Room 45
Paintings in this room
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...
Around 200 of Cezanne’s works depict male and female nude bathers, either singly or in groups, in a landscape. This large painting is one of three pictures of female bathers that Cezanne worked on during the final decade of his life. They represent the culmination of his lifelong investigation of...
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...
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...
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,...
Although not the most recent painting in the National Gallery’s collection, this picture is perhaps the most self-consciously modern. It is also the Gallery’s only example of Cubism, the early twentieth-century art movement initiated by Pablo Picasso and his colleague Georges Braque, which radica...
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...
The sunny, windswept beaches of Valencia became one of Sorolla’s best-loved and most popular subjects in the years around 1900, when he achieved international acclaim in Paris. This work, one of his earliest beach scenes, was painted several years before he began to take up the motif with regular...