Room 41

A woman wearing a long dark dress and yellow straw hat stands next to a cow on a path which draws the viewer into the landscape. Long shadows are cast by the bushes and tree on the left. In the background the lavender blue hills of the Jura descend from left to right. The view is near Dardagny,...

A supremely poised young woman is painted in three-quarter view. Her right hand curls around the handle of a mirror, while she appears to be caressing a lock of hair with her left. She wears a white blouse under a black velvet bodice and yellow detachable sleeves over her arms. This study is one...

A sandy road leads from the immediate foreground to a cluster of sunlit buildings in the centre background. A further, much hazier group, lies just to the right of the prominent tree. The first group depicts the village of Saintry, south-east of Paris. The square tower with its pointed roof is a...

Honoré-Victorin Daumier (1808–1879) often used Miguel de Cervantes’s comic novel Don Quixote as a source for paintings and drawings. These always feature Don Quixote himself, who is usually accompanied by his faithful companion, Sancho Panza. This picture probably depicts the incident when Don Qu...

Princess Pauline Sander (1836–1921) was the wife of Prince Richard Metternich, the Austro-Hungarian Ambassador at the court of Napoleon III from 1860 to 1871. Known as the ‘ambassadress of pleasure’, she was a glamorous figure in Parisian high society during the Second Empire. A pioneer of fashio...

The painting illustrates a passage from the Life of Lycurgus by the Roman historian Plutarch, which describes how Spartan girls were ordered to engage in exercise – including running, wrestling and throwing the discus and javelin – and to challenge boys. However, this may be a scene of courtship...

In a simple bare room, featuring only three objects, a sofa, a full-length mirror and a picture on the wall, a young woman stands in quiet contemplation of her appearance. She wears a striped dress with an overdress of a pale grey, tied in a bow at the waist with a black fringed scarf. Her hair i...

In August 1877 Manet began work on a large picture of the Brasserie de Reichshoffen, where he was fascinated by the skill of the waitresses. While working on the picture, he radically altered his plans and cut it in two, completing each half separately. This snapshot view of the cafe is the right...

Ferdinand Maximilian was enthroned as a puppet emperor of Mexico in 1864 with the support of Emperor Napoleon III of France. However, Napoleon III reneged on his military support. Captured in May 1867 by nationalist Mexican and Republican forces, Maximilian and two of his generals were executed b...

In the summer of 1867, the German artist Adolph Menzel visited Paris for nine weeks. While there, he almost certainly went to Manet’s temporary pavilion, which for a few days was situated near the Universal Exhibition. The pavilion displayed around 50 of Manet’s paintings, including Music in the...

During the summer of 1869, Monet and Renoir painted together at La Grenouillère, a slightly raffish resort on the river Seine some 12 kilometres west of Paris. It had become a popular weekend retreat from the city during the 1860s.Monet made several oil sketches at the resort, including this pict...

In 1871 Monet moved with his family to Argenteuil, a suburb north-west of Paris. During his six-year stay there he painted around 200 pictures of the town and its surroundings. This picture is one of 18 Argenteuil canvases that record the snowy winter of 1874/5. The figures trudging along the roa...

Monet’s earlier paintings of the Normandy coast had emphasised it as a working seascape, peopled with fishermen who had to contend with a cold climate, choppy seas and stormy skies. But this painting and the eight others he made in the summer of 1870 show it as a holiday destination, with wide sa...

This painting is one of a dozen views of the Gare Saint-Lazare that Monet painted in early 1877. He had known the station since his childhood, and it was also the terminal for trains to many of the key Impressionist sites west of Paris.One of the less finished paintings of the group, it is the mo...

During the 1870s when he was living at Argenteuil, on the outskirts of Paris, Monet made several trips back to Le Havre, where he had grown up. The city was a thriving commercial and industrial centre, and France’s most important transatlantic port, with a series of harbours and busy docks. For...

Monet was captivated by London’s fog during his first stay in the capital from 1870 to 1871. Later in life he told the art dealer Rene Gimpel: ‘Without the fog, London would not be a beautiful city. It’s the fog that gives it its magnificent breadth.’ This misty composition is anchored by carefu...

This painting was almost certainly exhibited with the title The Lake in the Bois de Boulogne at the Fifth Impressionist exhibition in 1880 together with another picture by Berthe Morisot, In the Bois de Boulogne. The two paintings show the same two women (possibly professional models) who wear id...

This is one of 12 surviving pictures that Camille Pissarro made while in self-imposed exile in south London from late 1870 to mid-1871 during the Franco-Prussian war. Perhaps the first picture he painted while in London, it is one of the more rural scenes of the group and is similar to landscapes...

This is one of 12 pictures that Pissarro painted while in self-imposed exile in London from 1870 to 1871 during the Franco-Prussian war. The Avenue was a wide, tree-lined street in Sydenham, a fashionable semi-rural suburb near Crystal Palace in south London. The location can be identified today...

Pissarro and his family moved to Louveciennes in the spring of 1869, and he may have painted this picture shortly afterwards, or possibly in the spring of 1870. Only 30 minutes west of Paris by train, Louveciennes was an important location for early Impressionism, as it was one of the small towns...

We seem to be sitting in a box at the theatre with two young women, though we can’t be sure what is going on. We can’t see the stage and one of the women is looking away from us, the back of her bonnet hiding most of the other’s face. This sense of mystery is enhanced by the nearer woman’s pose,...

This sunlit scene on the river Seine is typical of the imagery that has come to characterise Impressionism, and Renoir includes several familiar Impressionist motifs such as fashionably dressed women, a rowing boat, a sail boat, and a steam train crossing a bridge. The exact location has not been...

This painting places us in a busy Parisian street close to six principal figures who fill the foreground. A milling crowd behind them almost completely blocks out the boulevard beyond. The top quarter of the picture is mostly filled by a canopy of at least a dozen umbrellas.Painted in two stages,...

Sisley painted this winter scene in the small village of Marly-le-Roi in early 1875, soon after he moved there. The village was the site of the Château de Marly, which had been built in the late seventeenth century for Louis XIV, King of France, as a retreat from Versailles. It was later demolish...

For its lavish interiors, the objets d’art in the background, and the swaggering self-confidence of the sitter, this portrait has become an icon of the late 19th century’s Aesthetic movement. Painted by Jacques Joseph (James) Tissot, a French émigré who settled in London in 1871, it depicts the a...