Tommaso di Folco Portinari (1428–1501); Maria Portinari (Maria Maddalena Baroncelli, born 1456)
Hans Memling Netherlandish
ca. 1470
A native of Florence, Tommaso Portinari was the branch manager of the Medici bank in Bruges. He probably commissioned these portraits from Memling around the time of his marriage to the fourteen-year-old Maria Baroncelli in 1470. The two panels originally formed a triptych with a central devotional image of the Virgin and Child. Memling has placed the sitters before illusionistic frames, an innovation suggesting that the figures project into our space. His close attention to the stubble and scar on Tommaso’s chin heightens the realistic effect.
Madonna and Child
Carlo Crivelli Italian
ca. 1480
Symbols of good and evil appear throughout this exquisitely rendered painting. While the apples and fly symbolize sin, the cucumber and goldfinch reference redemption and the soul. Flemish art may have inspired the precisely detailed style of this work, one of Crivelli’s most refined pictures. It also showcases his talent for visual tricks: viewers might be tempted to brush away the fly that appears to have landed on the painting. In the distance, the landscape is populated with turbaned figures, possibly Mamluks who in the 1480s controlled the holy city of Jerusalem.
Three Miracles of Saint Zenobius
Botticelli (Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi) Italian
ca. 1500
This panel, likely originally part of a daybed or wainscoting for a marriage chamber, belongs to a series illustrating the life of Zenobius, the fifth-century bishop of Florence. Botticelli had come under the influence of Christian reformer Girolamo Savonarola and began painting austere religious narratives with a sense of urgency and foreboding. Here, the saint feverishly rushes across a surreal townscape, raising the dead. At left, he meets a funeral procession and resurrects a dead youth. At center, he raises a man killed while transporting a casket of relics. At right, Saint Eugenius receives water and salt blessed by Zenobius, who then hastens across the square to revive a dead relative.
The Agony in the Garden
Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio or Santi) Italian
ca. 1504
This panel was originally part of the base (predella) of the nearby altarpiece, one of three scenes focused on Christ’s last days. Christ prays before his arrest, while his disciples slumber around him. The small angel who proffers a chalice or cup is a visualization of Christ’s thoughts—“let this cup pass from me”—as he slowly accepts his fate. Raphael depicted the scene in a delicate landscape, with each of the sleeping followers in a carefully observed pose.
The Musicians
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi) Italian
1597
While Cupid’s presence confirms this is an allegory representing Music, Caravaggio’s painting equally engages with contemporary performance and individualized models, including a self-portrait in the second boy from the right. Caravaggio’s contemporary Giovanni Baglione recorded that the artist painted “a concert, with some youths portrayed from nature very well” immediately after joining the household of his first major patron, Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte. Most likely, this is the same painting and is one of several employing the half-length, earthy yet sensual figures with which Caravaggio made his name upon arriving in Rome.
View of Toledo
El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos) Greek
ca. 1599–1600
Writing to the sculptor Auguste Rodin after having been astonished by this painting in Paris in 1908, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke described how “splintered light tills the ground, turning it over, tearing into it and bringing up here and there pale green meadows behind the trees standing like insomniacs.” Regarded as El Greco’s greatest landscape, it portrays Toledo, the city where he lived and worked for most of his life. But it is an emotive rather than a documentary vision that not only imaginatively revises the skyline—most notably, the cathedral has been moved—but also distorts architecture and landscape such that they are fully in service of the kind of drama Rilke and other modernists appreciated in his work.
The Abduction of the Sabine Women
Nicolas Poussin French
probably 1633–34
This painting embodies Poussin’s innovations derived from studying Roman antiquity. Figural groups, several closely based on ancient sculptures, evoke the choreography of dancers caught mid-action on stage, while the complex interplay of drapery woven between the figures reveals Poussin as a master colorist. Poussin arranged wax figures in a tiny, theater-like box to establish the sophisticated spatial relationships and formal balance of such paintings. The violent subject comes from a founding myth for the city of Rome: Romans invited the neighboring Sabines to a festival with the intention of forcibly capturing their women as wives. When the Roman leader Romulus raised his cloak—seen here at left—his warriors seized them. This painting belonged to the French ambassador to Rome in the 1630s and then to King Louis XIII’s chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu.
Interior of Saint Peter's, Rome
Giovanni Paolo Panini Italian
after 1754
Saint Peter’s awe-inspiring interior was an obligatory stop for pilgrims and tourists to Rome. Panini made numerous versions of this view for these visitors to take home, updating them in accordance with additions and alterations to the basilica over the decades of his career. The earliest version painted in 1730 for the French ambassador Cardinal Melchior de Polignac is today in the Musée du Louvre, Paris. The Met’s painting dates from over twenty years later, as indicated by the inclusion of statues of Saint Theresa of Avila and Saint Vincent de Paul erected in 1754 and seen in the first two niches on the right.
Modern Rome
Giovanni Paolo Panini Italian
1757
Modern Rome is a pendant to Ancient Rome (on view nearby) and catalogs some of the city’s most famous monuments from the two centuries prior to the execution of these paintings. Guidebooks and writings on art typically contrasted modern and ancient works to better draw out their strengths and weaknesses. Akin to luxurious postcards, they condense an itinerary of must-see sights. They were commissioned by the comte de Stainville, later duc de Choiseul, ambassador to Rome from 1753 to 1757; he is shown seated in an armchair. Among the works illustrated are Michelangelo’s Moses and statues by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. For more about this painting, including the identification of additional monuments, visit its collection record at The Met website.
The Chariot of Aurora
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo Italian
1760s
This oil sketch was probably presented as a proposal by Tiepolo for the decoration of a ceiling in the royal palace in Madrid. Tiepolo was summoned to Spain in 1762 to decorate the throne room, but a ceiling representing Aurora was painted in the queen’s bedroom in 1763 by Tiepolo’s German rival, Anton Raphael Mengs. Here, Aurora, goddess of dawn, crosses the sky in her chariot, accompanied by the Hours and heralded by Apollo; the figure of Time is on the right. Allegories of abundance appear in the form of Ceres, who holds a sheaf of wheat, and Bacchus, who wears a crown of leaves.
Madame Grand (Noël Catherine Vorlée, 1761–1835)
Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun French
1783
Madame Grand was born to a French colonial family near Pondicherry, India. As she rose to fame for her beauty and eventual marriage to the minister and diplomat Talleyrand, admirers and critics alike exoticized her origins by giving her the epithet l’Indienne. This remarkable image of her with eyes raised and lips parted as if in song was among ten portraits and three history paintings shown by Vigée Le Brun at the Salon of 1783, the same year the artist was accepted as one of only four female members of the French Royal Academy.
The Stolen Kiss
Jean Honoré Fragonard French
ca. 1760
Fragonard is best known for energetic, broadly brushed paint surfaces, but the high degree of finish and the miraculous, incandescent glow of this painting demonstrate his technical range. The hard paint surface emulates seventeenth-century Dutch painting, but his teacher, François Boucher, inspired the subject of a forcibly pursued kiss, evidently won in a card game. Executed during Fragonard’s first trip to Italy, this was among his first private commissions, probably from the bailli de Bréteuil, Malta’s ambassador to the Holy See.
Allegorical Figure Representing Geometry
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo Italian
and Girolamo Mengozzi (called Colonna) Italian
1760
These illusionistic depictions of allegorical sculptures from the Palazzo Valle Marchesini Sala in Vicenza were part of an immersive fresco cycle completed around 1760 and detached around 1900. Incised lines (still visible in raking light) helped to guide Tiepolo as he painted quickly before the walls’ wet plaster surface dried. Tiepolo consulted a specialist in perspective, Mengozzi, to ensure that the foreshortened depictions of architecture and sculpture aligned when one stood at the center of the room, evidence of just how site-specific such decorative programs could be.
Marie Emilie Coignet de Courson (1716–1806) with a Dog
Jean Honoré Fragonard French
ca. 1769
Fragonard’s so-called fantasy portraits are electric performances: brushed with virtuosity, panache, and speed, he reworked the surface while the paint remained wet, including by incising lines into the large white ruff. The theatrical costume recalls Queen Maria de’ Medici’s court dress from over a century earlier, as depicted in a series of paintings by Peter Paul Rubens that Fragonard saw in the French royal collections. A recently discovered drawing makes it possible to identify this woman as the aristocratic salon hostess Marie Emilie Coignet de Courson. Fragonard’s painterly performance arguably outshines her, however, making this a kind of artist’s self-portrait.
The Angel Appearing to Zacharias
William Blake British
1799–1800
Blake devoted much of the year 1799–1800 to fifty biblical scenes drawn, a commission he received from his principal patron, the government clerk Thomas Butts. About thirty of these works have been identified; it is thought that some have not survived owing to the fragility of the materials. This scene illustrates verses from Luke (I:11–13), in which the archangel Gabriel appears to the righteous Zacharias, a high priest of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, to announce that Zacharias’s elderly and barren wife will give birth to a son, Saint John the Baptist.
Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d'Ognes (1786–1868)
Marie Denise Villers French
1801
A woman looks up from her drawing, perhaps better to study us. The simple interior may represent a studio in the Louvre. The broken windowpane framing the distant couple, an unsettling detail, demonstrates the artist’s technical skill. Villers was the sister of the painter Marie Victorine Lemoine and a pupil of Anne Louis Girodet-Trioson, Jacques Louis David’s student. Taking advantage of newly open submission procedures for women painters at the Salon, she exhibited this work publicly in 1801 under her name, but it was soon incorrectly ascribed to David—a misidentification perpetuated until the 1950s. Due in part to this history, the painting appeared on the cover of a 1971 issue of Artnews that featured a watershed call to reevaluate art history, Linda Nochlin’s "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?"
An Old Chapel in a Valley
Théodore Rousseau French
ca. 1835
Perhaps painted about 1835, when the young artist had already begun to establish his reputation as an innovative landscape painter, this study retains the tight brushwork and marked contrasts in tone of his earlier work. The view has not been identified with any degree of certainty but it must be the product of one of Rousseau’s frequent sketching tours outside Paris.
Copenhagen Harbor by Moonlight
Johan Christian Dahl Norwegian
1846
Since the early nineteenth century, the waterfront shipyard and lumberyard depicted in this view has been known as Larsens Plads, or Larsen’s Place, after its founder, Lars Larsen. Dahl first painted this prospect in 1816 (Kurpfälzisches Museum, Heidelberg), but in reprising it for the present work he doubled the size of the canvas, omitting incidental details and heightening its atmospheric effect. This placid scene, conceived as the pendant to a far wilder, natural one, Tyrolean Landscape with a Waterfall (1823; private collection), remained unsold at the artist’s death.
Fishing
Edouard Manet French
ca. 1862–63
Patterned after elements in landscapes by Peter Paul Rubens, the present painting gives currency to Delacroix's recommendation to Manet: "Look at Rubens, draw inspiration from Rubens, copy Rubens. Rubens was God." Manet and his future wife, Suzanne Leenhoff, are the couple at lower right dressed in seventeenth-century costume and posed like Rubens and his wife in the Flemish painter's Park of the Château de Steen (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). As Manet had concealed his relationship with Suzanne from his father, who died in September 1862, it is likely that Fishing—a variation on a wedding portrait—was made between then and their marriage in October 1863.
Oedipus and the Sphinx
Gustave Moreau French
1864
The legendary Greek prince Oedipus confronts the malevolent Sphinx, who torments travelers with a riddle: What creature walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening? Remains of victims who answered incorrectly litter the foreground. (The solution is the human, who crawls as a baby, strides upright in maturity, and uses a cane in old age.) Moreau made his mark with this painting at the Paris Salon of 1864. Despite the growing prominence of depictions of everyday life, he portrayed biblical, mythological, and imagined stories. His otherworldly imagery inspired many younger artists and writers, including Odilon Redon and Oscar Wilde.
The Fishing Boat
Gustave Courbet French
1865
Courbet painted this work during an intensely productive visit to Trouville with James McNeill Whistler from September until November 1865; in a letter to his father, the artist boasted that he had executed "thirty-five paintings" in a very short time, which "stunned everybody." In his choice of subject, Courbet followed in the wake of Eugène Isabey, Johan Barthold Jongkind, and Eugène Boudin; but unlike many of the canvases executed at the time, this fishing boat, rigged and filled with equipment, is the focus of the composition rather than a subordinate element. In 1899, this became the first work by Courbet to enter the Museum’s collection.
The Dance Class
Edgar Degas French
1874
This work and its variant in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, represent the most ambitious paintings Degas devoted to the theme of the dance. Some twenty-four women, ballerinas and their mothers, wait while a dancer executes an "attitude" for her examination. Jules Perrot, a famous ballet master, conducts the class. The imaginary scene is set in a rehearsal room in the old Paris Opéra, which had recently burned to the ground. On the wall beside the mirror, a poster for Rossini’s Guillaume Tell pays tribute to the singer Jean-Baptiste Faure, who commissioned the picture and lent it to the 1876 Impressionist exhibition.
Madame Manet (Suzanne Leenhoff, 1829–1906) at Bellevue
Edouard Manet French
1880
Despite the seemingly rapid brushwork and the summary treatment of detail, this painting was preceded by at least two drawings and an oil sketch. This is Manet's last portrait of his wife; it was painted at Bellevue, a suburb of Paris, where they spent the summer of 1880.
Girl in a Courtyard, Algiers (formerly Courtyard in Tangier)
Philippe Pavy French
1886
In the 1870s and 80s, Pavy exhibited scenes like this one at the Society of British Arts and the Royal Academy of Arts in London, where they were praised for their "unobtrusive style, their thorough but nevertheless artistic treatment of details, and their marked richness and variety of color." However, although Pavy titled this picture Courtyard in Tangier, it is based on a photograph of a girl named Aïcha, produced and retailed in Algiers by the studio of Jean Geiser (Swiss, 1848–1923). Evidently the painter’s skill at rendering humans and objects convincingly was not alloyed to a strict sense of veracity overall.
Women Picking Olives
Vincent van Gogh Dutch
1889
At the end of 1889, Van Gogh painted three versions of this picture. He described the first as a study from nature "more colored with more solemn tones" (private collection) and the second as a studio rendition in a "very discreet range" of colors (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). The present work, the most resolved and stylized of the three, was intended for his sister and mother, to whom Van Gogh wrote: "I hope that the painting of the women in the olive trees will be a little to your taste—I sent [a] drawing of it to Gauguin, . . . and he thought it good. . . ."
Wheat Field with Cypresses
Vincent van Gogh Dutch
1889
Cypresses gained ground in Van Gogh’s work by late June 1889 when he resolved to devote one of his first series in Saint-Rémy to the towering trees. Distinctive for their rich impasto, his exuberant on-the-spot studies include the Met’s close-up vertical view of cypresses (49.30) and this majestic horizontal composition, which he illustrated in reed-pen drawings sent to his brother on July 2. Van Gogh regarded the present work as one of his “best” summer landscapes and was prompted that September to make two studio renditions: one on the same scale (National Gallery, London) and the other a smaller replica, intended as a gift for his mother and sister (private collection).
Pygmalion and Galatea
Jean-Léon Gérôme French
ca. 1890
Between 1890 and 1892, Gérôme made both painted and sculpted variations on the theme of Pygmalion and Galatea, the tale recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. All depict the moment when the sculpture of Galatea was brought to life by the goddess Venus, in fulfillment of Pygmalion’s wish for a wife as beautiful as the sculpture he created. This is one of three known versions in oil that are closely related to a polychrome marble sculpture, also fashioned by Gérôme (Hearst Castle, San Simeon, Calif.). In each of the paintings, the sculpture appears at a different angle, as though it were being viewed in the round.
The Repast of the Lion
Henri Rousseau (le Douanier) French
ca. 1907
This work was probably shown in the Salon d'Automne of 1907, but it treats a theme that Rousseau first explored in Surprised! of 1891 (National Gallery, London). He based the exotic vegetation of his many jungle pictures on studies that he made in Paris’s botanical gardens, and adapted the wild beasts from popular ethnographic journals and illustrated children's books. Rousseau’s nickname, "le Douanier," derives from his job as a customs official.
Pandora
Odilon Redon French
ca. 1914
In classical mythology, Pandora was a supremely beautiful woman created by the gods and sent to Earth to live among mortals. Redon depicts her nude, in a state of perfect innocence, and surrounded by flowers, like the biblical Eve in the Garden of Eden. According to legend, when Pandora opened the box cradled in her arms, she released all the evils destined to plague humanity, bringing to an end the idyllic Golden Age. This painting is thought to have been made about 1914, on the eve of World War I, when the themes of harmony destroyed and chaos unleashed may have had heightened resonance.