- Details
- Date: 1879
- Title: Summer's Day
- Holder: National Portrait Gallery
- Artist: Berthe Morisot
- Movement: Impressionism
Summer's Day (or Jour d'eté) depicts two women seated in a row boat, and was painted in the Bois de Boulogne.
Morisot employed a rather unusual palette in this painting. She painted the dark blue coat of the woman on the right with cerulean blue which was rarely used by the Impressionists. The green foliage is painted in a mixture of emerald green, viridian, lead white and cadmium yellow. Cadmium yellow was not yet widely used at this time.
Ownership of the painting, part of the disputed Hugh Lane bequest, has been shared since 1959 between the National Gallery, London and the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin. The painting is currently in the National Gallery.
In 1956, the painting was stolen from the Tate Gallery in London by two Irish students while it was on display there in order to highlight Ireland's claim to the Hugh Lane Bequest. It was later recovered after being left anonymously at the Irish Embassy.
- Details
- Date: 1869
- Title: La Vague (The Wave)
- Holder: Musee des beaux-arts de Lyon
- Artist: Gustave Courbet
- Movement: Realism
Courbet painted many works depicting the coast of the English Channel at Tourville and Etretat in the latter half of the 1860s. This coastline provided the stage for works by Corot, Boudin and Monet, and these artists were dubbed the Saint-Siméon Group after a site in this region. Courbet was one of the most active members of this group. In 1868 Courbet, Manet, Monet and Boudin participated in the International Seascape Exhibition in Le Havre. It is thought that Waves was painted on the coast at Etretat in 1869. Courbet's powerful brushwork can be seen in the expression of the constantly changing waves and sky. The huge waves with their white caps rise up and crash under the heavy sky. The waves eventually crash on the huge crags in the foreground. This transitory moment was captured on canvas by his virtuosity. Courbet created several other works on this subject in the same year.
Seven of these paintings may be found on this site in the Courbet Gallery.
- Details
- Date: 1852-55
- Title: The Horse Fair
- Holder: Metrpolitan Museum of Art
- Artist: Rosa Bonheur
- Movement: Realism
The Horse Fair is an oil-on-canvas painting by French artist Rosa Bonheur, begun in 1852 and first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1853. The artist added some finishing touches in 1855. The large work measures 96.25 in × 199.5 in (244.5 cm × 506.7 cm). It is the artist's most famous painting.
The painting depicts dealers selling horses at the horse market held on the Boulevard de l'Hôpital in Paris. The notorious hospital of Petie-Salpêtrière can be seen in the left background. She dedicated herself to the study of draft horses at the dusty, wild horse market in Paris twice a week between 1850 and 1851 where she made endless sketches, some simple line drawings and others in great detail.
Although some critics described this work as purely an exercise in academic mastery, it is clear too that the artist is an intense observer of both animal and human psychology. Bonheur writes, "The horse is, like man, the most beautiful and most miserable of creatures, only, in the case of man, it is vice or property that makes him ugly. He is responsible for his own decadence, while the horse is only a slave."
The prime version of the painting has been in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since 1887, when it was donated by Cornelius Vanderbilt II.