Room 44

A old women, her gaze unfocused, clutches a rosary – a string of beads used in prayer – tightly in her hands. According to the writer Joachim Gasquet, the sitter was a former nun who had escaped from a convent, wandering aimlessly until Cezanne took her on as a servant.Gasquet found this painting...

Paul Cezanne was about 40 years old when he painted this self portrait in Paris around 1880–1. He was now middle-aged with a family to support, and the intensity of his earlier self portraits has here given way to a more distant and reflective presence. Although relatively small, the portrait has...

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...

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....

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 late 1883 Van Gogh moved to the town of Nuenen in North Brabant, in the south of the Netherlands. His arrival there marked the beginning of a highly productive period that was to culminate in his first major painting, The Potato Eaters of 1885 (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam).This picture belongs...

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...

Eva Gonzalès (1847–1883), Manet’s only formal pupil, was a successful artist and a regular exhibitor at the Salon. This portrait was probably started in the summer of 1869 and involved numerous sittings. It was finally finished in March 1870 and shown at the Salon the same year.Manet had painted...

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...

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...

Monet was in his early twenties when he painted this view across the breakwaters to the headland of La Hève, near Sainte-Adresse on the Normandy coast. He knew the area well, as he had spent his childhood in nearby Le Havre. The picture was probably made on the spot as a study for a larger studio...

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...

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 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...

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,...