Gwen John Interior, 1915

The Cleveland Museum of Art This picture is one of a set of four. In subject matter, style, and dimensions, these pictures are more nearly alike than those in any other set of paintings by Gwen John. The version now at Cleveland was dispatched by Gwen John to John Quinn on 12 February 1916, though from their correspondence it seems possible that it was already finished in July of the previous year. "I have several things ready to send," she wrote, "but I was advised a few weeks ago by the packer to wait a little till the danger at sea is over" (26 July 1915). These pictures may have been painted at 6 rue de l'Ouest, which had a very similar fireplace and mantelpiece (though the wallpaper seems different from other rue de l'Ouest pictures). Follow the link to read the full story. http://impressionistsgallery.co.uk/artists/Artists/jkl/JohnGwen/pictures/Interior,%201915.html

Mary Cassatt At the Theater, c. 1879

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art This pastel represents the culmination of a series of pictures centered on the atmosphere of the theatre or opera box, which Cassatt explored when her involvement with the Impressionist group was at its most enthusiastic. The theme satisfied various Impressionist interests, most particularly in the effects of light (here artificial) and in the common pursuits of the modern city. This picture was also a relatively early exploration of the expressive qualities of pastel, demonstrating Degas's influence most clearly in the varied use of the medium, smoothed down to suggest the sheen of the model's bared shoulder but applied in slashing diagonals in the background and at the left of the skirt to add energy to an already assertive pose. Follow the link to read the full story. http://impressionistsgallery.co.uk/artists/Artists/abc/cassatt/pictures/At%20the%20Theater,%20c.%201879.html

Claude Monet Les villas à Bordighera, 1884

Musée d'Orsay The Italian village of Bordighera, a resort filled with gardens and palm trees, became popular in the 1880s as a destination for upper-class English and German travelers. Situated on the Mediterranean coast of Liguria, about twenty kilometers east of the French town of Menton, it attracted Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir in 1883 in their search for new, paintable landscapes. Monet returned alone the following year and painted more than forty views of the area, the town, and its gardens. His energy was ferocious; at first, he worked on four canvases each day, and between 24 January and 2 February 1884, he completed fourteen. Follow the link to read the full story. http://impressionistsgallery.co.uk/artists/Artists/mno/monet/pictures/Les%20villas%20%C3%A0%20Bordighera,%201884.html

Camille Pissarro The Boïeldieu Bridge in Rouen, 1896 Musée d'Orsay Pissarro stayed at the Hôtel de Paris in Rouen from 20 January to 29 March 1896. From his studio on the third floor, he painted different views of the Pont Boïeldieu over the Seine: at sunset, on an overcast day, and in the fog. The bridge joined the old Gothic city in the north with the new southern industrial areas of Sainte-Sever. On the far bank, we see boats docking and unloading cargo, with the urban landscape in the distance. Pissarro captures the transient effects of the mist and smoke, a sense of fugitive movement in the city's activity. He was attracted to Rouen, describing it as having terrific character and being just as beautiful as Venice. Indeed, this juxtaposition between old and new is part of what makes Pissarro's urban paintings so intriguing. Follow the link to read the full story. http://impressionistsgallery.co.uk/artists/Artists/pqrs/Pissarro/pictures/The%20Bo%C3%AFeldieu%20Bridge%20in%20Rouen,%201896.html

Paul Sérusier Still life: the artist's studio, 1891 Musée d'Orsay
It was perhaps unfair of the critic Albert Aurier to malign Sérusier's early work as "an almost slavish imitation of Gauguin," yet when looking at *Still-life: the Artist's Studio* it seems this claim may be justified. The subject matter is almost identical to that of Gauguin, and the knife to the left of the composition rests in a strikingly similar position to Gauguin's in his *Still-life with Fan* c. 1889.

But Sérusier's painting is not simply a copy. Both Gauguin and Sérusier were heavily influenced by the work of Cézanne, in whose art Sérusier found a tangible expression of his desire to imbue subjects from the everyday with a sense of the spiritual. Of Cézanne's still-lifes with apples he said:

*"He is the pure painter. The purpose, even the concept of the object represented, disappears before the charm of his coloured forms. Of an apple by Cézanne one says: How beautiful! One would not peel it; one would like to copy it. It is in that that the spiritual power of Cézanne consists."* Follow the link to read the full story. http://impressionistsgallery.co.uk/artists/Artists/pqrs/Serusier/pictures/Still%20life-%20the%20artist's%20studio,%201891%20.html

Alfred Sisley Le pont de Moret, 1893 Musée d'Orsay, Paris In Sisley's time, the towns of the Seine-et-Marne region were bustling with local commerce: barges on the canal, a flour and tanning mill at Moret, boatyards around Saint-Mammès, and orchards, gardens, and farms at Les Sablons. Sisley visited the area late in 1879, seeking an inexpensive place to live, and came to know it intimately. Veneux-Nadon, seventy-five kilometers from Paris, was his home from 1880. He then lived at Moret and Les Sablons for six years before returning to Moret in 1889. Although Tobias Smollett described Moret-sur-Loing as a "very paltry" place, nineteenth-century guidebooks praised its "commanding position on the Loing, its ramparts and gateway, its huge ruined donjon, and the beauties of its Gothic church."
Follow the link to read the full story. http://impressionistsgallery.co.uk/artists/Artists/pqrs/Sisley/pictures/Le%20pont%20de%20Moret,%201893.html

Camille Pissarro Boulevard Monmartre in Paris, 1897 Hermitage Museum During the winter and spring of 1897, Pissarro worked on a series of paintings depicting Paris boulevards. These works brought the artist into the public eye, and art critics came to regard him as one of the creators of Divisionism. Pissarro made sketches for the Paris Boulevards series from the window of his Paris hotel room. He completed the paintings at his studio in Éragny in late April. They are the only series by Pissarro in which the artist aimed to precisely reproduce the various effects of changing weather and sunlight. http://impressionistsgallery.co.uk/artists/Artists/pqrs/Pissarro/pictures/Boulevard%20Monmartre%20in%20Paris,%201897.html

Félix Vallotton Woman in a Black Hat, 1908

Hermitage Museum Valatton, in his records, names this painting "Bust depiction of a woman with naked breast, wearing a black shawl, black hat, and pink ribbon." The artist made a careful study of the Old Masters. When required to practice the technique of copying as a student at the Académie Julian, he chose artists of the highest rank—Leonardo da Vinci, Antonello da Messina, and Albrecht Dürer. This painting, with its solemn use of color, is executed with striking precision.

http://impressionistsgallery.co.uk/artists/Artists/tuv/Vallotton/pictures/Woman%20in%20a%20Black%20Hat,%201908.html

Édouard Vuillard In a Room , 1899 Hermitage Museum Probably the artist's love of everything decorative and his use of ornamental patterns in his pictures echo Vuillard's memories of the tailoring workshop set up by his mother after his father's death. Vuillard was close to Bonnard and helped organize the Nabi group in 1889. His small, brightly colored pictures, seemingly composed of several areas of color like mosaics, anticipate the discoveries of Fauvism, which followed the Impressionist perception of the world. Depicting the everyday life of the common man, he created wonderfully decorative compositions. Later, he favored large colored surfaces, producing openly decorative effects that resulted in the creation of vast decorative panels.
http://impressionistsgallery.co.uk/artists/Artists/tuv/Vuillard/pictures/In%20a%20Room%20,%201899.html

Pierre-Auguste Renoir Jeanne Samary, 1877

Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow This picture is a replica of the portrait housed at the Comédie-Française. At first sight, it may look like a sketch for a portrait, but in fact, it is Renoir's most accomplished work. Here are the quintessential features of Impressionism—an emotional state of the model, a fleeting moment halted by the artist's brush and paints. Anything more, and the mystery would be destroyed, and Mademoiselle Samary would turn into an actress playing soubrettes at the Comédie-Française.

http://impressionistsgallery.co.uk/artists/Artists/pqrs/Renoir/pictures/Jeanne%20Samary,%201877.html

Vincent van Gogh, Irises, 1889

J. Paul Getty Museum The episodes of self-mutilation and hospitalization that followed his quarrel with Paul Gauguin finally prompted Van Gogh to have himself admitted in May 1889 to the asylum Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France. Despite occasional, disturbing recurrences, Van Gogh produced almost 130 paintings during his year of recuperation in Saint-Rémy. Although he was not permitted to leave the grounds for the first month, the overgrown and somewhat untended garden of the asylum provided ample material for his paintings, which he worked, as was his practice, directly from life. In the first week, Van Gogh reported to his brother Theo that he had begun work on "some violet irises."

https://impressionistsgallery.co.uk/artists/Artists/ghi/Van%20Gogh/pictures/Irises,%201889.html

Edgar Degas, Madame Camus, 1869-1870, National Gallery of Art, Washington

Dr. Gustave Émile Camus (Dijon 1829 – Paris 1892), a physician and friend of Degas, collected Japanese objects in addition to Saxon porcelains. Degas makes a discreet and indirect allusion to his collections in the portraits of his wife, born Blanche Dumoustier de Frédilly. Goncourt describes her as a very beautiful woman who, "in her slenderness and aristocratic pallor, seems like a divinity from the world of her shelves." In this monochrome harmony, Madame Camus stands out like a shadow puppet, her fan accentuating the Far Eastern aspect of the scene. Probably depicted in her salon at 34 rue Godot-de-Mauroy, she is placed in a typically Second Empire setting, datable thanks to a torchère that could be attributed to Cordier. The rococo molding of the mirror emphasizes the very linear and sinuous style of this strange portrait. An excellent musician, she attended Manet's gatherings. Degas also painted her Portrait at the Piano (Zurich, Buhrle Collection).


This marvelous portrait was exhibited at the Salon of 1870. Found strange by some, Théodore Duret declared that this work broke new ground: "The lady who is the subject of this portrait is the realization of this type, utterly original, very lively, very feminine, very Parisian." She seems to be seen as if through her own gaze, for Jeanne Raunay describes her eyes as "half-open, letting a fiery glance filter through her half-closed eyelids." This work was thus probably presented at the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876, under the title Portrait, Evening. This title recalls what Degas notes in his notebooks: "Work a lot on evening effects, lamps, candles, etc. The point is not always to show the source of light, but the effect of the night."

Claude Monet, Vase of flowers, 1881-1882, Courtauld Institute Galleries, London. Between 1878 and 1882, for the only extended period in his career, Monet concentrated on still lifes. He was likely motivated in part by financial concerns: opulent flower paintings found a readier market at this time than did his landscapes. The present work is one of 21 floral still lifes he undertook during this time, and contrasts notably with the few paintings of cultivated cut flowers he produced in the 1860s, which adhere more closely to the conventions established for the genre by eighteenth-century painters such as Chardin. The lush bouquet of pink and white mallows – a common wildflower – billows out of a green ceramic vase resting on a table which seems partly to dissolve into an indeterminate background, rendered in overlapping webs of sparkling colour. The slightly off-centre placement of the vase and the unusually high viewpoint make the table- top and the vase appear to tilt, somewhat disconcertingly, to the left.

Pierre Bonnard, Dining Room on the Garden, 1934-1935, Guggenheim Museum. “It is enough for the painter if windows are sufficiently large to allow the full radiance of daylight to penetrate, like lightning, so that all its nuances can strike everything it happens to encounter.”

—Pierre Bonnard, 1941 https://impressionistsgallery.co.uk/artists/Artists/abc/Bonnard/pictures/Dining%20Room%20on%20the%20Garden,%201934-1935.html

Edgar Degas, The Milliners, c. 1882, J. Paul Getty Museum Two milliners sit at a dramatically angled worktable, their bodies partly obscured by the shadowed hat stands that crowd their work space. Seen as little more than a silhouette, the figure at right works carefully on a hat. Her attentiveness is not shared by her older counterpart who, though grasping a swath of pink fabric, appears lost in thought, gazing beyond the frame with a disquieting expression. The brightly colored ribbons--pink, yellow, orange, and green--draw attention to the drabness of the room and its inhabitants. https://impressionistsgallery.co.uk/artists/Artists/def/Degas/pictures/The%20Milliners,%20c.%201882.html

Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Apples, 1893 - 1894, J. Paul Getty Museum, The still life held an obsession for Cezanne throughout his career. From the 1880s until the end of his life, he repeatedly painted the same objects—a green vase, rum bottle, blue ginger pot, and apples. The immobility and longevity of the subjects allowed him the time and control to pursue his searching analyses of the relationship between space and object, between visual experience and pictorial rendering. https://impressionistsgallery.co.uk/artists/Cezanne/pictures/Still%20Life%20with%20Apples,%201893%20-%201894.html

Claude Monet London, Parliament. A break in the fog, 1904 Musée d'Orsay, Early in 1871 Monet, with his friend Pissarro, went to London, taking in not only the city itself but its major museums, seeing the works of J. M. W. Turner and John Constable for the first time. In 1872–73, Monet painted his famous Impression, Sunrise, depicting Le Havre, a work which named (if it did not actually declare) the revolution in art that we now know as Impressionism, and which featured in the first “Impressionist” exhibition of 1874.

https://impressionistsgallery.co.uk/artists/Artists/mno/monet/pictures/London,%20Parliament.%20A%20break%20in%20the%20fog,%201904.html

Édouard Vuillard, Conversation, 1897–1898, The Metropolitan Museum of Art OF ALL HIS WORKS, Edouard Vuillard’s small, poetic, dimly lit “intimiste” interior scenes dating from the 1890s are most coveted by collectors. The settings of many of these pictures are the various modest Parisian apartments that Vuillard shared with his sisters and his mother—a widowed dressmaker and his lifelong muse. He often depicted Mme Vuillard at work, in the company of her assistants, unrolling bolts of material, cutting, and sewing, amidst a profusion of subtly hued, patterned wallpapers, screens, curtains, tablecloths, and clothing. Continue reading https://impressionistsgallery.co.uk/artists/Artists/tuv/Vuillard/pictures/Conversation,%201897%E2%80%931898.html