Exhibition Series Sponsors
Presenting Sponsors: Mary and Ryan Finley, Mary and Pete Mark Family Foundation, William G. Gilmore Foundation, The Laura and Roger Meier Family, James F and Marion L Miller Foundation, Oregon Community Foundation
Lead Sponsors: Mary and Cheney Cowles, Pat and Trudy Ritz, Flowerree Foundation, Dorothy Piacentini, McGraw Family Foundation
Major Sponsors: Mary and Tim Boyle, The Smidt Foundation, Cooper Dubois and Sanda Stein, Darci and Charlie Swindells, Travers and Vasek Polak, Mr. and Mrs. William A. Whitsell, The Standard
Sponsors: Sharon and Keith Barnes Endowment, Robert Trotman Interior Design, Allen Trust Company, Northern Trust, State of Oregon, Oregon Cultural Trust, Regional Arts and Culture Council, Oregon Arts Commission
Monet to Matisse: French Moderns
Presenting Sponsor: Janet H. Geary
Lead Sponsor: Ann Flowerree/Flowerree Foundation
Sponsors: Richard Louis Brown and Thomas Mark, Clark Foundation, European and American Art Council of the Portland Art Museum
Supporters: George and Barbara Dechet, Judith and Hank Hummelt
Additional support for the exhibition is provided by the Laura S. and Roger S. Meier Endowment for European Art and Janet and Richard Geary Curator of European Art Endowment.
Monet to Matisse: French Moderns
Organized by Lisa Small, Senior Curator of European Art, and Richard Aste, former Curator of European Art, Brooklyn Museum and curated for Portland by Lloyd DeWitt. The Richard and Janet Geary Curator of European and American Art Pre-1930.
French Moderns: Art History Timeline
1848 Théodore Rousseau arrives at Barbizon Forest, attracting other landscape artists, including Jules Dupré, Félix Ziem, and Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Peña.
1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish the Communist Manifesto. Revolutions occur across Europe. In France, Louis-Philippe is deposed and the Second Republic is declared.
1849 Gustave Courbet paints The Stonebreakers. Its realist, unsentimental style and humble, anonymous, and provincial subject matter challenge the principles of the dominant taste of academic neoclassicism.
1850 William-Adolphe Bouguereau wins the coveted one-year Prix de Rome scholarship. His style, pejoratively labeled “art pompier” (pompous art), retains great public favor.
1852 The Second Empire begins. Napoleon III is emperor until 1870.
1854 The Crimean War begins, in which France is allied with Great Britain and the Ottoman Empire against Russia.
1859 Napoleon III defeats Austrian forces in Italy, returning Lombardy to Italian rule.
1860–62 France explores recognizing the Confederate States of America but remains neutral until the Emancipation Proclamation.
1862 Napoleon III installs Maximillian II as the Mexican emperor during the American Civil War, withdrawing forces after the war ends. Maxmillian is executed by the restored Republican government of Mexico in 1867, an event depicted by realist artist Edouard Manet.
1870 Otto von Bismarck provokes war with France in July, which surrenders September 1. The Prussians besiege a resistant Paris, whose citizens suffer starvation and resort to eating the zoo animals; they capitulate in January.
1871 France cedes Alsace and Lorraine to Germany and pays 5 billion francs indemnity. The French legislature establishes the Third Republic, which endures until the Nazi invasion of 1940. The Paris Commune is established in March, its government staff including Gustave Courbet. The city is retaken by May 28, and 10,000 Communards are imprisoned in colonies.
The Impressionist Exhibitions
1874, April 15–May 15 The first Impressionist exhibition is held at photographer Nadar’s former studio at 35 Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. Claude Monet’s Impression Sunrise draws the scorn of critics, who unintentionally give the movement its name. Paul Cezanne, Monet, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Berthe Morisot are among the 30 who participate.
1876, April 1–30 The second Impressionist exhibition is held at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris. The show includes 20 artists exhibiting 252 works.
1877 At the third exhibition, the group adopts the Impressionist label. Gustave Caillebotte heads the project, supporting it with his private funds. The show features 18 artists exhibiting 241 works, including Renoir’s Bal du Moulin de la Galette and Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare.
1879 The fourth exhibition includes Marie Bracquemond and Paul Gauguin; Renoir, Cezanne, Morisot, and Alfred Sisley do not participate.
1880 The fifth exhibition features Mary Cassatt, Bracquemond, and Morisot; women artists make a strong showing. Monet abstains in favor of the official Salon; only a single work of his is accepted.
1881 The sixth exhibition debuts Degas’s Little Dancer. Many of the other artists decline to keep showing with the group.
1882 The seventh exhibition welcomes back Monet, Sisley, and Caillebotte; Degas and Cassatt do not participate.
1886 The eighth and final exhibition is a reunion of sorts, with Degas, Renoir, Gauguin, Monet, and Pissarro all contributing works. They are joined by artists like Paul Signac and Georges Seurat, whose style is seen as forming a new movement, referred to as Divisionism or Pointillism.
1887–89 The Eiffel Tower is constructed.
1894–1906 Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus is imprisoned at Devils Island for espionage, leading great novelist Emile Zola to publish “J’Accuse.” Dreyfus is exonerated in 1906, but the case divides the country while exposing widespread antisemitism; this political scandal becomes known as the Dreyfus Affair.
1900 The Universal Exposition in Paris is regarded as the moment when Art Nouveau becomes the dominant trend in design, advertising, and decorative arts.
1904 The French Republic cultivates an understanding with Russia and Great Britain known as the Triple Entente, which leads their alliance against Germany at the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
1905 The French Republic stops supporting religious organizations, establishing the official policy of laïcité, or secularization.
1905 Henri Matisse and André Derain are labeled “Fauves” (wild animals) by critics responding to their works at the Salon d’Automne.
1911 The first major Cubist exhibition in France, at the Salon des indépendants, includes work by Robert Delaunay, Leges, and Albert Gleizes but not Pablo Picasso or Georges Braque.
1914–18 World War I takes place throughout Europe, ending in an armistice.
1924 André Breton publishes his Surrealist Manifesto.
1935 The Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project is initiated as a relief program; it lasts until 1943. Major American artists begin working in a modern style as a result of this New Deal initiative. It succeeds the 1933 Public Works of Art Project and its Section of Painting and Sculpture program.
1937 The first major exhibition of the American Abstract Artists group is hosted by the newly founded Squibb Galleries, featuring 39 members. The abstract art movement presages the eventual international triumph of the New York school in the 1950s, when the city eclipses Paris as the world’s dominant contemporary art center.
1938 The International Exhibition of Surrealism at the Beaux-Arts Gallery in Paris displays 300 works by more than 60 artists.
1940 The Nazis invade France, ending in a second armistice in June and the division of the country into the northern Nazi-occupied territory and the southern collaborationist-administered Vichy republic.
1944 Allied forces invade Normandy, known as D-Day.
1945 The United Nations is established after World War II ends.
1946 The constitution of the Fourth Republic is adopted.
Auguste Rodin
French, 1840–1917
The Age of Bronze, medium-size model, first reduction, 1876; cast 1967
Bronze
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of B. Gerald Cantor, 68.49
Auguste Rodin’s original life-size sculpture, almost twice as big as this version of The Age of Bronze, was so convincing that some accused the sculptor of casting the figure directly from a live model. False accusations of “cheating” by those offended by an artwork’s realism were common in the nineteenth century. To present-day eyes, however, the figure may appear somewhat idealized, though that was not the artist’s intent.
[Artwork Description: This bronze sculpture measures a little over three feet high and is about a foot across at its widest. It depicts a young male nude, standing with his right leg bent at the knee and his right arm raised with his hand in a loose fist resting on the top of his head. His left arm is also bent at the elbow, his hand held at shoulder height with fingers curled inward. The sculpture’s deep brown surface appears smooth and glossy. Light bounces off the figure’s well-defined musculature, especially on the upper back, arms and legs. Golden brown areas of lighter bronze patina appear on the sculpture. The figure has short, cropped hair and wears a neutral expression. His eyes almost completely closed and his chin tilted up slightly.]
Edgar Degas
French, 1834–1917
Nude Woman Drying Herself, circa 1884–86
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Carll H. de Silver Fund, 31.813
Edgar Degas’s painting of a nude woman drying herself with a towel is very likely unfinished. The artist used his brush to outline the main forms in the composition, including the female model, the circular tub from which she has emerged, and a sponge resting in the center. In other areas, he used paint thinned with turpentine in order to indicate texture and tone. Had he finished the canvas, Degas would have then overlaid the bright colors for which his paintings were known, bringing the final work to life.
[Artwork Description: This work measures five feet by seven feet and was created in sepia brown tones on a light ground. It has a sketchy, unfinished quality, showing brushstrokes and outlines clearly. Standing at center and filling almost the full height of the painting, is a nude woman drying her back with a small towel. Her feet are together, her knees are slightly bent. Her back is to the viewer, as she bows her head. Her hair has been gathered on top of her head in a bun. Just to the left of the figure at lower center, is the round, shallow tub that holds a large irregularly shaped natural sponge. Light falls from what appears to be a large window behind the woman and tub, casting the figure’s back in shadow. On the right is a large bed and at left, is a portion of an upholstered chair set in front of a dresser on which sits a pitcher and basin.]
Fernand Léger
French, 1881–1955
Les Plongeurs Polychromes, 1941–42
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of The Beatrice and Samuel A. Seaver Foundation, 2004.30.11
This painting is part of Fernand Léger’s series of Divers, which was inspired by watching swimmers at a pool in Marseilles while awaiting passage to New York in 1940. As the artist recalled, “It was impossible to tell whose head, leg, and arm belonged to whom.” Indeed, Les Plongeurs Polychromes gives an impression of a tangled mass of figures in space—a topsy-turvy tumble of bodies and birds with neither top nor bottom. Léger’s juxtaposition of bright colors enhances the sense of exuberant, athletic chaos.
[Artwork Description: This almost square work measures thirty-three inches by just over thirty inches. Arms and legs drawn in a flat manner are outlined in black and jumbled together with a female head with curly hair and at least one head and torso complete with round circles for breasts. Bright colors provide shading to add volume to the assorted shapes. Birds with extended wings mingle with limbs. Sunny yellow, hot-pink, royal blue, red-orange, aqua, dark green and black biomorphic shapes encircle the assemblage on a greenish gray background. The combination of disjointed shapes and intense colors lend the work a sense of movement and chaos.]
Monet to Matisse: French Moderns
Over the span of a century, Paris played a pivotal role in the rise of modern art. The French capital served as the center for new styles and movements that turned away from the models and hierarchies of the French Academy of Painting and Sculpture, established in 1648, to embrace contemporary life and ideas. Spurred by the industrial growth of the Second Empire of the 1850s and 1860s, Paris was the artistic hub for modernity with its galleries, annual Salons, and spectacular world’s fairs. Varying in scale, style, and media, the fifty-nine paintings and sculptures on view here explore major new forms of representation and abstraction forged in France through war and peace. All the works in the exhibition are drawn from the Brooklyn Museum’s renowned collection.
By the early 1900s, Brooklyn’s visionary curators and trustees were acquiring contemporary masterpieces by such artists as Henri Fantin-Latour and Paul Cézanne, forming the cornerstone of a collection that now includes iconic paintings by Edgar Degas and Claude Monet, and sculpture by Auguste Rodin. In addition to presenting works by these French-born masters, the exhibition represents a number of the many foreign artists drawn to France such as Marc Chagall and Giovanni Boldini.
French Moderns: Monet to Matisse, 1850–1950 is organized in four sections: Landscape, Still Life, Portraits and Figures, and The Nude. Beginning with the landscapes of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and the birth of plein-air (outdoor) painting, the exhibition surveys the innovative styles and techniques developed by artists working in France, spanning nineteenth- and early twentieth-century movements from the Realism of Gustave Courbet to the Surrealism of Yves Tanguy.
The Nude
In the nineteenth century, the nude was inextricably linked to the ideals of classical Greek sculpture, with its flawless physiognomies and grandiose historical and mythological subjects. In the eyes of conservative critics, contemporary figures hardly seemed worthy of being immortalized in bronze, marble, or oil paint. Champions of modernity, however, such as the critic and poet Charles Baudelaire, argued for a new, modern kind of beauty through the representation of daily life, and artists increasingly responded by approaching their models’ nakedness with an unflinching realism. By the twentieth century, the modern nude sometimes also reflected the shifting perspectives of abstraction.
Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de la Peña
French, 1807–1876
Bathers by a Woodland Stream, 1859
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Gladstone in memory of Sylvia Israel, 85.228
Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de la Peña, born to Spanish parents in Bordeaux, was part of a group of French landscape painters who began to paint in the Forest of Fontainebleau near the village of Barbizon, about thirty miles south of Paris, in the 1830s. In this painting, Diaz’s characteristically rapid and loose handling of paint, evident in the daubed highlights on the sun-dappled leaves and tree trunks, enlivens the tranquil, centered composition. The three female bathers, who might represent nymphs, lend the painting a mythological air. Leafy, tree-filled scenes like this one—sometimes with figures, sometimes without—were the artist’s stock-in-trade.
[Artwork Description: This painting measures two feet wide by and foot and a half high. It depicts a group of semi-nude female figures posed near a pool or small pond in a forest. The dense foliage and overgrown branches of the trees fill most of the painting. Sturdy tree trunks form the middle ground while the figures are grouped at lower right. The three figures sit and stand near the edge of the pool of water that stretches from bottom right to left. The first figure from the left is facing the viewer, crouching and reaching towards the water, one shoulder draped in light colored fabric. The center figure stands, their head turned to the side and back. They hold fabric draped over their forearms and covering their lower half. The third figure sits with their back to the viewer, head lowered, and one arm stretched out towards the pool. Their red and white drapery has fallen around their waist. A small pale gold dog stands at the edge of the pool at center bottom. Sunlight filters through the leaves at center top and casts light on the figures, dog and pool.]
Brooklyn Museum’s Collectors
Laura L. Barnes
The work by Henri Matisse, one by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and the work by Chaïm Soutine were gifts of Laura L. Barnes, who grew up in Brooklyn and married collector Albert C. Barnes, who died suddenly in 1951. They assembled what remains arguably the finest private collection in the world, open to the public in Philadelphia and still operated as always intended as an educational institution. The gifts to the Brooklyn Museum from Laura’s own collection are consistent with those of their foundation, whose educational mission she and Albert pursued jointly. The estate they built on North Latch’s Lane in Upper Merion, bordering Philadelphia, has an extensive arboretum, which became the focus of the horticultural library Laura amassed and her horticulture program at the Barnes Foundation, which continues there today.
The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation
The work by Robert Delaunay and the sculptures by Auguste Rodin were gifts of the foundation administered by Iris Cantor, who grew up in Brooklyn and married Gerald Cantor in 1977. His fascination with Rodin began just after his return from World War II, when he was able to purchase artworks because of his success through the financial services company Cantor Fitzgerald. The foundation gave an astonishing 58 Rodin bronzes to the Brooklyn Museum in 1983, as well as the work by Delaunay. The commitment to support museums and exhibit French 19th-century art is continued into the present by Iris.
Doris D. Havemeyer
Born in Brooklyn, Doris D. Havemeyer was married to Horace O. Havemeyer, whose family’s National Sugar Company had been established in Brooklyn by the mid-1800s, when much of their raw materials were still produced by enslaved laborers in the South. They were enthusiastic collectors and had inherited numerous French paintings from his parents, Henry O. and Louisine Havemeyer, who left a staggering 2,000 works of art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1929.
William H. Herriman
The works by Jean-François Millet and William-Adolphe Bouguereau were donated by William H. Herriman (1829–1918). After moving from Brooklyn to Rome permanently in 1865, he supported American artists in the city as well as restoration projects and institutions like the American Academy in Rome. Herriman and his wife, Elizabeth Wyckoff, left important works of art to both the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Alexander M. Bing
Donor of Odilon Redon’s Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, Alexander M. Bing (1878–1959) was a prominent real estate developer in Manhattan, working with his brother Leo to erect several prominent Art Deco apartment buildings as well as large-scale affordable housing projects. He collected French and American art extensively. A painter and printmaker, he staged his first solo exhibition of Abstract Expressionist canvases at age 75.
Colonel Edgar and Bernice Garbisch
One of the works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir was donated by Colonel Edgar Garbisch and his wife, Bernice, sister to collector Walter P. Chrysler Jr. and daughter of the car magnate. Colonel Garbisch was a college football star and career military man. The couple’s huge collection of early American art, furniture, and artifacts decorated their inherited estate on Maryland’s eastern shore; those items were bequeathed to a number of museums, including the Brooklyn Museum, along with an important work by Renoir.
Aaron Augustus Healy
Donor of the Alfred Sisley, Pierre Bonnard, and Henri Fantin-Latour paintings, Aaron Augustus Healy was a leather merchant and antiques dealer. He served as a board member at the Brooklyn Museum during the pivotal trip to Paris in 1900 for the Universal Exposition, when he and others acquired the work by Fantin-Latour as well as the massive James Tissot series The Life of Christ on the advice of artist John Singer Sargent. The Tissot acquisition established the museum as a serious collector of French avant-garde art.
Dikran G. Kelekian
The work by Camille Pissarro was purchased with funds donated by renowned dealer of Islamic art Dikran G. Kelekian, who emigrated from Armenia to the US and was an expert in Persian art. He was on the jury of the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris, where he seems to have met Brooklyn Museum donors Albert C. Barnes and Henry O. Havemeyer, as well as museum trustees George Hearn and Aaron Augustus Healy. Kelekian collected French avant-garde art extensively enough to provide a core of 58 paintings, including this work by Pissarro, to the exhibition Paintings by Modern French Masters: Representing the Post-Impressionists and Their Predecessors at the Brooklyn Museum in 1921, to which were added 87 paintings on loan from France (and 30 local loans). This was a momentous project for the museum, which the present exhibition is intended to celebrate and partly reprise.
Aleksandr Yakovlev
Russian 1887–1938
Model Washing Her Hair, 1929
Tempera on linen
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Martin Birnbaum, 44.220
By the turn of the twentieth century, working women in Paris often bathed with water from a pitcher while crouching over a copper basin. Here, the Russian-trained painter and noted draftsman Aleksandr Yakovlev, who settled in Paris after the 1917 Russian Revolution, focused on the model’s muscular body. He accentuated the torsion of her brawny arms as she wrings water from her hair. Inspired by Edgar Degas’s paintings of bathers, Yakovlev rendered this private scene in earthy tonalities with broad brushstrokes.
[Artwork Description: This almost square painting measures about twenty-two inches by twenty-three inches and depicts a nude woman squatting while wringing out her wet hair into a basin on the floor. The woman’s muscular body fills the space. The light source appears to come from directly above. She is viewed from a slightly elevated position so her bare shoulders and part of her upper back are visible. She leans forward grasping her long brownish hair in both hands. Her left knee and foot are drawn up by her elbows; her other leg is in shadow. The basin in front of her falls mainly in shadow, though its rim and two handles are highlighted with strokes of light paint applied in dry brush. A light-colored cloth is draped on the edge of the basin and is partly laying on the floor. The figure is muscular and sturdy looking. She is depicted in earthy tones of brown, beige, cream and pale peach against a dark background. The back of her bowed head shows her hair parted down the center, golden in color where the light falls. At the figure’s left and slightly behind, stands a large pitcher almost as tall as the crouching woman. The scene is depicted with painterly or fluid strokes and some details like the foot and forearm outlined in black.]
Jacques Villon
French, 1875–1963
The Philosopher, 1930
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Gerda Stein, 34.1000
Based on a life study of a seated male bather swathed in a towel and reading a newspaper, Jacques Villon’s simultaneously geometric and organic painting blends hard- and soft-edged intersecting planes with the contours of a powerful, muscular body and its enveloping white drapery. Although this work developed out of an initial interest in the human form, the artist gave it a title that evokes the metaphysical realm of the intellect or the incorporeal.
[Artwork Description: This painting measures just under forty inches high by thirty-two inches wide and depicts a seated male figure wrapped in a white towel reading a newspaper. The figure fills the height of the painting and most of the width. Geometric shapes are combined with organic shapes to form the figure, the towel and newspaper. The towel and newspaper are rendered in shades of white and gray bisected by dark lines to suggest folds in the paper and fabric. The seated figure is depicted in shades of peach. Blocks of color form the right leg and the head and torso. The other leg is in shadow and appears in shades of gray. The face is not distinguishable aside from the suggestion of an eye and dark hair. A shadow falls across the man’s face and torso. His pectoral muscles are defined with black curved lines. A curved black line delineates the figure’s right shoulder. Behind the man are large angular planes of pale gray, jade green and brown that seem to radiate outward from the figure. Rough brushstrokes are visible giving the painting in a part, a sense of being a sketch. The overall effect is moody and muted.]
Auguste Rodin
French, 1840–1917
She Who Was the Helmet Maker’s Once-Beautiful Wife, 1885–87; cast 1969
Bronze
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation, 86.87.2
Throughout much of his career, Auguste Rodin faithfully represented the effect of age upon the body. In this sculpture of an old, naked woman sitting on a rock with her head lowered, the artist’s keen sense of observation is evident.
The figure’s sagging, wrinkled flesh challenged the era’s conventional standards of beauty in art. Indeed, even the contemporary sculptor Aristide Maillol was mystified by the master’s choice of subject matter: “An old woman’s belly does not appeal to me: I like health and beauty.”
Auguste Rodin
French, 1840-1917
Danaid, circa 1903
Marble
Brooklyn Museum, Ella C. Woodward Memorial Fund, 12.873
This sculpture depicts a dramatic moment from Greek mythology when one of the Danaids, the daughters of Danaos, collapses in despair. For the crime of murdering their husbands on their wedding night, the Danaids were punished with the endless task of filling a bottomless barrel with water. Here, Auguste Rodin expressed the Danaid’s emotional anguish through the physical contortions of her body as she lies huddled on the ground, having realized the futility of her actions.
[Artwork Description: This sculpture measures a little over two feet long, about twenty inches high and just under thirteen inches wide. It depicts a nude female figure collapsed on a craggy rock next to an overturned vase. The figure has her knees and one arm tucked beneath her. She rests her head on her other arm, turning her head to the side so her face is visible. She twists her body and head in opposing directions creating angles at her waist, hips and shoulder blades. Her long hair cascades over her head and drapes itself over the rock. The hair mimics the water flowing out of the overturned vases next to the figure’s right side. The craggy rock is irregular in shape and is covered in chisel marks. The artist’s signature is carved on the side.]
Still Life
The French term for still life—nature morte, or “dead nature”—conveys the lowly status that the French Academy accorded to paintings of inanimate objects, as opposed to human subjects. Far from being inert, however, still life reflected the rapidly changing world experienced by nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists. Beginning in the 1850s, the genre garnered a newfound popularity that continued through the end of the century. While many artists evoked the familiar comforts of home, others called attention to an increasingly diverse society by depicting precious goods from Egypt and Japan.
Still life aims to stimulate all of the viewer’s senses through displays of fine cloths, ripe fruits, and warm, sunlit tabletops. Twentieth-century artists harnessed the evocative power of still life in order to induce sensations that transcended physical experience and entered psychological and spiritual realms.
József Rippl-Rónai
Hungarian, 1861–1927
Woman with Three Girls, circa 1909
Oil on board
Brooklyn Museum, Designated Purchase Fund, 1994.68
József Rippl-Rónai’s “corn style” application of paint (so called by the artist because the paint daubs look kernel-like) juxtaposes bright, intense colors that compress the figures, furnishings, and decorative floral pattern into a single plane. Inspired by avant-garde techniques observed in Paris, where the artist lived from 1887 to 1900, Rippl-Rónai sought to create a modern Hungarian style. Here, the flowering foliage recalls the allover floral patterns of embroidered Hungarian folk textiles, and the tulips in the yellow vase are traditional symbols of Hungarian culture and identity.
[Artwork Description: This painting measures approximately three feet by two feet. It features a woman seated by a table and as three blonde girls stand nearby. The woman is positioned in the center of the painting. The long table stands to the right and extends from the woman to the right edge. At far left, the three girls stand, partially cropped, next to a wicker chair. The woman wears a wide brimmed hat in gold trimmed in what might be cream-colored puffy flowers. She’s turned slightly to the left, facing the three girls. Her dark hair comes to her shoulder, and she holds her right hand up to her face while her left hand rests in her lap. Her skin color is peach and gold in color. She wears a long cream dress with several layers of ruffles. A dark shawl with pink roses covers her shoulders. The girls are dressed alike in white short sleeved blouses with a ruffled collar under dark vests with wide red ribbons tied at the neck. One girl stands beside the wicker chair and her white skirt and dark stockings are visible. The other two girls stand behind the chair with its pink blanket folded over its back. One girl rests her arms on the chair back while only the head of the third is seen. The table at right is covered with a deep red cloth that has a floral border in greens and orange. Two vases stand on the table. One is yellow and holds pale tulips. The other is dark and slightly larger and holds daisies. The scene is set against a background of green foliage with large pink flowers suggesting wallpaper or a blooming garden.]
André Masson
French, 1896–1987
Glasses and Architectures, 1924
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of The Beatrice and Samuel A. Seaver Foundation, 2004.37.3
Two goblets arranged within an enigmatic architectural framework anchor this transitional work by the Surrealist painter André Masson. The geometric structuring of the composition draws from Analytic Cubism, whose practitioners, including Pablo Picasso, fragmented their images into abstract forms. The startling appearance of an androgynous torso passing beyond the right edge of the canvas suggests the rising prominence in Paris of the Surrealists, whose art sought to blur the boundary between dream and reality. Masson would join the group the year he painted Glasses and Architectures.
[Artwork Description: This small painting measures fifteen by eighteen inches. A windowsill borders the left edge and bottom of the work then gives way to a receding table that holds two glass goblets. One goblet lies on its side at right, while the other remains standing. Geometric architectural shapes form a surreal roofless room open to rounded clouds above. Fluted columns, decorative molding, zigzagged stair steps combine with more organic shapes that resemble possible body parts fill the background while the goblets occupy much of the foreground. A limbless nude figure is cropped on the right. The work is created in muddy, muted browns, dark grays with rusty red.]
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
French, 1796–1875
Ville-d’Avray, 1865
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Charlotte R. Stillman, 51.10
Known as “the very poet of landscape,” Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot sought to capture the subtle shifts of light in serene views. He painted this work in the vicinity of his parent’s country house in Ville-d’Avray, south of Paris, positioning his easel amid the reeds by a pond. The realistic play of light on water provides a subtle pathway into the composition, while scattered field workers hint at the rhythms of rural life.
[Artwork Description: This landscape in muted colors measures almost three feet wide and a little over two feet high. A glossy surfaced pond sits at lower right, while the foreground is occupied by russet-colored reeds that also ring the pond. A figure stands in or near the pond, perhaps gathering reeds. At left is an expanse of pale green- yellow grass containing a few more working figures. The middle ground reveals a string of country houses in pale gold and white that thread among tall trees with foliage that appears slightly blurred or smokey. A distant line of dark green trees appears on the horizon. The sky is all but filled with cream and the palest gray clouds that appear layered on top of one another. Breaks in the clouds allow the periwinkle blue sky to peek through. The colors in this rural scene are muted and dark: dark green, golden yellows, browns and russets lending the work a moody effect.]
Gustave Courbet
French, 1819–1877
The Edge of the Pool, 1867
Oil on canvas
Gift of Mrs. Horace O. Havemeyer, Mrs. Frederic B. Pratt, and Hyman Brown, by exchange, 1992.17
In this landscape Courbet renders the characteristic features of the Doubs region—craggy rocks, dark pools, tall oaks—with a great range of color tones and variations in technique, including a liberal use of his palette knife as well as his brush. He attentively contrasts the brightly illuminated green strip of the far bank with the murky center of the pool. The small figures of the woman on the bank and the man in the boat add a pastoral note to the painting.
[Artwork Description: This painting measures approximately thirty-two inches by forty inches and depicts a cluster of tall oak trees towering above two figures near a dark pool of water. The trees and their foliage occupy much of the work. Varying shades of green against a semi-cloudy sky fill the upper two thirds of the painting, the color of the leaves changing depending on where the sun shines on them. At lower center, a female figure in a long dress stands at left watching the male figure in a long tunic and breeches navigate a small boat in the shaded pool. The foreground holds a triangular patch of bright green long grass on the shore of the water. At far left, a craggy outcropping of rocks hems in the pool while on the far right in the distance stands a farm outbuilding at the end of a stretch of a ragged pathway.]
Gustave Courbet
French, 1819–1877
The Wave, circa 1869
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. Horace O. Havemeyer, 41.1256
While summering at Étretat in northwestern France, the Realist painter Gustave Courbet was drawn to nature in an unbridled state, capturing a wave breaking at high tide. The artist represented the foam and cresting waves by slathering thick white paint onto the canvas with a palette knife. He wrote to the poet Victor Hugo: “The sea! The sea! . . . in her fury which growls, she reminds me of the caged monster who can devour me.”
[Artwork Description: This dramatic seascape capturing a huge wave cresting and crashing measures two feet tall and just under three feet wide. The wave occupies the lower half of the work. The crest of the wave peaks at the very center, edged in foam. The barrel of the wave is formed to the right of the crest where the sea crashes downward and creates a mass of foam in the lower right corner. Smaller waves and foam swirl at the lower edge of the painting adding to the feeling of turbulence. The water is depicted in dark greens that almost become black in areas. Whitecaps swell and crash on the horizon. The sky is filled with low, stormy clouds. Deep grays and dark blues seem to threaten bad weather. The painting is filled with a sense of movement and foreboding.]
Claude Monet
French, 1840–1926
Rising Tide at Pourville, 1882
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. Horace O. Havemeyer, 41.1260
Claude Monet painted this abandoned customhouse in 1882 during a visit to the Normandy coast. He emphasized the cabin’s dramatic setting on the rugged coastline by cropping the right edge of the canvas and adopting an elevated viewpoint. The sweeping brushstrokes convey the raw forces of nature, from the roiling sea to the windblown vegetation on the cliff side, as well as the weathered surface of the brick cottage.
[Artwork Description: This seascape, that measures a little over two feet high and almost three feet wide, is largely composed of a view of a roiling sea overlooked by a small cottage on the edge of a steep cliff. The sea occupies a sideways L shape across the top of the work and down the left side. A thin strip of sky is visible at the very top of the work. The sea is painted in shades of blues, purple-grays and pale golden browns. White foam edges the waves creating a pattern of loosely parallel lines that travel diagonally across the work. At right, a steep craggy cliffside is covered in long green and golden grasses and shrubs. A small, reddish-brown cottage is positioned at extreme right and is partially cropped out the scene. The viewer is given a sense of viewing the scene as if from above the cliff, cottage and sea. Paint is layered, applied in dashes and dabs creating texture and depth.]
Eugène Louis Boudin
French, 1824–1898
The Beach at Trouville, circa 1887–96
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Robert B. Woodward, 15.314
In this late seascape, Eugène Boudin depicted a couple of local workers making their way across the beach in a wood horse-drawn cart. Though the composition harks back to seventeenth-century Dutch marine paintings, the freshness and immediacy of Boudin’s paint handling is very modern. The artist’s commitment to working en plein air to capture the play of light on water and clouds in saturated and unmodulated patches of color had a profound influence on his younger friend Claude Monet, and demonstrates why Boudin is recognized as an important forerunner of the Impressionists.
[Artwork Description: This landscape painting measures about two feet wide and a little over a foot tall. It portrays a near empty beach, a sliver of water and a broad blue sky with fluffy drifting clouds. The sky occupies the upper two thirds of the work. Clouds cluster at the horizon line, overlapping in white, gray, pale blue with touches of muted purple. Paint is applied in layers, somewhat roughly, creating a slightly blurred or impressionistic effect.The upper left portion of the sky is free of clouds featuring layered blues and grays. At right, a large bank of clouds seems to drift across the space in off-white, gray and bits of peach. The bottom third illustrates the beach and water. Beginning at right, a low hill in deep green and blue gently descends to meet the sea. Small dots and dabs of white paint suggest a group of buildings on the shore. A small cottage is placed where the sea and low hill meet about a third of the way in from the right at the horizon line. A simple brushstroke suggests the red roof. The blue water has highlights of white that echo the shape of the low hill; beginning narrowly at center and widening towards the left edge of the work. A cart with two horses stands on the pale beige beach. Two figures working on the cart are depicted with a white dab for a torso and black dabs for hats and legs. The pale sandy beach on the left slowly transforms into yellow green grass on the right. Deep brown strokes, both horizontal and vertical, suggest an uneven area filled with low lying vegetation. The artist’s signature appears at lower right.]
Camille Pissarro
French, 1830–1903
The Climb, Rue de la Côte-du-Jalet, Pontoise, 1875
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Purchased with funds given by Dikran G. Kelekian, 22.60
Departing from traditional landscape formats, here Camille Pissarro incorporates multiple simultaneous vantage points in his sun-filled woodland scene: gazing up the steep sandy road in the foreground; down through the ravine of birches in centerfield; and across at the nearby red-roofed hamlet. This kind of radical conflation of perspectives and spaces deeply inspired his friend and student, Paul Cézanne, with whom Pissarro often painted in Pontoise, just northwest of Paris. Working en plein air, Pissarro advocated using a palette knife, “Don’t be afraid of putting on color…Paint the essential character of things…, generously and unhesitatingly…”
[Artwork Descriptions: A impressionistic painting that measures a little over two feet wide and just under two feet high features a bucolic scene of a steep path overlooking a stream with an arched bridge and a glimpse at a nearby village through leafy trees. At left, a wide path dominates the scene. It takes up almost the entire right edge of the work, running vertically top to bottom. It is edged with bushy, deep green shrubs which contrast with the sandy beiges and grays of the path itself. Moving towards the center, two clusters of pale, slender birch trees with green foliage stand off the path on a slope down to a suggested riverbed and arched bridge. Branches with foliage in various shades of green cross and overlap obscuring the view beyond them except at upper left, where the branches part to create an oval-shaped gap. Through this gap are rooftops of slate blue and brown. They sit beneath a large house with a white facade and brick red roof. Green countryside, blue sky and three tall cypress trees complete the scene within the scene.]
Gabriele Münter
German, 1877–1962
Nightfall in Saint-Cloud, 1906
Oil on board
Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of William K. Jacobs, Jr., 1992.107.29
[Artwork description: This small study measures about 4 inches high by 6 and a half inches long. It depicts a landscape created with loose strokes and plentiful paint that results in a highly textured surface. The scene is almost abstract but a stand of purple, blue, orange, and green trees run across the work from top left to right. A strip of lemon-yellow sky flecked with orange peeks through along the top edge. The middle ground holds a field or meadow in shades of green. It also includes dabs and swipes of pink, orange, white and purple, applied horizontally. A smaller clump of dark green shrubs stands at the far left middle. The paint is applied heavily in a loose manner. Portions of the pulpboard are unpainted, especially at the edges. The effect gives the painting a sense of lively movement.]
Gabriele Münter
German, 1877–1962
Countryside near Paris, 1906
Oil on board
Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of William K. Jacobs, Jr., 1992.107.30
Gabriele Münter quickly built these studies of the Parisian countryside with overlapping wet-on-wet strokes of electric yellow, blue, orange, green, and pink. Although the images are highly abstracted, even illegible in places, short touches deftly suggest tree branches and foliage, long horizontal brushstrokes indicate swaths of sky and parkland, and diagonal strokes mark recessions in space. Münter’s freely worked oil sketches reflect her shift during this period from an earlier Impressionist-derived approach toward Expressionism, a movement that espoused communicating the artist’s inner life through art.
[Artwork description: This small study measures about 4 inches high by 6 and a half inches long. It depicts a landscape created with loose strokes and plentiful paint that results in a highly textured surface. A yellow one-story building stands at upper left, perhaps on top of a hill. The roof is purple mixed with dabs of white, gray and green. Three vertical strokes of green denote windows or doors. Below this is the façade of a brownish- yellow building with a rusty red and gray roof. It’s merely outlined with a thick application of paint and filled in with loose layers of gray, brown and mustard. At the center a pine tree stands bisecting the painting. Its foliage is dark green, its trunk and branches brown. At right, shapes of various trees, shrubs and other vegetation are just discernible. Paint is applied liberally and loosely creating a textured surface. Some of the pulpboard beneath the painting is visible.]
Yves Tanguy
American, born France, 1900–1955
Dress of the Morning, 1946
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of The Beatrice and Samuel A. Seaver Foundation, 2004.30.25
In Dress of the Morning, Yves Tanguy framed desolate voids with interlocking forms that resemble body parts and spindly rods with rigorous precision. He painted this otherworldly landscape in the United States shortly after World War II. Tanguy’s disturbing dreamscape reflects an interest in the psychology of the subconscious that was typical of Surrealism. He stated that painting “surprises me as it unfolds, giving me total freedom . . . and for this reason I am unable to make a prior plan or a sketch.”
[Artwork Description: This work measures just under two feet tall and a few inches over two feet wide. Much of the painting is composed of an empty sky-like space flanked in the foreground by interlocking abstract forms. Deep sky blue begins at the top edge fading to wispy white and blue, blending towards the bottom into dark grays and black shapes that seem to hang like bands of fog or mist. The abstract shapes are positioned at right and left. They resemble body parts, spindly rods, fragments of shells. They are mostly smooth-edged shapes that overlap and cluster in pearly grays with touches of milk chocolate brown. A gray narrow cylinder runs across the foreground connecting the two groupings. In the background set against the dark misty shapes are smaller objects, such as a square shape filled with small organic shapes and thin rods attached to rings and stone like shapes. The effect of the abstract shapes and dramatic shading is otherworldly.]
Odilon Redon
French, 1840–1916
Jacob Wrestling the Angel, circa 1905–10
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Alexander M. Bing, 60.31
As a Symbolist, Odilon Redon sought to express spiritual ideas and feelings in his art, as opposed to slavishly copying nature. Here, the artist depicted the biblical story of Jacob wrestling with an angel, recounted in Genesis (32: 24–29). After the two struggled throughout the night, the angel finally blessed Jacob after wrenching his opponent’s hip. The windowlike void at the center of the canvas, with opalescent layers of paint and daubs of impasto, accentuates the spiritual significance of daybreak in the story.
[Artwork Description: This long, narrow painting is over four and half feet tall and two feet wide. It is dominated by two trees that flank the small figures of the angel and Jacob. The tree at left is cropped so that just a sliver of its dark brown trunk is apparent beginning at the bottom of the work and continuing upward where a few branches sprout pink and purple flowers. Its branches join the tree at right that is pictured more fully. Its textured trunk gently undulates from the bottom edge upwards. Thick branches bear more flowers depicted with dabs of pink and purple paint. The space left between the two trees reveals a sunrise sky that is pale yellow and with hints of faraway clouds. Pastel, rocky outcroppings are barely discernible and blend into the hazy sky. At the very bottom of the work, stand two figures. A nude Jacob with his back to the viewer struggles against the angel. His head is down, his arms are raised, and he bends one knee and leans forward while bracing with the other leg. The angel has diaphanous gold wings and wears a transparent knee length garment. No facial features are visible. A spray of white dots near the figures suggests blossoms or butterflies.]
Raoul Dufy
French, 1877–1953
The Regatta, circa 1908–10
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. William K. Jacobs, Jr., 64.91
The Regatta depicts a crowd of spectators watching a boat race at Sainte-Adresse, a popular seaside resort near Le Havre, in Raoul Dufy’s native Normandy. The artist reduced the figures, sailboats, and flags to geometric forms, building his composition through blocks of bright, flattened color. He was inspired by the Fauves, or Wild Beasts, who caused a scandal at the 1905 Salon d’Automne in Paris through their brash colors and non-naturalistic painting style.
[Artwork Description: This painting is a little under two feet wide and just two feet high. A crowd of spectators are gathered on the shore in the foreground. They appear to be focusing on a number of vessels in the sea that fills the upper two thirds of the canvas. The figures have their backs turned to the viewer. There are two males dressed in dark suits, one wearing a straw boater hat, the other, a dark derby. A male and female couple lounge on the sand at bottom left, both wearing hats. The female figure appears to wear a swimsuit in an earthy khaki color. At bottom far right, another figure appears to be walking parallel to the shoreline in an old-fashioned men’s one-piece purple swimsuit. At the center are a cluster of spectators who are closer to the water. They wear white suits and brown clothing. The figures are painted simply, some are outlined in black and are almost cartoonish. The dark blue water occupies the upper area of the canvas and is filled with sailboats. The sails are creamy beige for the most part but one sailboat at left sports deep red sails. Like the figures, the boats are depicted with flat one-dimensional blocks of color. Brushstrokes are bold with little blending. Two slender boats rowed by several figures each is centered in the work. Three red, white and blue striped flags placed at left, right and center create a triangle that encloses the boats rowing at center.]
Landscape
Since its founding in the seventeenth century, the French Academy had considered landscape painting to be among the lowest and thus least important forms of artistic expression. However, as painters in the nineteenth century began to challenge the old academic conventions and categories, landscapes in particular rose in critical and commercial popularity. Taking advantage of newly portable paint tubes, artists began setting up their easels outdoors in order to capture nature en plein air, or in the open air. From the atmospheric colors and loose brushwork of the Impressionists to the bold visions of the Expressionists and Surrealists, landscape became one of the prime subjects through which painters expressed their modernity.
André Derain
French, 1880–1954
Landscape in Provence, circa 1908
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Anonymous gift, 39.273
With his friend Henri Matisse, André Derain was a major proponent of Fauvism, a brief early twentieth-century avant-garde movement characterized by vivid colors and exuberant application of paint (often squeezed from the tube directly onto the canvas). This work also shows the influence of Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso in the artist’s restrained palette of dark greens, blacks, and ochers, his more schematic, geometrical design, and his compressed composition, which collapses foreground and background into a series of flat, intersecting patches of color.
[Artwork: This work measures a foot tall and a little over a foot wide. Its focus is several trees in the foreground that are closely cropped so only their dark, crooked and bent trunks are visible along with a few branches and a bit of dark green foliage. At center, is a smaller tree that is depicted almost like a leaf: a thin, dark upright trunk with six limbs branching off to the side and surrounded by dark green foliage. The foliage is painted as a flat patch and is contained using a dark outline. In the background are a field and distant hills all depicted using the same palette of greens, ochre, orange and pale yellow. These colors are applied in patches, denoting fields, trees, foliage of different colors. The upper third of the work is a pale blue sky with a couple of small white clouds. Dark outlines bleed through the pale blue. Touches of orange mingle with the blue sky.]
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
French, 1841–1919
The Vineyards at Cagnes, 1908
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Colonel and Mrs. Edgar W. Garbisch, 51.219
Pierre-Auguste Renoir depicted a young woman reading beneath an olive tree in this lush, summery painting of the olive groves near Cagnes, in the South of France. The work fuses modern and classical elements of French landscape painting. Renoir’s rapid, sketchlike technique is quintessentially Impressionist, as is his vivid palette of warm reds, cool blues, and lush greens and yellows. The use of the olive trees as a framing device, however, recalls the orderly compositional structure of seventeenth-century pastorals.
[Artwork Description: This summer scene measures a foot and a half high by just under two feet wide. It depicts a female figure seated in the shade under two trees. The trees with their brown wavy branches flank the figure with one standing at each side of the work. They begin just above the lower edge of the painting with their branches exploding into pom poms of bright green leaves flecked with sunny yellow at the upper edge. The figure sits in the green grasses at right appearing to lean against a tree trunk. Her head is lowered to the book in her lap, and she wears a broad brimmed hat with a flat crown. She wears a long-sleeved red top and blue skirt. Behind her in the middle ground fat tufts of green grasses and foliage cover an area with brown soil. More densely crowded foliage continues at left and right middle ground. In the distance, is a glimpse of white buildings with reddish-brown roofs. A pale blue hill sits directly behind the farm buildings in the distance. Bits of ice blue sky peek through the lush foliage which casts shadows on the figure and foreground.]
Gustave Caillebotte
French, 1848–1894
Apple Tree in Bloom, 1885
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of William K. Jacobs, Jr., 1992.107.2
With his signature use of zooming perspective in this painting, Gustave Caillebotte lured the viewer into his suburban retreat outside of Paris. His careful depiction of the garden’s strict plan complements the more informal treatment of the apple blossoms, rendered with thick touches of paint. Strokes of bright orange hint at the roofs of the estate’s various buildings, here fragmented by the screen of the flowering tree branches.
[Artwork Description: This painting is almost square measuring two feet wide and just over two feet tall. A garden is portrayed focusing on a large apple tree and straight garden path. The tree takes up over two thirds of the painting’s width beginning at the left edge and runs most of the height, too. It has a slender trunk that branches off into a wide leafy canopy dotted with pink flowers. Patches of orange hint at buildings obscured by the branches and leaves. The tree stands on a squared off section of garden painted in reddish browns in loose brushstrokes. At bottom right, a pale cream path begins narrowing as it recedes into the distance. Textured is added to it in the form of scratchy, dry brushstrokes. A dark green hedge meets the path in the middle ground at right. The sky above the tree and hedge is a combination of pale gray and cream brushwork with the slightest hint of pale blue peeking through.]
Claude Monet
French, 1840–1926
Houses of Parliament, Sunlight Effect, 1903
Oil on canvas
Bequest of Grace Underwood Barton, 68.48.1
At the turn of the twentieth century, Monet made three trips to London, where he was captivated by the visual effects of the city’s thick smog. Stationed on the balcony of Saint Thomas’ Hospital, Monet painted nineteen versions of his view across the river: the Houses of Parliament in changing weather and light conditions. Here, he downplays the building’s architectural detail, choosing instead to focus on rendering the shimmering water and sunlight breaking through the haze in loose, overlapping strokes of color.
[Artwork Description: The impressionistic painting is thirty-two inches high by thirty six inches wide and depicts the Houses of Parliament in London. The buildings are shown in a hazy silhouette with a foggy purple and gray sky above and blue gray water below. The Parliament is positioned in the center of the work horizontally. At right the buildings run off the canvas while at left the shoreline fades into the background. Spikey spires jut upward from the mostly mow lying buildings. The tower that is Big Ben is the tallest standing just left of center topped with three spires of its own. Parliament is rendered in muted dark tones with visible brush strokes. The sky is a mixture of mauve and grays with the exception of the sun breaking through the haze at the very top right. Golden strokes of paint are strongest at the corner and radiate downward. Sunlight reflects on the river water directly below and is depicted in daubs of sharp yellow and orange. The sunshine colors contrast dramatically with the rest of the muted color scheme.]
Alfred Sisley
British, active France, 1839–1899
Flood at Moret, 1879
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of A. Augustus Healy, 21.54
During the 1870s, the Seine and its tributaries flooded several times. Here, Alfred Sisley depicted the inundated banks of the Loing River on a crisp late autumn day. His landscape possesses the typical sketchy quality of Impressionism, indicating that the picture was painted on the spot, quickly, so as to capture a moment in time. The artist left portions of the primed canvas surface visible in the upper sky to indicate white wisps of clouds.
[Artwork Description: This landscape scene is a little over two feet wide and just over a foot and a half high. It features a stand of tall, bare trees standing in water with a village in the background against a sky that seems alive with moving clouds. The group of trees is positioned in the center of the work and reach from the bottom edge and stretch upward where they run off the canvas. Their slender trunks are pale brown, some standing straight and some arching gracefully. Their numerous branches are bare and they fill a good portion of the work from upper left to just past halfway at right. At the far bottom right, a broad path or road angles from the corner and leads to a group of white houses and buildings with red roofs.They were created with thick strokes of paint giving the canvas a visible texture. They sit jumbled together at the edge of the blue water, partially behind the foreground trees. Indications of more distance houses appear low on the horizon. A lone scraggly, dark brown tree stands at the far right edge near the road. On the opposite side of the work at left, is a distant stand of trees surrounded by water. They appear feather-like sprouting from the dabbed and daubed blue water. The upper portion of the work is devoted to the sky that is given a sense of movement by the application of blue paint on the white canvas. The paint appears to have been applied freely with brushstrokes that barely cover the bare canvas. The artist’s signature is at lower right.]
Paul Cézanne
French, 1839–1906
The Village of Gardanne, 1885–86
Oil and conté crayon on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Ella C. Woodward Memorial Fund and the A. T. White Memorial Fund, 23.105
In this work Paul Cézanne rendered the church tower and stucco houses of a Provençal village in a series of interlocking squares and rectangles. These flat geometric forms, painted in warm ochers and reds, counter the more haphazard organic shapes of the trees on the hillside, with their cool, contrasting greens and blues. Sketchy traces of a graphite underdrawing are visible in the areas of canvas left bare, especially at bottom right and at the tip of the bell tower, providing insight into the artist’s working process.
[Artwork Description: This work is three feet high and just over two feet wide. It depicts a church and its bell tower perched high on a hill above a collection of rooftops and leafy trees. The church and tower are positioned at the top center. The tan church appears to be several stories high and has rusty-red roofs. A bell tower stands at its right end with its upper most pointed tip outlined but not painted. To the left of the church, a green and mustard hill rises and is dotted with buildings. To the church’s right, distant hills are pale lavender. Below the church and tower are crowded rooftops. They seem stacked like blocks or bricks, overlapping and tumbling down the sheer hillside. They echo the tan and rust color scheme of the church. The lower half of the painting holds a band of conical shaped green trees. Some appear to be fully painted and some sketched in. Moving down to the bottom of the painting, we find dense, deep green shrubs near another building and a leafy tree at left but the bottom right corner is mostly unpainted and contains only the sketched outlines of trees. The painting has the quality of being unfinished or in progress.]
Portraits and Figures
With the spread of affordable ready-to-wear clothing in the mid-nineteenth century, portraits of modishly dressed urbanites, rendered in bold colors and textured surfaces, became a staple of avant-garde painting. Numerous painters represented here captured the glamor of Belle Époque high society through fluid brushwork that accentuated their sitters’ glimmering fabrics and jeweled accessories. Others found inspiration in the more eccentric personalities of their times.
Certain artists focused on the costumes and habits of particular religious or folk cultures. These figural works attempted to preserve and ennoble local traditions against the onslaught of the modern world.
Jules Breton
French, 1827–1906
The End of the Working Day, 1886–87
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. Edward S. Harkness, 35.867
Jules Breton here depicted three young women crossing a potato field near Courrières on their way home, under a rosy twilight sky. This idealized and heroic portrayal of field workers reflects the impact of the democratic Revolution of 1848 on artists later in the century. In his autobiography Breton recalled that after the Revolution artists showed “a deeper interest in the life of the street and the field. The tastes and the feelings of the poor were taken into account, and art conferred honors upon them, formerly reserved for the gods and for the great.”
[Artwork Description: This work measures just under three feet high and about four feet wide and depicts farm workers making their way through a field at the end of the day. Three women are featured in the foreground, two just right of center and one at left. They wear long skirts with aprons, white blouses with vests and kerchiefs on their heads. The woman in the center of the trio carries two shovels and a large water jug. The other women each carry large sacks on bent heads holding them in place with their hands. They are walking in a field towards the right amid hip high thistle plants topped with white puffs. The field sprawls out behind them. The horizon line where the sky meets the land is about two thirds from the bottom of the canvas. The sun is low in the sky casting a pink glow among the fluffy clouds. Rays of sunshine radiated down onto the field. At far left in the background, two figures continue to work. At extreme right in the background a house or farm buildings can just be made out.]
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
French, 1796–1875
Young Women of Sparta, 1868–70
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. Horace O. Havemeyer, 42.195
In this idyllic landscape, a woman in theatrical Roma costume reclines on a jaguar skin with a mandolin on her lap. Her languid pose contrasts with the twirling triad of maidens in the background engaged in a dance or, perhaps, a physical contest, since Spartan women were renowned for their athleticism.
For this voluptuous odalisque, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot chose a favorite model, Emma Dobigny, whose pale skin reflects the tonalities of the landscape. He wrote of his struggle to capture “these tissues of flesh that let one sense the blood beneath while they reflect the light of the sky.”
[Artwork Description: This work is a little under a foot and a half high and about two and a half feet wide. It depicts a female figure lounging in the foreground while three others engage in the background at left. The main figure lies leaning on her left elbow propped up on a rich red cushion. She looks towards the left with her chin slightly tucked in. Her gaze appears dreamy and unfocused. Her legs are stretched out on a leopard skin towards the left. She holds a mandolin across her lap. She has light skin and dark hair tucked in a kerchief. Her pale creamy dress is edged in red on the sleeves and bust. Her skirt appears to be hiked up to her knees, exposing her bare legs and feet. At left, two of the figures clasp hands with one set held high over their heads. They appear to be in action, their long skirts billowing. The third figure looks on close by with her hand on her hip. They stand in front of a narrow stream that bisects the painting horizontally from left to right. The sky is pale blue with wispy clouds behind the trio and a distant, foliage covered shore is visible. At right, behind the reclining woman, tall trees full of dark green foliage fill the shoreline. Wildflowers sprout near her bare feet and the red cushion.]
Henri Fantin-Latour
French, 1836–1904
Madame Léon Maître, 1882
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of A. Augustus Healy and George A. Hearn, 06.69
Henri Fantin-Latour imbued his subject—the sister-in-law of his friend the composer Edmond Maître—with an air of melancholy. Madame Maître’s downward glance avoids direct engagement. Her elegant evening dress emphasizes her corseted waistline and low neckline. In this large-scale portrait painted in the studio, the raking light from above makes the sitter’s ivory skin glow. Fantin-Latour commented, “The soul is like music playing behind the veil of flesh.”
[Artwork Description: This portrait measures just over four feet wide and approximately fifty-five inches high. It depicts a light skinned woman seated in a crimson room holding a decorative fan. The woman wears a black dress that is drawn in tightly at the waist and features lacy ruffles along a low neckline accented by yellow and pink roses at the center. Her voluminous skirts billow out beside her on the red upholstered bench she sits on. Her hands rest in her lap holding a turquoise blue fan that is partially open to show its pattern. Her hair is dressed tightly to her head, parted in the middle with curls at the forehead. Her gaze is slightly downcast. Overhead lighting causes her eyes to recede in shadow while her nose and high cheekbones are highlighted. She wears gold bracelets on her arm and a gold locket on a black band around her neck. The walls behind her are almost the same deep crimson as the bench and hold no decoration. A plump maroon cushion sits at her right. On the couch at the left is a light tan throw, possibly made of fur.]
William Bouguereau
French, 1825–1905
The Elder Sister, reduction, circa 1864
Oil on panel
Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of William H. Herriman, 21.99
William Bouguereau here portrayed a dreamy young woman, dressed in garments that seem at once rustic and classical, holding her little brother. Although the title defines the figures as siblings, the pair’s tender, entwined pose, the woman’s serene expression, and the rosary beads the child holds clearly recall images of the Madonna and Child. Bouguereau’s works appealed to a bourgeois clientele—both French and American—that cherished Christian and domestic values, especially when presented with such untroubled sweetness and delicacy.
[Artwork Description: This portrait of a sister and brother measures approximately twenty-two inches by eighteen inches. It depicts an older girl, probably in her early teens, holding her toddler brother. She holds him as one holds a smaller infant: the child is nestled in her arms; her hands clasped in front. The boy presses his forehead to his sister’s neck while he wraps one arm around her shoulders. The other arm hangs loosely at his side holding a string of rosary beads. The beads are bright orange while the string is red. The little boy is nude, has blonde wispy, wavy curls, pale skin with rosy cheeks and blue eyes that look at the viewer. His chubby legs are crossed at the ankle. The girl gazes directly out at the viewer. Her dark hair is parted in the center and swept back. She has large brown eyes, a long straight nose and full pink lips. She wears a white blouse gathered at the neckline with billowy sleeves. Her full skirt is reddish- brown and overlaid with lengths of blue and red fabric that are looped and tucked into her waistband creating dramatic classical folds. Behind the pair stands a low dark brown console or table on which stands a ceramic jug. The wall behind them is mostly in darkness with a hint of stonework discernable at left. The pair have a serene quality as they stare out. An unseen light source from above left illuminates the pair, casting a slight shadow to the right]
Berthe Morisot
French, 1841–1895
Madame Boursier and Her Daughter, circa 1873
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Museum Collection Fund, 29.30
Much of Berthe Morisot’s work focused on modern life as it was experienced in spaces associated with women: the home, a garden, or a park or other area of polite bourgeois leisure. The subjects in this painting are the artist’s cousins, posed as though paying a social call in a nicely appointed room with striped wallpaper, an upright piano, and a vase of flowers. Quick, unblended strokes summarily define the forms, patterns, and textures of the pair’s fashionable clothing and elegant furnishings while simultaneously foregrounding the materiality of paint itself.
[Artwork Description: This double portrait measures approximately thirty inches high by twenty-two inches wide. It depicts a mother and daughter seated in a well-furnished room. The mother and daughter’s figures practically fill the picture plane. The mother sits on the left, and her daughter sits on her lap. Both gaze directly at the viewer. The woman has pale peachy skin, blues and full pink lips. She wears a black hat trimmed with grayish white feathers or fur. Her brown hair is swept back with a loose tendril trailing at her neck, She wears a dark dress with a deep V-neck trimmed in filmy white lace accented by pink flowers at the bust. The little girl has light brown hair, pale skin with rosy cheeks. She wears a double breasted light blue jacket over a white collared shirt. She has red bows in her hair. The daughter’s hands rest on her mothers in their laps. The mother sits in a floral upholstered chair. An upright piano is positioned in the background at right. White sheet music, a white and blue vase and a mirror decorate the piano. The walls of the room appear silvery gray with gold stripes. The painting’s brushstrokes are loose and unblended.]
Augustus John
British, 1879–1961
Woman by a Riverbank, circa 1910–12
Oil on panel
Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Helen Babbott Sanders. 78.151.7
Augustus John painted his mistress Dorothy McNeill, known as “Dorelia,” with a small, doll-like head and diminutive features. Using heavy touches of unmixed pigments, he depicted Dorelia in a brightly colored costume consisting of a blue jacket, yellow head scarf and stockings, and a long, contour-hugging, striped dress. Both the artist and his model were known for their bohemian dress and lifestyle, often traveling in a caravan in emulation of the Roma people and culture they admired.
[Artwork Description: This small painting measures eighteen by twelve and a half inches. It is a full-length portrait of a woman walking near a body of water with a rocky shoreline and foliage in the background. The woman stands in the center of the work, turned slightly towards the right. She wears a royal blue jacket over a cream and tan dress with its neckline edged in bright red. The dress hugs the woman’s body ending at her ankles where a bit of bright yellow stocking is visible. She wears flat black pointy shoes, a yellow head scarf over dark hair gathered into a low bun and carries a red shawl over her left arm. She clasps her hands together at the waist. Her head appears to be slightly too small for her body. Her eyes, nose and mouth are depicted simply: dashes for eyes, a narrow nose and a bit of pink for the mouth. Brushstrokes are broad and unblended. Layers of built-up color are visible. Green foliage on the far shore is created with dabs of paint as is the deep blue stream. Brushstrokes in blues and teals with white where the water laps at the shore appears to give the stream movement. The colors are bright and clear but flat with little shading.]
Lajos Tihanyi
Hungarian, 1885–1938
The Critic, 1916
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Right Reverend John Török, D.D., 29.1302
A self-taught artist who would settle in Paris in the mid-1920s, Lajos Tihanyi combined the fragmentation of Analytical Cubism and the psychological intensity of Expressionism in his portraits. This figure has been identified as a particular individual—Andor Halasi, a Hungarian literary critic whom Tihanyi knew well. Tihanyi emphasized the sitter’s pronounced bone structure with a subtle play of light and shadow indicating sharp protrusions and deep hollows. The angular wings of the starched collar and the knot of the tie further echo the sitter’s pointed features.
[Artwork Description: This portrait of a man measures approximately twenty inches by seventeen inches. The man faces left in a three quarter view. He has a high, broad forehead, a prominent nose and small mouth. His eyes are slightly hooded. His face narrows as it reaches his chin and pursed lips. His skin is peach with touches of yellow and even green in the hollow of his cheeks and temples. His hair is dark, perhaps black, and is cut short around his ears. The angles of his facial features echo that of his partially receding hairline. He wears a white wing collared shirt with a deep red tie under a dark jacket or coat. He is set against a background of burgundy brushstrokes. Brushstrokes are clearly visible in this portrait. It is not painted in a purely realistic style, but it seems to convey the personality of the sitter.]
Auguste Rodin
French, 1840–1917
Balzac in a Monk’s Habit, circa 1893; cast 1971
Bronze
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation, 84.75.22
In 1891 the Parisian Society of Men of Letters commissioned Auguste Rodin to create a monument to the writer Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850). Rodin first explored representing the author in the suit he wore in daily public life but ultimately depicted him in the Dominican robe he wore when he worked at home at night, including a stack of books or manuscripts beside him.
Rodin believed that France produced uniquely regional physical types and traveled to Balzac’s native city of Tours to find a model, choosing a local driver named Estager.
[Artwork Description: This sculpture of a male figure measures approximately forty two inches high by twenty inches wide by sixteen inches deep. It depicts a man dressed in an oversized monk’s robe standing next to a tall stack of books. The robe gapes at the neck exposing the man’s shirt beneath and the hood in back appears bunched up around his neck. His left hand is on his waist and his right hand rests on possibly the top of a walking stick. The long robe pools on the square pediment hiding the figure’s feet. A doubled length of cord encircles his waist loosely. The man looks to his right with his chin raised. His shaggy hair almost reaches his shoulders, and he sports a mustache. The surface of the bronze sculpture is, at places, smooth and shiny, revealing the folds of fabric. In other areas the bronze has been texturized with marks evoking the roughness of the robe.]
Jean-François Millet
French, 1814–1875
Shepherd Tending His Flock, early 1860s
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of William H. Herriman, 21.31
The son of Norman farmers, François Millet dedicated his career to the depiction of the peasants of Barbizon, the farming community outside Paris where he lived. Here, Millet endowed the shepherd, described as a massive pyramidal shape looming above the horizon, with dignity and an imposing monumentality. With his dark head haloed against a bright break in the clouds, he stands tall among his flock like a Christ figure. While Millet did not support overtly religious interpretations of his work, his images do reflect a common contemporaneous belief in the inherent spirituality of poor peasants.
[Artwork Description: This work measures approximately thirty-three inches by forty inches and depicts a male figure at the center, surrounded by his flock of sheep. The figure is almost as tall as the painting and he stands leaning on a staff, looking right. This staff, along with his voluminous gray-brown mottled cape create a pyramid shape that dominates the scene. He leans slightly forward on the staff, his legs positioned one behind the other in a shallow lunge. His blue coat peeks out from under the cape. He wears a hat with a round crown and wide brim. His facial features are not well defined, but his skin appears to be a weather-beaten reddish brown. The sun is peeking out from a partly cloudy sky creating a halo effect around his hat. The figure stands on a short, scrubby brush, golden in color where the sun hits it. Sheep graze behind him, huddled in a large group that stretches from the left to the right of the shepherd. In the distance, the horizon is flat with just a few examples of tall vegetation at left. The sky glows with pale yellow sunshine through blue and gray clouds.]
Alexander Archipenko
American, born Ukraine, 1887–1964
The Ray, 1920s
Bronze with green patina
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of The Beatrice and Samuel A. Seaver Foundation, 2004.37.1a–b
Alexander Archipenko’s enigmatic sculpture evokes a vase, a ray of light, and a standing nude woman. The artist articulated the female body using simple forms: a horseshoe for a face, a triangle for a right arm, a semicircle for a left breast, and a vertical cleft to delineate legs. He ultimately transformed a living model into an inanimate object, creating two versions as Vase Woman and one as The Ray.
[Artwork Description: This slender sculpture stands seventy-four inches high and has a rich green patina on bronze. The work begins at top as a small horseshoe shape that tilts forward like a nodding head. The elongated “neck” blends into the torso area of the figure, widening slightly. A semi-circle juts out and acts as a breast on the left. A shallow triangle on the left forms an arm. The figure continues to widen to the hip area. A slanted cut out denotes where the torso ends, and the legs begin. A vertical cleft delineates the rounded legs which narrow to the base fitting neatly in a base that is like a cube with a sphere removed from it. It stands on a cream marble pediment.]
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
French, 1796–1875
The Young Woman of Albano, 1872
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. Horace O. Havemeyer, 42.196
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s solitary female figure wears the traditional garb of the Italian town of Albano, located just south of Rome, where the artist had traveled and worked earlier in the century. Corot reveled in the richly textured garments of his sitter, a fifteen-year-old girl named Mademoiselle Darmelas, employing glittering touches of paint to articulate the details of her head scarf, vest, and necklace. Darmelas’s pensive gaze and the smoky tones of the background together lend the picture a melancholy air.
[Artwork Description: This portrait of a young woman measures approximately thirty inches by twenty-six inches. The white woman has pale skin and wears a colorful head scarf over her dark hair. Her gaze is cast downward, her expression is neutral. Her eyes are deep set and appear in shadow. She has a small mouth with pink lips and high cheekbones. She wears dangling earrings. Her lacy blouse is long sleeved and has a scoop neck. It is paired with an embroidered red vest and a long heavy gold necklace. Touches of gold accent her costume, especially the intricate necklace. She holds her left hand up to her bodice, possibly touching the lace. The background is a textured smoky gray with a horizon line that hints at a distance setting or rising sun.]
Marc Chagall
French, born Russia, 1887–1985
The Musician, circa 1912–14
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of William K. Jacobs, Jr., 1992.107.3
The Musician recalls Marc Chagall’s memories of growing up in a Russian Jewish household in the town of Vitebsk, in present-day Belarus, where he would listen to his uncle “Neuch” play the fiddle. Chagall painted the work during his first Parisian period (1910–14), when he absorbed the influences of Fauvism and Cubism, evident in the painting’s bright, nonrepresentational colors and spatial ambiguities.
[Artwork Description: This small portrait of a violin player measures just over nine inches by five inches. It portrays a man with darkened eyes, and a beard holding a violin close to his body. The man fills the picture plane with the top of his head leaning towards the left of the frame. His body is cropped at knee level. Broad, deliberately unpolished brushstrokes are used along with vivid colors creating a figure with an orange face, a red beard, greenish yellow hands that clasp his white and rust-brown violin. Brushstrokes are clearly visible. Dashes, dabs and zig zags are layered on the figure and his surroundings creating a sense that the figure is in motion.]
Henri Matisse
French, 1869–1954
Woman in an Armchair, circa 1916–17
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Laura L. Barnes, 67.24.15
In 1916 and 1917, Henri Matisse made some fifty paintings of an Italian model named Laurette, whom he consistently posed seated in an antique armchair with pink upholstery, and clad in a green gandoura, a Moroccan robe typically worn by men. Woman in an Armchair is a study in sinuous curves—from the long, dark hair to the black contours describing the fall of the robe to the wood frame of the chair. There is a wistful, melancholy quality in Laurette’s expression that hints at the intimacy that may have fueled the relationship between artist and model.
[Artwork Description: This portrait of a young woman is approximately nine inches by six inches. It depicts a white woman with beige skin and long dark hair that falls over her shoulders. She is seated on a chair with a pink upholstered back edged with a dark wood frame along the top. The woman leans towards the left and appears to have her knees drawn up under her voluminous green robe. She rests her arm on her knees. She appears to look out at the viewer with a pensive expression. The curve of the chair, the woman’s flowing hair and the swirls of the folds of her robe each seem to echo one another and lend the portrait a sense of softness.]
Jehan-Georges Vibert
French, 1840–1902
An Embarrassment of Choices (A Difficult Choice), before 1873
Oil on panel
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. Carll H. de Silver in memory of her husband, 13.39
Jehan-Georges Vibert, a successful painter and sometime writer of comedic plays, won popular acclaim in the 1870s and 1880s with paintings poking fun at clergymen’s excesses. The scarlet-robed cardinal in this image sniffs daintily at a bouquet of flowers, his face reflected in the mirror behind him. The ghostly outline in the mirror of another head turned away from us—which has only become visible over time—suggests that Vibert altered the original composition as he worked.
[Artwork Description: This painting of a cardinal measures just over eighteen inches by fourteen inches. The cardinal is depicted pausing to sniff a bouquet of flowers. He is pictured in profile facing to the left. He wears a pale red cloak over his rich red vestments that reach to the floor. He holds a broad brimmed hat with multiple tassels behind his back. He has a staff in his right hand and leans forward on it slightly. He wears a red skullcap over his shaggy, collar length red hair. His skin is pale and his nose is slightly oversized. The flowers are arranged in a deep blue urn decorated with gold trim that stands almost as tall as the cardinal. This elevates the flowers to the perfect height for sniffing. The cardinal is in a room with ornately carved, gold gilt walls. A large mirror is behind him and shows his head in reflection. At the far right, is a low stool, upholstered in red velvet with gold gilt legs that form an X shape. The floor has an intricate parquet design of diamond shapes.]
Pierre-Édouard Frère
French, 1819–1886
The Little Cook, 1858
Oil on panel
Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Robert B. Woodward, 15.328
Pierre-Édouard Frère adopted a low vantage point in this painting, encouraging viewers to share the young girl’s space as she sits beside the stove, waiting to stir the pot with a ladle more than half her size. Root vegetables and a large head of leafy green cabbage are scattered on the floor, and popular inexpensive prints are pinned to the wall. Common in nineteenth-century working-class households, the prints also allude to a more complicated world beyond the confines of the child’s humble kitchen, underscoring, by contrast, the innocent quality that was Frère’s stock-in-trade.
[Artwork Description: This painting of a white small girl in a rustic kitchen measures just over twelve inches by nine inches. The girl sits on a low stool with her elbows resting on her knees. She holds an oversized spoon in her right hand, the bowl of which is comparable in size to the child’s face. She is shown in profile sitting before a black, cylindrical wood stove. Her brown hair is tucked into a black cap that ties under her chin. The sleeves of her dark red and blue dress are rolled up past her elbows and a large white cloth is tied around her waist like an apron. By her expression, she appears that she could be daydreaming. Scattered at her feet are a large leafy cabbage, carrots and other root vegetables. The stove has a tall pipe that continues upward out of frame. A shallow black, cook pot sits on the stove. Behind the girl is a simple wooden table that bears tableware for three; bowls, drinking glasses, a jug, a terrine and a loaf of bread. The wall behind the table has square pictures pinned to it. None of the images are discernable, however. The kitchen space is rendered in warm, earthy brown tones.]
Édouard Vuillard
French, 1868–1940
Thadée Natanson, 1897
Oil on cardboard mounted on panel
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of William Kelly Simpson in honor of Nathan Todd Porter, Jr., 2005.23
Édouard Vuillard portrayed his patron, the influential editor and publisher Thadée Natanson, engaged in a favorite activity, reading. His downcast eyes and inclined head indicate a quiet, absorbed moment.
Vuillard was a leading member of the Nabis (Hebrew for “prophet”), an artistic brotherhood founded in 1891. The artist’s emphasis on his sitter’s meditative gaze and red-and-white patterned shirt illustrates the Nabis’ attention to spiritual feeling and surface decoration.
[Artwork Description: This portrait of a man reading measures just over twenty inches by fifteen inches. The head, and upper torso of the man occupies much of the painting. He is positioned a bit to the left of center. His head is inclined, and his eyes are downcast. He has wavy dark hair, sideburns and a beard. His mustache is thinner and wispier compared to his full beard. He wears a red and white patterned shirt under a dark jacket. His tie is wide and also dark. The room around him is rendered in the same dark browns and tans and features only a framed picture at top left and the suggestion of a window or door at right. The subject’s coloring seems to meld with those of his surroundings.]
Giovanni Boldini
Italian, 1842–1931
Portrait of a Lady, 1912
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Anonymous gift, 41.876
In this painting, the sought-after society portraitist Giovanni Boldini imbued the New York philanthropist Florence Blumenthal (born Florence Meyer) with a casual, sensual elegance. The artist’s careful drawing of her face contrasts with the deftly abbreviated touches of black, gray, and white that render her fashionable dress and the silver jacket she has just removed. The liveliness of the brushwork and the complementary curves of the chaise lounge and sitter make for a striking composition.
Kees van Dongen
French, born Netherlands, 1877–1968
W. S. Davenport, circa 1925
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. William Slocum Davenport, 32.117
Kees van Dongen made a splash in the 1920s chronicling Parisian high society. His winning strategy involved placing his sitters against a neutral backdrop and punctuating the composition with brilliant, even supernatural color. In this portrait of an American dentist residing in Paris, van Dongen added blue-green highlights to the face. A bright red brushstroke at the lapel signals Dr. Davenport’s recent knighthood in the Legion of Honor for facial reconstructive surgery during World War I.
Edgar Degas
French, 1834–1917
Portrait of a Man, circa 1866
Oil on canvas
Museum Collection Fund, 21.112
In this enigmatic painting, a man in modern bourgeois attire sits in a chair among cuts of meat. A platter bearing sausage and a bloody, freshly carved pig’s trotter rests on the cloth-covered table, and what appears to be a rib roast sits on another platter (or is it an artist’s palette?) on the floor. Behind him, a hanging cloth partially covers the indecipherable images (perhaps meat?) on the wall.
It has been suggested that the scene may depict a butcher’s shop, a restaurant, or, more likely, an artist in his studio—a theme that Edgar Degas explored in numerous works. A disquieting combination of portraiture and still life, the painting thwarts easy explanation.
Jules Breton
French, 1827–1906
Breton Peasant Woman Holding a Taper, circa 1869
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of William H. Herriman, 21.102
In this intimate image of an elderly woman holding a rosary and a taper, Jules Breton conveyed the religious devotion associated with Brittany and its people. The picture is one of his many paintings and studies of pardons, Brittany’s annual penitential rites in which peasants in traditional costumes assemble at the local church and then take part in a procession. Breton’s woman bows her head in prayer, her black-and-white costume sharply silhouetted against a monochromatic background. She is an evocative portrayal of religious devotion and tradition, unshaken and unchanged in the face of modernity.
Jean-Léon Gérôme
French, 1824-1904
The Carpet Merchant of Cairo, 1869
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Joseph Gluck, 74.208
Jean-Léon Gérôme painted this scene of a merchant hawking his wares on the streets of Cairo following a three-month-long trip to Egypt and North Africa in early 1868. The vendor calls out to passersby as he holds up the ornate carpet for their inspection—and ours. In a bravura performance of his celebrated meticulous brushwork, Gérôme lavished attention on the carpet’s rich colors, complex patterns, and plush folds.
Henri Matisse
French, 1869–1954
Flowers, 1906
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Marion Gans Pomeroy, 61.243
With the irregularly applied patches of vivid color characteristic of the Fauves, or Wild Beasts, this composition suggests a tabletop and a wall (or perhaps a windowsill and frame) with a field of flat, thinly brushed areas, along with visible sections of unpainted canvas. In the center is a vase filled with wildflowers, articulated by short strokes and smudges of pigment. Some of the flowers float apart, enmeshed in the surrounding color fields. Empty space and solid objects are rendered alike, dematerialized in various painterly marks of unmodulated color.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
French, 1841–1919
Still Life with Blue Cup, circa 1900
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Laura L. Barnes, 67.24.19
Auguste Renoir’s modest still life depicts a blue china cup and saucer, two peaches, and several green figs arranged horizontally on a tablecloth. A slender strip of ocher floral wallpaper can be seen behind the table, and the creases and folds of the tablecloth are modeled with tones of gray and violet. Renoir often painted such still-life compositions in order to explore various color combinations—here, the contrasting cool blues of the china cup and warm, fiery oranges and yellows of the peaches.
Antoine Vollon
French, 1833-1900
Fish, 1871–75
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of William A. Putnam and Walter H. Crittenden, 19.86
Using a loose, animated painting style, Antoine Vollon depicted a mound of freshly caught fish beside a bed of reeds and a wicker basket. His use of heavy impasto brushwork is most noticeable in the bright red scales around the eye of the fish at the far right. The artist’s quick and intuitive approach to painting is also evident in his signature, which he roughly scratched into the still-wet pigment at the bottom right.
Georges Lemmen
Belgian, 1865–1916
Still Life with Fan, circa 1907–8
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Purchased with funds given by William K. Jacobs, Jr., 83.70.1
Georges Lemmen painted this still life of a bouquet of wildflowers in a blue-and-white vase set in front of an open fan during his “intimiste” period, when he concentrated on subjects drawn from his domestic milieu. The profusion of real and decorative blossoms—seen in the glass bowl next to the vase, along the tabletop, and in the patterns of both the tablecloth and the wallpaper—also reveals the artist’s interest in decorative arts, a realm in which he worked intensively during the 1890s.
Chaim Soutine
Russian, active in France, 1893–1943
Still Life, Gladiolas, circa 1919
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Laura L. Barnes, 67.24.24
In Still Life, Gladiolas, Chaim Soutine brought together the expressive brushstrokes of the European Old Masters with the brilliant color and flattened compositions of his contemporaries in France, including Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse.
Soutine’s passion for painting led him from a Lithuanian Jewish ghetto in modern Belarus to the art academies of Minsk and, ultimately, Paris. In the French capital, he turned his back on the prevailing avant-garde style of Cubism and embraced the expressive manner of Rembrandt van Rijn and Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, whose works were then on view in the Louvre.
Pierre Bonnard
French, 1867–1947
The Breakfast Room, circa 1925
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Frank L. Babbott Fund, Carll H. de Silver Fund, and A. Augustus Healy Fund, 43.202
A keen observer of the mundane routines of domestic life, Pierre Bonnard simultaneously conveyed both intimacy and distance in the shared space of this cheerful breakfast room. While the vantage point implies a place for the viewer across from the seated woman, the austere jutting wedge of the white tablecloth and the placement of the basket of fruit set her apart. Moreover, with her head and shoulders bowed over her cup, the woman stirs her drink with meditative self-absorption. Bonnard further underscores the detachment of the figures with the turned back of the retreating child.
Robert Delaunay
French, 1885–1941
In the Garden, 1904
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Iris and Gerald B. Cantor, 86.28
Robert Delaunay here transformed an outdoor breakfast in the garden of his family home into an intimate still life bathed in morning light. A freshly laid table awaits a lady opening her parasol near the house. The garden, with its profusion of flowers and fruit trees, and the steep-roofed house are typical of the Berry region. Delaunay painted this work at age nineteen, when he was influenced by the landscapes of Claude Monet, whose paintings had been exhibited in Paris the year before.
Georges Rouault
French, 1871–1958
Still Life with Clown, 1932
Oil on paper laid down on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of William K. Jacobs, Jr., 1992.107.34
The painter and printmaker Georges Rouault’s training in a stained-glass workshop had a powerful impact on his vibrant painting style of the 1930s. Here, for example, his use of bold, flat patches of color separated by outlines of black paint smacks of stained glass and creates a decorative border around the main subject, a masked clown seated next to a vase of flowers. Rouault identified deeply with the clown, regarding the tragicomic character’s ability to overcome suffering with laughter as an allegory of the human condition: “I saw quite clearly that the clown was me, was us, nearly all of us.”
Fernand Léger
French, 1881–1955
Composition in Red and Blue, 1930
Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of The Beatrice and Samuel A. Seaver Foundation, 2004.37.2
Fernand Léger’s experimental still life juxtaposes nonrepresentational and representational objects against a blue-gray field. Architectural elements, including the staircase and fragment of wall molding at the left, rest alongside abstract shapes, such as the peach rectangle and form evoking a lollipop or pinwheel, that float on a large red ground in the center. Léger was inspired by the burgeoning medium of cinema during the late 1920s and early 1930s, and began using techniques such as fragmentation, magnification, and montage in his paintings.
Jean Hélion
French, 1904–1987
Composition, 1939
Oil on Masonite
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Lucile E. Selz, 1991.283.2
Many of Jean Hélion’s New York abstract paintings from the second half of the 1930s evoke the human figure. Composition may depict a man standing with his legs apart. The blue arch may represent legs, and the yellow polyhedron a head.
Hélion returned to Europe in 1940 to support the war effort in France and was interned in a Nazi POW camp. By 1942 he had escaped and returned to the United States, where he remained for four years before resettling in France.
Edgar Degas
French, 1834–1917
Dancer at Rest, Hands Behind Her Back, Right Leg Forward, modeled 1882–95, cast 1919–32
Bronze
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Richard Rodgers, 70.176.5
In this sculpture, Edgar Degas depicted a young dancer of the Paris Opéra Ballet with one foot placed far in front of the other, in ballet’s fourth position. Her hands are held behind her body, and her chin thrusts upward in a pose that seems both relaxed and haughty. Many of Degas’s paintings and pastels focus on the female body, and the three-dimensionality of sculpture offered the artist a means of exploring its forms and musculature, as well as its placement and movement in space. During his lifetime, Degas hardly ever exhibited his sculptures, which he viewed as studies rather than finished works.