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“The delicate dark veil that covers Mona Lisa's hair is sometimes considered a mourning veil. In fact, such veils were commonly worn as a mark of virtue” (Scaillierez).
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“In the 7th century BC, the three Horatii brothers, chosen by the Romans to defy the Curiatii, the champions of the town of Alba, are swearing to defeat their enemies or die. As they receive their weapons from their father, the women of the family are prostrate with suffering” (Lerouge).
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“Juliette Récamier, the wife of a Parisian banker, was one of the most famous socialites of her time. This portrait, showing her dressed in the "antique style" and surrounded by Pompeian furniture in an otherwise bare picture space, was extremely avant-garde for 1800” (Francois).
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“Completed in four months, from October 1800 to January 1801, it signals the dawning of a new century. After a decade of terror and uncertainty following the Revolution, France was emerging as a great power once more. At the heart of this revival, of course, was General Napoleon Bonaparte who, in 1799, had staged an uprising against the revolutionary government” (Pollitt).
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“This work, his most famous nude, was commissioned by Caroline Murat, Napoleon's sister and the queen of Naples” (François).
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“Géricault drew his inspiration from the account of two survivors of the Medusa… Due to the shortage of lifeboats, those who were left behind had to build a raft for 150 souls—a construction that drifted away on a bloody 13-day odyssey that was to save only 10 lives” (Laborie).
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“This painting, executed in 1855, is a replica of the original. Courbet, dissatisfied with the perspective, repainted the work and enlarged the canvas by some twelve inches along the right side” (“The Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair.” ).
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“True to one of Millet's favourite subjects – peasant life – this painting is the culmination of ten years of research on the theme of the gleaners” (Schormans).
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“the theme of the odalisque with her black slave, already handled by Ingres among others, the picture portrays the cold and prosaic reality of a truly contemporary subject” (Lewandowski).
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“In 1866, Claude Monet started painting a large picture in the garden of the property he was renting in the Paris suburbs” (Lewandowski).
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“It shows one of the artist's sisters, Edma, watching over her sleeping daughter, Blanche. It is the first image of motherhood—later one of her favourite subjects—to appear in Morisot's work” (“The Cradle”).
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"The woman is Victorine Meurent, Manet's favorite model in the 1860s, and the child was the daughter of a fellow painter who allowed Manet to use his garden to create The Railway" ("The Railway").
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“Degas closely observed the most spontaneous, natural, ordinary gestures, the pauses when concentration is relaxed and the body slumps after the exhausting effort of practising and the implacable rigour of the class” (Lewandowski).
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“Though some of his friends appear in the picture, Renoir's main aim was to convey the vivacious and joyful atmosphere of this popular dance garden on the Butte Montmartre”(Berizzi).
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“Courbet's approach was radically innovative at the time: he used a canvas of dimensions usually reserved for history painting, a "noble" genre, to present an ordinary subject, with no trace of idealisation, which cannot pretend to be a genre scene either” (Lewandowski).
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"This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big,” wrote van Gogh to his brother Theo, describing his inspiration for one of his best-known paintings, The Starry Night (1889).3 The window to which he refers was in the Saint-Paul asylum in Saint-Rémy, in southern France, where he sought respite from his emotional suffering while continuing to make art" ("The Starry Night").
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“an expressionistic construction based on Munch's actual experience of a scream piercing through nature while on a walk, after his two companions, seen in the background, had left him” (“The Scream”).
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"When this painting was first shown at the 1911 Salon d’Automne in Paris, the prominent art critic André Salmon dubbed it “The Mona Lisa of Cubism" ("Tea Time(Woman with the Teaspoon)").
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“This painting is emblematic of research conducted by Renoir at the end of his life. From 1910, the artist returns to one of his favorite subjects: outdoor nudes to which he devotes large paintings. Renoir celebrated a timeless nature, that any reference to the contemporary world is banished” (Lewandowski).
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“Through the generosity of Mrs. Donop de Monchy (see Monet’s Friends) and Michel Monet, the Marmottan Monet Museum owns the largest Monet collection, from Impression, Sunrise to Giverny's Water Lilies”(“Impression Soleil Levant.”).
