Masterworks

Mary Cassatt's painting 'The Bath' belongs to at least two artistic traditions that it outsoars with ease: the sentimental scene of domestic life and the child have a dignity and a seriousness that dispels all trace of sentimentality; and the formal strength of the image makes it difficult for us to think of it as mere story-telling...

Most Americans, if you ask them to name some of the most famous pictures in the world, would think at once of the Mona Lisa, but they would soon mention 'American Gothic' by Grant Wood. It is obviously a very popular picture, because it is painted in a conservative, anti-modernist style, though painted in the 20th century, it looks as if it comes from the 19th...

"Paris in 1877 - already a modern city of apartment blocks and wide boulevards, a city rebuilt by Baron Haussmann and recreated in the pictures of the Impressionists. For this picture, the painter Gustave Caillebotte chose to paint the intersection of eight wide streets near the Gare St. Lazare, and to show it on a rainy day..."

"Without knowing that this painting by Robert Delaunay showed the Eiffel Tower and the neighbouring apartment block, one might not so easily guess that this was its subject. Once we do know, of course, it all starts to fall into place. Even so, the picture remains something of a period piece, perceiving the subject as such an exciting one..."