Paintings

Jean-François Millet. An industrialist commissioned Millet’s Four Seasons in 1868. In this autumn scene, sheep graze after harvest near Chailly and Barbizon.

Frederic Edwin Church. A blazing sunset hangs above forests and a lake in Maine.

Gustave Moreau. This confrontation established Moreau’s reputation at the Salon of 1864. Human remains show what happened to earlier victims of the Sphinx’s riddle.

William Sidney Mount. White men listen to a fiddler inside a barn while a Black laborer pauses outside. Music is shared across the doorway, but the figures remain spatially separated.

Camille Pissarro. Pissarro chose ordinary countryside rather than a celebrated monument or exceptional event.

Robert S. Duncanson. Duncanson imagined this valley from Thomas Moore's poem Lalla Rookh. A courtly entourage accompanies the Persian princess's journey.

Nicolas Poussin. Blind Orion seeks sunlight to restore his sight. Poussin places the myth within clouds, water and land.

Thomas Eakins. The painting records a race on Philadelphia's Schuylkill River in May 1872.

Nicolas Poussin. The subject is the violent abduction of women in Rome’s founding legend.

Albert Pinkham Ryder. A friend of Ryder's lost a large wager on a horse race and died by suicide. The painter transformed the event into a skeletal rider carrying a scythe.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Renoir probably combined a studio sitter with coastal studies made in Normandy. The face is carefully controlled while the background remains freer.

Charles Sheeler. Sheeler based the composition on Manhatta, the film he made with photographer Paul Strand.

Georges Seurat. Circus Corvi offered a free performance outside its entrance at Paris’s Gingerbread Fair in 1887. The display encouraged people to buy admission.

William Merritt Chase. Dora Wheeler became Chase's first student after his return from Munich. Few American painters then accepted women as private pupils.

Georges Seurat. This is the final preparatory study for the monumental La Grande Jatte in Chicago. Separate patches precede the finished painting’s denser dots.

John Singleton Copley. Copley chooses a moment in a rescue when the outcome remains uncertain.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Lautrec’s friend William Tom Warrener, an English painter, talks with women at the Moulin Rouge. The canvas prepared a colour lithograph published in 1892.

Gilbert Stuart. According to the museum's account, artist and sitter went skating when the weather seemed better for that than for a portrait sitting.

Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun. The countess’s white muslin dress reflects a fashion popularised by Marie Antoinette. Her pose probably responds to British portraiture.

Mary Cassatt. Stays in Antibes strengthened Cassatt's interest in bright decorative color. The high viewpoint and compressed planes reflect her study of Japanese prints.

Jean Antoine Watteau. Mezzetin was a commedia dell’arte character familiar on the Parisian stage but comparatively new to painting. He sings and plays while a distant statue turns its back.

Mary Cassatt. The model was the daughter of Degas's friends. She sits freely rather than holding a formal adult pose.

Eugène Delacroix. Delacroix adapts Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. Rebecca is carried from a burning castle by enslaved men acting under Bois-Guilbert’s orders.

Mary Cassatt. Coastal subjects are unusual in Cassatt's work. This painting is associated with the period after a trip to Spain with her ailing mother in 1884.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The publisher’s family sits in a Parisian interior decorated with Japanese objects.

Frederic Edwin Church. Church combines the near and far sides of the falls into a view unavailable from one fixed human position. The viewer seems to hover over the torrent.

Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas. Singer Jean-Baptiste Faure commissioned the scene and lent it to the Impressionist exhibition of 1876.

Winslow Homer. A boy controls the tiller of a small boat. Homer revised the arrangement, replacing one figure with an anchor.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. Moltedo directed Rome’s post office and represented French clergy at the Vatican.

Winslow Homer. The title refers to shooting two birds in succession with a double-barreled gun. The weapon points toward the ducks and the viewer.

Paul Gauguin. Gauguin gives a Christian subject Tahitian figures in his first major canvas made there.

John Singer Sargent. Sargent's niece Rose-Marie Ormond rests on a sofa. The picture belongs to his shift from public commissions toward informal family studies.

Henri Rousseau. Rousseau assembled his imaginary jungle from Paris botanical gardens and illustrated publications. The painting probably appeared at the Salon d’Automne in 1907.

Thomas Cole. Cole's series carries a person through four ages toward death and Christian salvation. Youth is the stage of hope and movement toward an imagined goal.

Jacques Louis David. Cupid visits Psyche at night while concealing his identity. David gives him the awkward body and satisfied smile of a young man.

James McNeill Whistler. In 1871 James McNeill Whistler painted his mother, Anna Matilda McNeill Whistler, in his London studio.