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| James McNeill Whistler The Master Smith of Lyme Regis 1895 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Honoré Daumier Deux Hommes before 1879 drawing Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| William Morris Hunt Self-portrait 1866 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Édouard Manet Monk in Prayer 1865 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
"Manet was a great admirer of seventeenth-century Spanish painting. This work may have been inspired by Zurbarán's Kneeling Monk, which Manet could have seen at the Louvre. He was also much impressed by the masterful handling of dark and light tones in the work of Velázquez."
– from curator's notes at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
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| Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Oedipus and the Sphinx 1864 oil on canvas Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
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| Alphonse Legros Confession of St Jerome ca. 1860-70 oil on paper Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| Louis Gallait Art and Liberty 1859 oil on panel Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
"This painting typifies the so-called "juste-milieu" (middle path) for which Gallait was so admired during his lifetime. The subject is Romantic in its idealization of the poor but virtuous itinerant musician, who bows to no authority but his own artistic muse. At the same time, it is restrained in its emotional tenor and painted with great technical assurance in the rendering of the body and in the carefully described details of the musician's dress. This is a reduced version of the same subject now at the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts in Belgium. When the larger version was exhibited at the Salon of 1851, critics praised the composition for its masterful drawing and melancholy dignity."
– from curator's notes at the Walters Art Museum
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| Edgar Degas Académie ca. 1856-58 drawing Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Raphael Lamar West Sketch of nude male figure before 1850 drawing Morgan Library, New York |
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| Jean-François Millet The Sower 1850 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
"Jean-François Millet was the artist that van Gogh most revered. Although he never saw Millet's famous Sower – already in a Boston collection before he was born – van Gogh admired Millet's other treatments of the theme, and sought to emulate them. At the very beginning of his career, he wrote that "I must draw diggers, sowers, men & women at the plough, without cease . . . I no longer stand helpless before nature as I used to do."
– from curator's notes at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
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| Louis-Rémy Robert Portrait of Alfred Thompson Gobert ca. 1849-55 salted paper print from paper negative Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Richard Caton Woodville Self-portrait with Flowered Wallpaper ca. 1848-50 oil on panel Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
"Woodville painted himself several times during his short career. In this small work the artist sits in a parlor chair, facing the viewer, while looking off to the left. His casual but fashionable attire includes a haphazardly buttoned tan jacket, a white shirt with black bow tie, a gray vest, and blue-green trousers with a checkerboard pattern. Woodville holds an awkwardly proportioned black top hat in his green-gloved left hand; his ungloved right hand frames his face in a gesture of contemplation. The hand-to-face pose is found frequently in works after photographs during this period, as it held the head still through the long exposure the medium required. Woodville's career coincided with the popular introduction of the daguerreotype portrait. The light brown wallpaper, with its repeating pattern of bouquets of pink roses, places the scene squarely in the domestic realm. Notable in this painting, as in others by the artist, is the contrast between the broadly worked clothing and the miniaturist technique of the carefully rendered face."
– from curator's notes at the Walters Art Museum
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| follower of Jacques-Louis David Académie ca. 1810-20 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Henry Fuseli Heavenly Ganymede 1804 lithograph Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |