We can prove the mirror is deliberate. A preparatory oil study survives in Amsterdam, and in it the geometry works: the barmaid stands at an angle, and her reflection falls where it should. Manet had the correct version in front of him and chose the impossible one for the finished painting. Quick Facts Artist: Édouard…
Claude Monet tried to beat this painting and lost the canvas doing it. In 1865 he began a version six metres wide, meaning to exhibit it at the Salon and outdo Manet at his own subject. He never finished it in time, left it with his landlord as security for unpaid rent, and got it…
For a century and a half the second woman in this painting had no name. Manet knew it — he wrote it in a notebook: Laure, a model who lived on the rue de Vintimille. He painted her three times. Yet catalogues described her for generations only as “the servant,” and her face was routinely…
For several weeks in 1881 the display case stood empty. Degas had shipped the vitrine to the Impressionist exhibition on time, with a label, and then failed to deliver the sculpture. Visitors came, read the catalogue entry, and looked at glass. He installed her only weeks after the opening — by which point the empty…
The old man with the stick is not an anonymous ballet master. He is Jules Perrot — the choreographer of Giselle, one of the greatest dancers of the Romantic ballet, who had partnered Marie Taglioni and toured Europe as a star. By 1874 he was seventy-four, retired and largely forgotten. Degas painted him from a…
One of the men leaning on the railing wrote À la recherche du temps perdu — indirectly. The figure in the top hat at the right is Charles Ephrussi, art historian, collector and one of the models Proust drew on for Charles Swann. Renoir put him in the painting in formal dress, surrounded by people…
This painting was owned by another Impressionist. Gustave Caillebotte – painter, sailor and the man who quietly bankrolled the movement – bought it and left it to the French state in his will. The state hesitated. The bequest of sixty-seven canvases caused a public row, and officials accepted only part of it. This one got…
One of these jars stood in a London studio for forty years. Bernard Leach bought it in Seoul in the 1930s and gave it to the potter Lucie Rie, who kept it on a shelf and looked at it daily. After her death it went to the British Museum. It is probably the single most…
Korea’s two most famous sculptures now stand facing each other in a single darkened room. The National Museum of Korea opened it in 2021 and called it the Room of Quiet Contemplation. There are no cases, no labels on the walls, no decoration — two figures on a floor that slopes very slightly, which makes…
This painting has a date on it. Jeong Seon inscribed the intercalary fifth month of the year sinmi — July 1751 — which is unusual for a painter who rarely dated anything. That same month his closest friend, the poet Yi Byeong-yeon, lay dying. They had known each other for over fifty years and had…
This view does not exist. There is no point anywhere in the Geumgang range from which you could see what Jeong Seon painted — he combined several vantage points into one image, as though hovering above the whole massif. And yet every peak in it is identifiable and can be matched to a map. It…
Mondrian could not stand the colour green. When he dined with friends he asked to sit with his back to the window so he would not have to look at trees. In the courtyard of his studio he had the trunks painted white. Green was the colour of nature, and nature was what he believed…