- 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: 1867
- Title: Ville d'Avray
- Holder: National Gallery of Art
- Artist: Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
- Movement: Realism
Ville-d'Avray is a commune in the western suburbs of Paris, France. It is located 11.9 km from the center of Paris. The commune is served by the Boulogne-Billancourt prefecture, of the Hauts-de-Seine department.
Traditional narrative or historical painting would have a landscape in the background, but not necessarily an actual landscape. From the 1830s, however, the modern landscape painting genre was born as an increasing number of painters observed and painted landscapes out of doors. Camille Corot was one of the new genre's pioneers. The town of Ville d'Avray, on the outskirts of Paris, and on the property he had inherited from his parents, was blessed with a wealth of natural beauty, and Corot painted its landscapes, with its forests and lakes, again and again throughout his career.
Several of these paintings may be seen on this site in the Corot 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.