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| James Tissot The Fan ca. 1875 oil on canvas Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut |
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| Paul Cézanne House in the country ca. 1877-79 canvas Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut |
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| Edgar Degas Before the curtain-rise ca. 1892 pastel Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut |
The green-tinted singer by Edgar Degas "dramatically foreshortened from above" was one of the artist's late-career "finished pastels made for sale." These began as life drawings made in the presence either of actual performers or of posed models. Degas accumulated an enormous collection of such drawings. Elements combined from several would then contribute to the more extrovert pastels in "incandescent hues" – among the diminishing number of works in the nineties actually intended to leave the studio and be sold.
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| Henri Fantin-Latour Madame Leopold Gravier 1889 oil on canvas Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut |
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| Henri Fantin-Latour The Reading 1870 canvas Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon |
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| Henri Le Sidaner Façade at twilight 1897 oil on canvas Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut |
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| Camille Pissarro Rue Saint-Honoré, effect of rain 1897 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Gustave Caillebotte On the Pont de l'Europe 1876-77 canvas Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth |
Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) befriended the Parisian Impressionists and bought their paintings, but showed his own work at the official Salon, where they could not. On the Pont de l'Europe (above) parades its rigid formality. Curators at the Kimbell Art Museum point out that in addition to identically dressed figures and monochrome blue tonality, "Caillebotte has adopted the geometric structure of the bridge, one pier of which bisects his picture vertically into two arched bays, these each subdivided by diagonal cross-bracing struts." Fortunately, Caillebotte could also evade industrial modernism, as below.
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| Gustave Caillebotte Riverbank in morning haze 1875 oil on canvas private collection |
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| Gustave Caillebotte Bathers in the Yerre 1878 canvas private collection |
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| Carolus Duran Portrait of Anna Alexandrovna Obolenskaya 1887 canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Puvis de Chavannes Young women on a seashore 1879 oil on canvas Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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| Puvis de Chavannes Shepherd's song 1881 oil on canvas Museum of Modern Art, New York |
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| Pierre-Auguste Renoir Woman with parasol in a garden 1873 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen Bornemisza, Madrid |
"Painting arose from the mixing of colors and – at moments when aesthetic warmth brought about a flowering – turned color into a chaotic mix, so that it was objects as such which served as the pictorial framework for the great painters. I found that the closer one came to the culture of painting, the more the frameworks (i.e. objects) lost their systematic nature and broke up, thus establishing a different order governed by painting."
– Kazimir Malevich, writing in the catalogue of the 10th State Exhibition, Moscow (1919) translated by Alexander Lieven