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| Édouard Vuillard The Album 1895 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
"In 1894-95, Thadée and Misia Natanson commissioned from Vuillard a series of five decorative panels known collectively as "The Album." The unusual character of these works matched that of the Natansons' Paris apartment, a large open space adjoined by several small alcove areas. Its unconventional decor reflected Misia's taste, which was inspired by the English Arts and Crafts movement. The apartment often served as an alternative office for Thadée's lively avant-garde journal, La Revue blanche. Among the contributors to this influential publication were Claude Debussy, Léon Blum, Stéphane Mallarmé, and André Gide. The evocative Symbolist qualities of Mallarmé's poetry and Debussy's music find echoes in Vuillard's five panels, which take their name from this painting."
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| John La Farge Nocturne ca. 1885 watercolor and gouache Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Kenyon Cox Augustus Saint-Gaudens 1887 and 1908 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
"Cox and Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907) met in Paris in the 1870s and exchanged portraits in 1887: an oil painting for a bronze relief. The original canvas was lost in Saint-Gaudens's 1904 studio fire, so Cox created this replica in time for the Metropolitan Museum's 1908 memorial exhibition of the sculptor's work. Saint-Gaudens is shown in his New York studio, modeling in clay a portrait relief of the artist William Merritt Chase. . . . Cox cleverly echoed his friend's portrait reliefs by showing him in profile."
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| Pierre-Auguste Cot The Storm ca. 1880 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Pierre-Auguste Cot Springtime 1873 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
"This flirtatious duo in classicizing dress, painted with notable technical finesse, reflect's Cot's allegiance to the academic style of his teachers, including Bouguereau and Cabanel. Exhibited at the Salon of 1873, the picture was Cot's greatest success, widely admired and copied in engravings, fans, porcelains, and tapestries. Its first owner, hardware tycoon John Wolfe, awarded the work a prime spot in his Manhattan mansion, where visitors delighted in "this reveling pair of children, drunken with first love . . . this Arcadian idyll, peppered with French spice." Wolfe's cousin, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, later commissioned a similar scene from Cot, The Storm, now also in the Metropolitan's collection."
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| William Michael Harnett The Artist's Letter Rack 1879 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Antoine Vollon Still Life with Cheese ca. 1875-80 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
"In his own day, Vollon was hailed as a second Chardin. This work, probably painted in the late 1870s, exhibits his technical virtuosity in describing the surface, light, and texture of everyday objects. His still lifes, in their choice of theme, palette, and broad handling, reflect the influence of his mentor Ribot, whose work was likewise indebted to seventeenth-century Spanish painting."
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| John William Hill Plums 1870 watercolor and gouache Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Edward Burne-Jones The Love Song 1868-77 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
"Burne-Jones associated this painting with a refrain from a Breton folk ballad: Alas, I know a love song / Sad or happy, each in turn. Drawing inspiration from the gothicizing Pre-Raphaelite movement, the artist conjured a twilight scene with a richly romantic, medieval air, enhanced by allusions to Italian Renaissance art, from the warm, dewy colors to the gracious figures and original frame, which recalls sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Venetian designs. When the picture was first exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery, London in 1878, the novelist Henry James admiringly compared it to "some mellow Giorgione or some richly-glowing Titian."
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| Martin Johnson Heade Approaching Thunder Storm 1859 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Théodore Géricault Riderless Racers at Rome 1817 oil on canvas Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
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| Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot St Sebastian succoured by Holy Women 1851-73 oil on canvas Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
"In Corot's painting, Sebastian's approaching martyrdom and sainthood are symbolized by putti who carry a palm frond and laurel wreath. As one critic wrote in 1871, "At the moment when St. Sebastian suffers and seems to die, the forest shares in his agony and mourns his death, while at the same time lifting him up to the heavenly spaces of a melancholic sky." Evidence of Corot's reworking of this ambitious canvas over the course of more than 20 years is visible to the naked eye. According to the artist's biographer and close friend, Alfred Robaut, Corot reworked the painting after it was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1853 and then once again in preparation for the Exposition Universelle of 1867. In 1871 he donated the painting to a lottery to raise funds for the orphans of the Franco-Prussian War. The artist finally filled in the upper corners of the composition in 1873."
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| Eugène Delacroix Christ on the Sea of Galilee 1854 oil on canvas Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
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| Eugène Delacroix Lamentation - Christ at the Tomb 1848 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
"The desolation of the mourners gathered around the body of Christ is intensified by the somber landscape, with three crosses dimly visible in the distance. Christ's stark white burial shroud and Saint John's scarlet cloak glow against the dark background, lending force and focus to the scene. The emotional intensity, expressive brushwork, and resonant color of Delacroix's work had a profound influence on later painters. Some years after this picture was painted, the artist observed: "The details are, generally speaking, mediocre and scarcely bear close inspection. On the other hand, the whole arouses an emotion that astonishes even me."
– quote texts from curator's notes at the various custodial museums