Room 43

In the early 1890s, Cezanne repeatedly painted the same set of objects in the isolation of his studio – fruit, dishes, cloths, and a water jug – to render them from different perspectives and interrogate their formal properties. In this picture, Cezanne introduces subtle effects of distortion to...

The wall of angular, jutting rock formations in this painting may represent a quarry, with the cuttings revealing geological strata. While the hillside is somewhere in Cezanne’s native Provence, the specific location has not been conclusively identified.Stylistically, the painting relates to scen...

In the 1890s and early 1900s, Cezanne painted numerous views of the Bibémus Quarry. Situated not far from Aix-en-Provence, the site was renowned since Antiquity for its yellow-ochre limestone. But while the artist was mesmerised by the quarry’s chromatic qualities, he also had personal and intell...

The Château Noir was a rambling house situated in extensive grounds near Aix-en-Provence in the south of France. Surrounded by wild vegetation, the run-down, isolated chateau offered Cezanne many subjects, and it became one of his favourite locations. He rented a small room in the house from 1897...

This painting shows Lake Keitele in central Finland. The zigzag pattern on the water’s surface is a natural occurrence caused by the interaction of the wind with the lake’s currents, but it is also intended to evoke the wake created by Väinämöinen, the poet-hero of the Finnish saga Kalevala, as h...

Van Gogh moved to Arles in February 1888, after having lived with his brother Theo in Paris for almost two years. It was Van Gogh’s dream to establish a new artist’s colony in southern France and he believed the warm colours of the south would inspire the future of modern art. To his surprise, ho...

A native of Berne, Switzerland, Ferdinand Hodler spent much of 1902 in the Oberland painting mountainous landscapes. This work shows the Kien Valley looking towards the Bluemlisalp, a massif at the far end of the valley. During his artistic retreats in the Alps – not so different, in spirit, from...

In 1884 Pissarro settled with his family in the village of Eragny. He painted a number of views of this meadow which is planted with small trees still surrounded by their protective cages. It is late afternoon and the long shadows thrown by the trees radiate out in a fan shape towards the left co...

This is one of 14 views of the Boulevard Montmartre in Paris that Camille Pissarro painted in 1897. These include the boulevard seen in snow, rain, fog, mist and sunlight, and in the morning, afternoon, at sunset and at night. The picture is the only example of a night painting by Pissarro.Pissar...

This cool, elegant painting explores the quality of light on water – how it moves, how it reflects and, towards the base of the picture, how it glows. The clouds are hardly reflected in the water: it seems as if the light has slipped under them to illuminate the vast, still stretch of almost tide...

This large picture was Seurat’s first major composition, painted when he had not yet turned 25. He intended it to be a grand statement with which he would make his mark at the official Salon in the spring of 1884, but it was rejected.Several men and boys relax on the banks of the Seine at Asnière...

This is one of four paintings Seurat produced in 1890 near the town of Gravelines, a small port on the northern French coast between Calais and Dunkirk. Positioned on the sand dunes of Petit-Fort-Philippe, we see the shore in the morning light after the receding tide has left a broad expanse of o...

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...