebration. In fact it...
Poppy Field
When he returned from England in 1871, Monet settled in Argenteuil and lived there until 1878. These years were a time of fulfilment for him. Supported by his...
Villas at Bordighera
This painting is a brilliant demonstration of Monet's rediscovery of the Mediterranean during his stay in Italy in 1884. And yet it was painted in his studio...
Etretat, The Cliff
In the winter of 1868-1869 Monet's attention was drawn to Etretat in the Caux region of Normandy. He then returned there every year between 1883 and 1886....
The Rocks at Belle-Ile, The Wild Coast
"I am in a wonderfully wild region, with terrifying rocks and a sea of unbelievable colours; I am truly thrilled, even though it is difficult, because I had...
A Corner of the Apartment
From 1871, when he returned from England, until 1878, Monet lived in the commune of Argenteuil near Paris. During this period he often featured his wife...
Argenteuil
During the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and the Commune, Monet lived in London with his wife and son. There he visited many museums, taking a particular...
Le bassin d'Argenteuil
From December 1871 until 1878, Monet lived in Argenteuil. He would set up his easel out in the countryside or in his garden. But above all it was the Seine...
Luncheon on the Grass
This fragment, there is a second also in the Musée d'Orsay, is one of the remaining parts of the monumental Luncheon on the Grass by Monet. The work was...
The Lunch
After 1870, Monet gave up the large-scale paintings of his early days. However there were some exceptions: these are The Lunch exhibited in the second...
Hunting Trophy
Monet seems to have had a particular liking for still life at the beginning of his career. Although he continued to be interested in this genre subsequently,...
Train in the Countryside
This small painting, dating from before the official birth of the Impressionist movement – the first exhibition of the group would only take place four...
The Cart
This view of Honfleur was dated 1865 by Monet, when the painting entered the Louvre in 1911. However, the letters of a local painter, Alexandre Dubourg,...
Symbolist Landscape
Constant Montald is one of the key figures in Belgian Symbolism. This Symbolist Landscape, almost square, with many verticals, is a perfect illustration of...
Feast Day at the Hospice Trivulzio
The Pio Albergo Trivulzio was a refuge for the sick, and predominantly an old people's home. In the early 1880s, Morbelli began to take an interest in the...
Galatea
The subject of this painting has been taken from the 12th fable of Book XIII in Ovid's Metamorphoses which tells the story of the Cyclops Polyphemus' jealousy...
Orpheus
In Greek mythology, Orpheus's skill as a poet and musician was such that he even charmed wild beasts. He had the misfortune of charming the Maenads, who tore...
The Cradle
Undeniably Berthe Morisot's most famous painting, The Cradle was painted in Paris in 1872. It shows one of the artist's sisters, Edma, watching over her...
Young Girl in a Ball Gown
This brilliant, free evocation of a young, unknown woman in a ball gown is the complete opposite of the society or official portrait produced by the regular...
Portrait of Madame Pâris
Muenier was twenty-three when he painted this portrait of his mother in law, Madame Pâris. So it is a rare, early work by this eminent exponent of...
Summer Night at Aagaardstrand
At the beginning of the 20th century, although still a subject of controversy in Norway, Munch established an international reputation. He was favourably...
The Cemetery of St Privat
Alphonse de Neuville, like Edouard Detaille, was one of the main artists to paint episodes from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the theme recurs...
Vision
This painting was presented at the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1892 before featuring the following year in the second Rose+Croix Salon...
The Luxembourg Station in Brussels
Henri Ottmann worked in Brussels at the beginning of the 20th century. It was here at the Salon of Free Aesthetics in 1903 that he first exhibited three...
The shepherds arrive at Bethlehem
From 1835, Penguilly L'Haridon's paintings had been well accepted in official circles and he had won several prizes for his numerous historical, mythological...
The Birth of Pindar
It was at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris that Henry Picou, an artist from Nantes, met Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904), Jean-Louis Hamon (1821-1874) and...
White Frost
Painted near Pontoise where the painter lived from 1873 to 1882, White Frost was one of five pieces presented by Pissarro at the first exhibition of the group...
Red roofs
The title, Red roofs, corner of a village, winter, makes clear the theoretical dimension of this work by Camille Pissarro. In this painting he in fact moves...
A Corner of the Garden
A Corner of the Garden at the Hermitage seems to move away from Pissarro's familiar world towards the more sophisticated and urban one of Monet's gardens. In...
Hillside of the Hermitage, Pontoise
The very uneven topography around Pontoise, built on a steep bank of the Oise, lent itself to unusual compositions and provided an almost inexhaustible...
The House of Folly at Eragny
1880 to 1885 were difficult years for Pissarro financially and mark a definite development in his way of painting. This had as much to do with the common way...
Route d'Ennery
The rue de l'Hermitage in Pontoise, where Pissarro and his family lived until 1883, went between the banks of the Oise and the road to Ennery. Here Pissarro...
The Seine and the Louvre
After 1893, Camille Pissarro turned away almost entirely from the countryside motifs that had formed the main part of his work. From then on, he devoted...
The Poor Fisherman
The Poor Fisherman was the first of Puvis de Chavannes' paintings to be bought by the State. But the work sparked a lively reaction at the Salon of 1881 and...
The Dream
When Pierre Puvis de Chavannes' Dream was presented at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1883, the catalogue described its subject as: The Dream! "Love,...
Hope
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was deeply affected by the Franco-Prussian war and produced several works related to the conflict. In particular, at the Salon of...
View on the Château de Versailles
During the Spring 1871 Puvis de Chavannes, bitterly opposed to the Paris Commune, found refuge in Versailles. There he painted his first pure landscape: View...
The Young Mother
This painting was featured in the catalogue of the first monographic exhibition of the painter's work that opened in 1887 at the Galerie Durand-Ruel with the...
Young Girls by the Seaside
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898) was one of the most striking artists of the second half of the 19th century in Europe, known equally in the United...
The Balloon
It was while he was on the ramparts of Paris, when the town was besieged by Prussian troops in 1870, that Puvis had the idea for The Balloon. It was completed...
Lustral
Paul Ranson, one of the Nabis, developed an original style with Symbolist and esoteric resonances. In 1891, he made two versions of Lustral, including this...
Baroness Robert de Domecy
This is one of the few oil portraits that Redon made for the wife of his friend Baron de Domecy. This portrait of a woman dressed in red and brown, with a...
Closed Eyes
In the 1890s, Odilon Redon sometimes reworked some of his drawings or engravings in colour. Painted in 1890, Closed Eyes, which is no doubt a portrait of his...
Arï Redon with Sailor Collar
After the death of a first child, Odilon Redon was overjoyed by the birth of Arï in 1889: "An attentive tenderness surrounded this only child whose presence...
The Road to Peyrelebade
Born into a wealthy family in Bordeaux, Redon was just two days old when he was sent to a wet nurse in Peyrelebade, a village in the Médoc. He spent most of...
The Sleep of Caliban
Caliban, a character from Shakespeare's The Tempest, is an unruly, rebellious being and the son of a witch. He is also the wild, deformed slave of Prospero,...
Paul Gauguin
This portrait of Gauguin was in all likelihood inspired by the artist's death in the Marquesas Islands on May 8, 1903. That November, Redon published an...
Summary Execution
Henri Regnault was born in Paris in 1843 and killed in 1871 in one of the last battles of the Franco-Prussian war. Yet the young man had already made a name...
Juan Prim
While travelling in Spain in 1868, Regnault witnessed the revolution that brought the reign of Isabella II to an end, and saw the return of the revolutionary...
City Dance. Country Dance
Renoir liked dance scenes. These two paintings were designed as a pair: the format is identical and the almost life-size figures represent two different even...
Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette
This painting is doubtless Renoir's most important work of the mid 1870's and was shown at the Impressionist exhibition in 1877. Though some of his friends...
The Boy with the Cat
The Boy with the Cat has not given up all its secrets. This male nude has no equivalent in Renoir's work. The identity of the model seen from the back...
The Bathers
This painting is emblematic of the experimentation carried out by Renoir at the end of his life. After 1910, he returned to one of his favourite subjects –...
The Swing
A young man seen from the back is talking to a young woman standing on a swing, watched by a little girl and another man, leaning against the trunk of a tree....
Claude Monet
In this picture Renoir was not trying to present an ideal image of Monet as a painter. On the contrary, he offers an image as personal as it is realistic....
Julie Manet
Berthe Morisot and her husband Eugène Manet, brother of the painter, had known Renoir for many years. Their relationship became much closer in the second...
Large Nude
Renoir's female nudes, a favourite motif throughout his career, were more often painted in outdoor light than inside a room.In the 1890s, Gustave Geffroy...
Fernand Halphen as a Boy
A figure painter, Renoir had always accepted portrait commissions. His first public success was an ambitious family portrait, Mrs Charpentier and her Children...
Maternity
Pierre, Renoir's first son, was born on 21 March 1885. During the following months the painter produced a series of drawings and oil paintings in which Aline,...
Richard Wagner
A great music lover, Renoir was one of the first admirers of Wagner in France. At the beginning of 1882, when the painter was travelling in the south of...
Field of Banana Trees
Starting in 1881 the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel regularly bought paintings from Renoir. The painter then undertook all the trips he had previously been...
The Mosque
We do not know which festival Renoir was representing here in Algiers, set in the ancient Turkish ramparts destroyed several decades earlier by the French...
Frédéric Bazille
Beyond being a simple portrait, this painting conceals the presence of the five original principal figures of Impressionism: Frédéric Bazille (1841-1870),...
Young Girls at the Piano
In the early 1890s, friends and admirers of Renoir took exception to the fact that the French State had never made any official purchase from the painter,...
Mrs Josse Bernheim-Jeune and her son Henry
The model for this painting was Mathilde Adler (1882-1963). In 1901 she married her cousin, Josse Bernheim-Jeune (1870-1941) while her sister Suzanne...
The Martyrdom of St Sebastian
"Ribot -Ribera": the parallel between the French artist who exhibited at the Salon in the 1860s and his illustrious 17th-century Spanish predecessor very...
French Soldiers Marching
French Soldiers Marching is unique in the artist’s body of work. It is different in both subject and composition from his ''corn-style'' paintings produced...
The Last Day of Corinth
In 146BC, the Greek city of Corinth fell into the hands of Rome. Robert-Fleury depicts the moment when the Roman army enters the plundered city. The women of...
The Knight of the Flowers
From the moment they were created, the operas of Richard Wagner aroused great admiration, particularly from the artists of the Symbolist generation who took...
Manda Lamétrie, Farm Girl
The most successful of the various paintings that Alfred Roll sent to the Salon in the 1880s were imposing figures of women going about their daily work. By...
The Snake Charmer
Rousseau, who was self-taught and began painting late in life, travelled very little. Most of his jungles were painted in the Natural History Museum and in...
Portrait of Madame M.
Amongst the many portraits painted by Rousseau, it is rare to find a full-length portrait and one of such a size. However, there is another, which belonged to...
War
More than twenty years after the Franco-Prussian conflict of 1870 and the Commune in 1871 when the Douanier Rousseau painted War, he was still very much...
An Avenue, Forest of L'Isle-Adam
Théodore Rousseau was one of the greatest landscape artists of the 19th century. With a Romantic background, he spent his life trying to pierce the mysteries...
Road in the Forest
Theodore Rousseau received his training from the Neo-Classical painter Jean-Charles Rémond and from his sessions at the Louvre, where he mainly copied the...
Pond near the road
Rousseau had been a friend of Maurice Sand, son of the author George Sand, since 1839 when they met at the studio of the Swiss painter Menn. Following...
The Daughters of Leucippus
This very large canvas was part of a decoration designed by Roussel for the Bernheim family mansion, avenue Henri Martin, in Paris. For many years, the...
Venus and Love by the Sea
In 1906, Roussel discovered the clear light of the south of France and transformed his palette, endowing it with a calm luminosity dominated by greens and...
Orpheus' Lament
Orpheus, the poet and musician of Greek legends, could charm gods, humans and animals with his singing. Inconsolable after the death of his wife Eurydice, he...
Breton Wrestling
Sérusier's meeting with Gauguin at Pont-Aven in 1888 proved to be a veritable revelation. Under Gauguin's guidance, Sérusier painted the famous Talisman, a...
The Talisman
Paul Sérusier sojourned in Pont-Aven during the summer of 1888, as Paul Gauguin, whose advice he followed. On his returning to Paris, he showed his young...
Portrait of Paul Ranson in Nabi costume
We know of very few portraits by Sérusier, who specialised more in producing scenes of rural life in a synthesist or cloisonnist style. So this painting is...
The Downpour
Five years had passed since Gauguin gave Sérusier the famous painting lesson, near Pont-Aven. Sérusier, remaining faithful both to Synthetism and to...
Landscape with Puvis de Chavannes' Poor Fisherman
In 1881, Puvis de Chavannes exhibited his Poor Fisherman at the Salon de la Société des artistes français. It drew violent reactions from the critics. But...
Port-en-Bessin at High Tide
In the summer, Seurat usually went to the coast to paint landscapes. He claimed he "washed his eye clean from the days spent in the studio and caught the...
Model, Back View
During the winter of 1886-1887, Georges Seurat started work on a large composition The Models. The painting is now in the Barnes Foundation, in Merion in the...
The Circus
Coming after Parade and Cancan, Circus was the third panel in a series by Seurat on the popular attractions of the modern city and its late-night...
The Red Buoy
Paul Signac, an enthusiastic sailor, often painted seaside and port scenes, here St Tropez which he had discovered three years before on board his yacht...
Women at the Well
After Seurat's death in 1891, Signac pursued his work both as a painter and as the theoretician of the neo-impressionist group. In 1892, he decided to leave...
Les Andelys; TheRiverbank
1886 was a crucial year in the development of Signac's style. In his early works painted in the Paris suburbs, at Port-en-Bessin or Saint-Briac, the influence...
Woman with a Parasol
The Woman with a Parasol is Berthe Roblès (1862-1942), a distant cousin of Camille Pissarro, whom Paul Signac had met in the early 1880s when he was an...
The Road to Gennevilliers
From the beginning of the 1880s, the young Paul Signac had revealed a taste for urban landscapes, painting views of Montmartre and the Paris suburbs, and in...
Procession at Penmarc'h
Passionate and melancholic, Brittany became the region of choice for a group of artists nicknamed the "Bande Noire" (The Black Group). Charles Cottet and...
Fog, Voisins
British by nationality, although he was born in Paris and spent almost all his life in France, Alfred Sisley settled at Voisins, a village near Louveciennes...
The Loing's Canal
In 1880, there was a sudden change in Sisley's life and in his work. The painter abandoned Seine-et-Oise, where he had lived and worked since 1871, to move to...
Le chemin de la Machine
The road disappearing into the distance is one of Sisley's favourite themes. It often links the foreground with the background, and helps "pierce" the space,...
Snow at Louveciennes
The countryside in winter particularly attracted Sisley who excelled in capturing the sadness and desolation of nature. His taciturn and solitary temperament...
Boat in the Flood at Port Marly
In 1874, Sisley moved to Marly-le-Roi and became the chronicler of this village situated a few kilometres to the west of Paris. His most beautiful motif was...
The Potato Harvest
Originally from the island of Terceira in the Azores, José Julio de Souza Pinto arrived in Porto (Portugal) as a very young man, and became a brilliant art...
What is called vagrancy
Born in Brussels in 1823, the Belgian painter Alfred Stevens moved to Paris in the 1840s. This painting is representative of the early part of his career,...
Wague VII
The famous Swedish dramatist August Strindberg started to express himself through painting in 1873, and did so more intensively after 1892. But his best...
Seascape with reef
Completed in Paris, where Strindberg moved to in 1894 at the invitation of the painter and dealer Willy Gretor, this landscape was part of a series produced...
Rest
Hans Thoma was one of Germany's outstanding painters in the late 19th century. Trained in Karlsruhe and Düsseldorf in the 1860s, he met Gustave Courbet...
Portrait of Miss L. L.
From 1859 onwards, James Tissot exhibited works inspired by history and mediaeval literature at the Salon, with some success. In 1861 he won official...
Portrait of the Marquis and Marchioness of Miramon and their children
The Marquis of Miramon poses with his wife Thérèse and their first two children, on the terrace of the family château. Here Tissot displays an elegant...
Faust and Marguerite
In the early 1860s, in an effort to regenerate history painting, Tissot was seeking new subjects and a new style. He was strongly influenced by the work of...
Evening
In Evening, also known as The Ball, Tissot depicts a young woman wearing a luxuriant yellow dress, arriving at a society event. The extreme femininity of the...
The Circle of the Rue Royale
This imposing group portrait commissioned from Tissot at the end of the Second Empire invites us to access the intimacy of the Circle of the Rue Royale, a...
Dance at the Moulin-Rouge
Following on radically from his lithography work, deployed in the form of posters in the street, Toulouse-Lautrec accepted a commission to do two monumental...
The Clown Cha-U-Kao
A dancer and clown at the Nouveau Cirque and the Moulin Rouge, Cha-U-Kao owes her Japanese sounding name to the phonetic transcription of the French words...
Jane Avril Dancing
Like La Goulue and the female clown Cha-U-Kao, Jane Avril was part of the night life and show business that Toulouse-Lautrec loved to portray. The daughter of...
Rousse
Toulouse-Lautrec has left countless pictures of women in private moments, often at their toilet. Here the woman fills the centre of the composition and is...
Paul Leclercq
In 1897, Lautrec decided to paint the portrait of Paul Leclercq (1872-1856), a young writer who was one of the founders of La Revue Blanche. For a month,...
Justine Dieuhl
The palette used in this painting is typical of the portraits Lautrec painted in the garden of père Forest, a piece of land used for archery at the corner of...
Alone
This astonishing study on cardboard is a sketch for a lithograph published under the title Lassitude in the album Elles published in 1896. One can see a woman...
Woman with Gloves
This portrait is typical of the "studies" that Lautrec painted outside, in Père Forest's garden in Montmartre, around 1888-1891. Each time, he used the same...
Gamekeeper
From the very beginning of his artistic career, Troyon was interested in landscape painting, and produced many studies in the forests of Meudon, Compiègne...
Goose Girl
After travelling extensively in France, Holland and England, Troyon moved to Normandy around 1850, a region of pastures and livestock farming. There he...
Christ with the Peasants
In this painting from 1887 to 1888, Uhde presents an image of grace being said before a meal. Although Christ is recognisable by his halo, beard and long...
Misia at Her Dressing Table
Misia à sa coiffeuse (Misia at Her Dressing Table), dated 1898, reflects the close collaboration of Félix Vallotton with the Nabis and is among the finest...
The Ball
The Ball is one of the best known paintings by Félix Vallotton, a Swiss painter who was in close touch with the Nabis from 1891. This bird's-eye view figures...
Interior
Vallotton's style moved closer to the Nabis in 1892-1893. At that time he adopted their aesthetic principles - planes of colour, Japonism, Art Nouveau...
Self-portrait
Of the eight known self-portraits by Vallotton, this is certainly the most optimistic and peaceful. The work dates from 1897, when the artist was aged thirty...
Portrait of Alexandre Natanson
The Nabi group, to which Vallotton belonged, was closely linked to La Revue Blanche, founded in 1889 by the Natanson brothers: Alexander (1867-1936), Thadeus...
The Poker Game
"Some great news that will really surprise you: I'm going to get married. I am marrying a lady I have known and appreciated for a long time, a friend, a widow...
Dr Paul Gachet
Inseparably entwined with the last period of Vincent van Gogh's life in Auvers, Dr Gachet was an original character. He was a homoeopathic doctor interested...
Self-Portrait
Like Rembrandt and Goya, Vincent van Gogh often used himself as a model; he produced over forty-three self-portraits, paintings or drawings in ten years. Like...
The Arlesienne
This Arlésienne, Mme Ginoux, kept the Café de la Gare at Arles and often came in contact with artists, particularly Gauguin and Van Gogh. Gauguin also...
The Italian Woman
This woman is without doubt Agostina Segatori (1843-1910), a former model of Corot, Gérôme and Manet with whom Van Gogh seems to have had a brief love...
Starry Night
From the moment of his arrival in Arles, on 8 February 1888, Van Gogh was constantly preoccupied with the representation of "night effects". In April 1888, he...
The Church in Auvers-sur-Oise
After staying in the south of France, in Arles, and then at the psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy de Provence, Vincent Van Gogh settled in Auvers-sur-Oise,...
The siesta
The siesta was painted while Van Gogh was interned in a mental asylum in Saint-Rémy de Provence. The composition is taken from a drawing by Millet for Four...
The Dance Hall in Arles
On 23 October 1888, Paul Gauguin met up again with Vincent Van Gogh in Arles. The two men dreamt of founding a "studio of the Midi" together, in the South of...
The Restaurant de la Sirène
During his stay in Paris, between March 1886 and February 1888, Van Gogh lived with his brother Theo in the north of the city: first in rue de Laval, then in...
Van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles
Van Gogh produced three, almost identical paintings on the theme of his bedroom. The first, in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, was executed in October 1888,...
Eugène Boch
Van Gogh met the Belgian painter Eugène Boch (1855-1941) in mid-June 1888, while Boch was spending a few weeks near Arles. Around 8 July, Vincent mentioned...
Fritillaries
Fritillaries are bulbs which, like tulips, flower in spring. It is therefore easy to work out what time of year Van Gogh painted this picture. The variety...
Peasant Woman near the Hearth
This work, produced by Van Gogh at the end of the Nuenen period in Holland (1883-1885), was part of a collection of preparatory studies for the large, famous...
Thatched Cottages at Cordeville
This picture was painted during the artist's most frenetic creative period, a few weeks before his tragic death. Van Gogh had left Provence in May 1890, at...
Cholera Scene
Doctor Gachet, a collector and friend of the Impressionist painters, is mainly known nowadays for having brought Vincent van Gogh to Auvers-sur-Oise in May...
Restaurant "La Machine" at Bougival
It was in 1900, after meeting Derain, that Maurice de Vlaminck decided to become a full-time painter. Landscapes, particularly the Seine around Paris, were...
The Chapel, Chateau of Versailles
This tranquil painting was paradoxically triggered by the First World War. In the midst of the turmoil, Vuillard found in the exaltation of the classicism of...
Public Gardens
The Public Gardens cycle is made up of nine panels, commissioned in 1894 by Alexandre Natanson for his mansion in the Avenue du Bois, in Paris (now Avenue...
In Bed
This work is the most brilliant formal variation of one of the favourite themes of the Symbolist culture – sleep and loss of consciousness. In Bed is a...
Interior with Three Lamps
From 1893, Vuillard entered into close, daily contact with Thadée Natanson, the editor in chief of La Revue blanche, and his wife Misia. The painter was a...
The Artist's Mother taking Breakfast
From the beginning, Vuillard's art took an intimist and autobiographical direction that marked all of his work. This breakfast scene, painted around 1900,...
The Lilac Trees
Faithful to the precepts of the Nabi group, founded in 1888 and to which he belonged together with Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier, Pierre Bonnard and...
Sleep
For a long time in painting, the bed and the space around it, often linked with "etiquette", were regarded as a place to represent kings, nobles and...
The Haystack
The Haystack, along with The Lilac Trees and The Path, was part of a set of decorative panels produced for the Bibesco brothers, Antoine et Emmanuel, between...
The Path
Around 1900, Vuillard's career moved into a new creative period. His painting style developed under the influence of Monet's Impressionism, with paintings...
Variations in Violet and Green
Whistler was a refined aesthete and one of the most sensitive interpreters of the fashion for the arts of the Far East which spread through Europe from the...
Portrait of the Artist's Mother
Although an American by nationality, Whistler divided his career between London and Paris. He enrolled in Charles Gleyre's studio at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts...