Room 43

The dancers in Degas’s painting are clouded in a mist of tulle, but two striking heads of red hair seem to anchor the blurred forms moving in space. Arms and legs curve and stretch, delicate white skirts toss and sway. The white tutus depicted here are the practice dress worn by the younger dance...

The Cirque Fernando was built in 1875 near the Place Pigalle in Paris, close to where Degas lived. He saw Miss La La perform there several times. Born Anna Albertine Olga Brown (1858-1945), she was a mixed-race circus performer famous for her feats of strength. Olga is especially known as the inv...

Elena Carafa was Degas’s first cousin. Her mother, Stefanina, the Duchessa Montejasi-Cicerale, was the youngest sister of Degas’s father. Like many members of Degas’s family they lived in Naples, which Degas himself returned to in the winter of 1873–4, when he accompanied his dying father there....

Gauguin painted this still life soon after he had arrived in Tahiti for his second and final stay in 1895. Exotic red bougainvillea and hibiscus, white and yellow frangipani, white tiare and large blue leaves burst out of a dark clay pot. They look as though they are slightly past their best, and...

Van Gogh painted several versions of A Wheatfield, with Cypresses during the summer of 1889, while he was a patient in the psychiatric hospital of Saint-Paul de Mausole, in the village of St-Rémy in the south of France. A first version, which he described as a study, was painted on site in late J...

Van Gogh painted this patch of meadow when he was a patient at the psychiatric hospital at Saint-Paul de Mausole, near the village of St-Rémy in the south of France. While at the hospital he made a number of sketches and paintings that look down at small areas of meadow or undergrowth.Although th...

This is one of five versions of Sunflowers on display in museums and galleries across the world. Van Gogh made the paintings to decorate his house in Arles in readiness for a visit from his friend and fellow artist, Paul Gauguin.‘The sunflower is mine’, Van Gogh once declared, and it is clear tha...

This painting of a simple chair set on a bare floor of terracotta tiles is one of Van Gogh’s most iconic images. It was painted in late 1888, soon after fellow artist Paul Gauguin had joined him in Arles in the south of France. The picture was a pair to another painting, Gauguin’s Chair (Van Gogh...

This is a portrait of Misia Sert, née Godebska, who was the darling of the highest artistic circles in France at the turn of the twentieth century. It is hard to overstate quite how glamorous and influential she was: the local newspapers dubbed her the 'Queen of Paris’. A talented pianist, she a...

Jan Toorop was a Dutch-Indonesian artist, born to a Dutch father and Chinese-Indonesian mother. After travelling to the Netherlands as a young boy, he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1883, where he met many influential artists such as James Ensor and Théo van Rysselberghe.Toor...

This young woman seated in a garden is thought to be a dancer and model who we know only as Gabrielle. She appears in two other pictures by Toulouse-Lautrec.Although Toulouse-Lautrec worked mainly as a graphic artist and printmaker, and is perhaps best known for his posters advertising venues suc...