Jules Desbois showed an interest in subjects from Antiquity early in his career, presenting at the 1875 Salon a prize-winning Orpheus that was subsequently acquired by the French state. The subject and pose were not…

Carl Milles was a towering figure in Swedish sculpture in the first half of the twentieth century. His early politically committed style eventually turned more classical. From 1915 on, as Swedish urban culture began to…

The sonorous, clashing rhythms and strident colours which fill Alice Bailly’s work reflect the crucial role music played in her understanding of the world around her. She attended the 1913 premier of Stravinsky’s Rite of…

In the early 1860s, landscape painting was a way for Auguste Renoir, then a fledgling artist, to paint out in the open air. He would set out with Claude Monet, Frédéric Bazille, and Alfred Sisley,…

Félix Vallotton was too old to join up in the First World War, choosing instead to explore a burning question for all artists of the day: how to paint warfare. He tried a number of…

Félix Vallotton, who had been living in Paris since 1882, underwent a crisis in the late 1880s that saw him sink into depression. He faced both financial difficulties and a crippling crisis of artistic faith:…

Here, Albert Anker paints a pivotal administrative figure in every Swiss commune. In nineteenth-century Switzerland, the commune secretary held considerable power thanks to his legal knowledge and many responsibilities, from financial management to recording births,…

Félix Vallotton arrived in Cagnes on November 24, 1920. This painting, dating from early December, is one of the first he completed during his visit. The village where Auguste Renoir had settled some years earlier…

Albert Anker’s charming painting of a family welcoming a new baby dates from the year his own son Ruedi was born. The tightly framed composition draws on the contrast between the white bedding in the…

This painting of a woman choosing a book from a shelf is a far cry from Félix Vallotton’s Nabi interiors featuring the everyday triumphs and tragedies of bourgeois households. It is also very different from…