Room 41

Positioned on the waterfront of the East River, we are looking across the partly frozen river towards the tall buildings of Lower Manhattan. The warehouse in shadow on the left and the massive hull of an ocean liner on the right form two powerful diagonals that meet at the sunlit Manhattan skylin...

Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), was a key figure of German modernist art. Active since 1892 in the Munich Secession, in 1899 Corinth participated in the first exhibition of the Berlin Secession. That same year he painted Dr Mainzer’s portrait, also in Berlin, and shortly afterwards he relocated perman...

Women combing their hair, or having it combed, often appear in Degas’s work, and this painting is one of his boldest treatments of the subject. A maid, wearing her servant’s uniform, combs the hair of her seated mistress, who is not yet fully dressed. Pulled back by the force of the strokes, the...

Hélène Rouart stands in her father’s study, her hands resting on the back of his empty chair. Works from his art collection can be seen behind her, including three Egyptian statues in a glass case and, above her, a Chinese wall hanging. Although Degas set down the final composition with little su...

This is the only painting by Klimt in a British public collection, and it’s a fine example of the portraits of society women he painted in the early years of the twentieth century. Wearing a shimmering dress made of translucent white chiffon, Hermine Gallia appears almost to float before us. The...

Greta Moll was a sculptor who, along with her German husband Oskar Moll, was enrolled in Matisse’s art school, which he opened in 1908. She had previously been a student in Berlin where her portrait had been painted by the German artist Lovis Corinth. On being shown a photograph of that portrait,...

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...

In 1893 Monet bought a plot of land next to his house in Giverny. He had already planted a colourful flower garden, but now he wanted to create a water garden ‘both for the pleasure of the eye and for the purpose of having subjects to paint'. He enlarged the existing pond, filling it with exotic...

In 1916 Monet had a new studio built at his home in Giverny in order to work on huge canvases of his water-lily pond, each of them more than two metres high. These monumental paintings were intended to form an entire decorative scheme, and he donated 22 of them to the French state after the Firs...

During the final two decades of his life Monet devoted himself to painting the water garden he had created at his home in Giverny, producing around 250 innovative canvases. His paintings became increasingly experimental as he gradually abandoned depictions of the banks of the pond, its Japanese b...

Charlotte Cuhrt was 15 years old when Max Pechstein painted this striking full-length portrait. The daughter of Max Cuhrt, a successful solicitor and patron of the avant-garde, she sits confidently in an armchair, her big black eyes looking directly at the viewer. She’s dressed in red, with a lar...

This wooded hillside, called the Côte des Bœufs, was close to Pissarro’s home in the hamlet of L’Hermitage, near the market town of Pontoise, where he lived for most of the time between 1866 and 1883.Although Pissarro was a leading Impressionist, this painting signals his move away from the fleet...

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,...

Laurits Andersen Ring often painted the small village of Baldersbrønde on Zealand, Denmark’s largest island, where he lived for a number of years. This painting is a fine example of his unsentimental approach to the realities of rural life. He uses an almost monochrome colour scheme to create a b...

Staring straight at us while nonchalantly holding a cigarette is the Hungarian-born art dealer Joseph Brummer (1883‒1947), who had opened his gallery in Paris that same year. Brummer dealt in African works of art and was one of Rousseau’s most devout patrons. Seated in a wicker chair covered in r...

A tiger crouches low in thick jungle foliage, its back arched and teeth bared. It is not entirely clear what is happening: is the tiger cowering from the flash of lightning, or is it stalking prey?Surprised! was the first of around 20 ‘jungle’ paintings that Rousseau produced, which are among his...

Five drinkers gather in a tavern in Zarauz, the Basque coastal town where Joaquín Sorolla spent the summer of 1910. One stares at the artist through watery eyes while another pushes cider towards him, egging on the inebriate to further excess. A third glances menacingly at the painter. The canvas...