21 Notable Paintings in the Musée d’Orsay

Gustave Courbet was the founder and leader of Realism, the influential 19th-century literary and artistic movement that focused on ordinary people, everyday themes, and visual verisimilitude. Courbet was particularly interested in France’s peasantry, and he painted many of his most important pictures in his hometown of Ornans. The Artist’s Studio differs significantly in tone and topic from Courbet’s depictions of rural domestic dramas and radiant landscapes, yet his most visually elaborate and densely narrative painting is still considered one of his greatest masterpieces. The painting’s title is a clever pun, since it is both a genuine allegory and Courbet’s allegory of the philosophy behind Realism. At the center of the composition Courbet sits painting one of his more typical canvases, which symbolically represents his ethos of “truth” in painting. The nude model watching him paint acts as the embodiment of unidealized beauty. All around are sights of an artist’s studio such as a skull, a model contorted into a complex pose, and another wearing a traditional Chinese costume and waiting to be called to the platform. Included in the crowd are also portraits of Courbet’s friends, collectors, and patrons. Yet Courbet directs his attention to a little peasant boy, whose opinion seems to matter more to the artist than those of the affluently dressed scholars and collectors observing him, demonstrating the importance for artists to observe and represent the beauty of their contemporary reality. (Ana Finel Honigman)

This celebrated painting was one of the most widely reproduced images in the 19th century. Prints of it were displayed in thousands of Christian households, though it was equally popular with cartoonists, who loved to lampoon its sentimental approach. The Angelus is a prayer that was traditionally recited three times a day in Roman Catholic countries, in the morning, at noon and, as here, at sunset. The name comes from the opening words of a passage relating to the Annunciation—Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae, or “The Angel of the Lord announced to Mary.” Jean-François Millet was not prompted to paint the scene out of religious fervor. He was not a churchgoer, and his private life would certainly have been frowned upon by the authorities (he lived with a common-law wife with whom he had several children). Rather, he was inspired by nostalgia. He came from peasant stock himself, and he remembered the Angelus from his childhood. At the sound of the church bell, his grandmother had always instructed the family to stop working, to remember “those poor dead people.” He also recalled how peasant women seemed much more devout than their menfolk—it is no accident that, in this picture, the woman’s head is bowed and her hands are clasped in a formal attitude of prayer, while her husband simply holds his hat. L’Angélus escaped the controversy that surrounded some of Millet’s other paintings and rapidly became his most famous work. It sold in the 1890s for a huge sum, and its fate was national news in France. (Iain Zaczek)

Long before his association with the Impressionists, Édouard Manet was a controversial figure in the French art world. This was the first of his pictures to create a scandal, when it was exhibited in 1863. A year earlier, Manet’s taste for experiment had received an unexpected boost. His father had died, providing him with a sizable inheritance, which meant that his art did not need to be commercially viable. Neither did he have to be concerned about upsetting his family, since Manet knew that Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) would cause a stir. Most critics acknowledged that Manet was a talented painter but they were baffled by the subject. They were aware that it was loosely based on the Pastoral Concert, a famous 16th-century painting in the Louvre. However, while the original was clearly a fantasy, set in an imaginary past, the clothing in Manet’s picture was both real and modern. This raised questions of morality. Why were two gentlemen sitting beside a naked woman? Manet’s picture was also puzzling in other ways. The pose of the right-hand figure, for example, was copied from an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi. In its original context, the man’s gesture made perfect sense, but in Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe it served no obvious purpose. The figure in the background was equally disconcerting. She was obviously too large, particularly when compared to the nearby boat. Manet, it seemed, was deliberately flouting the laws of perspective, as well as the conventions of composition. (Iain Zaczek)

During the 1860s, Édouard Manet was France’s most notorious artist. In 1865, two years after the furor that surrounded his Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, he scandalized the public once again by exhibiting the provocative Olympia. In both pictures, Manet was reinventing an Old Master painting, translating it into a modern idiom. In doing so, he was well aware that he was crossing the boundaries of contemporary taste. So, when Olympia was shown at the Salon of 1865, the model was derided as “the Queen of Spades stepping out of the bath.” The controversy stemmed from 19th-century attitudes to the nude. Here, the problem lay not in the nakedness of the model, but in its context. Manet’s source, for example, was a famous Renaissance painting, the Venus of Urbino (1538) by Titian, which was deemed perfectly respectable. Similarly, many 19th-century artists were able to exhibit highly erotic pictures of Venus or Diana without censure. Provided that the subject was presented as a classical goddess or nymph, however thin the disguise, nudity was not an issue. Manet’s picture was shocking, because the nude was modern. As a result, many critics interpreted her as a prostitute. Worse still, her direct gaze placed the spectator in the role of the prostitute’s client. Manet did nothing to counter this interpretation. The woman is wearing a single slipper, which was a conventional symbol for loss of innocence, while the orchid in her hair was believed to have the qualities of an aphrodisiac. (Iain Zaczek)

Gustave Moreau was one of the pioneers of the Symbolist movement, which played a significant role in French art in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Orpheus was one of his early successes, winning him official recognition. During this period, the most prominent artistic rebels (the Realists, the Impressionists) reacted against academic art, with its clichéd depictions of classical myths and historical scenes. However, artists such as Moreau preferred to reinvent this approach rather than supplant it. Orpheus was a mythical Thracian poet famed for his musical ability, who could charm not only humans but animals, trees, and even rocks. He died when he spurned the Maenads, the wild female followers of the wine god Dionysus. Angered, they tore him limb from limb, and cast his remains into the River Hebron. But his head continued to sing plaintively as it floated away. Moreau reinvented this scene as a means of stimulating the viewer’s imagination. In a dreamlike setting, the musician’s head, recovered by a young woman, has become fused with his instrument. For some, this represented a timeless image of the martyred artist, undervalued when alive but venerated after his death, though Moreau denied any such specific meaning. The provocative imagery he developed—severed heads, listless poets, androgynous men, and sinister femmes fatale—recur frequently in his works and appealed to both the Symbolists and the Surrealists. (Iain Zaczek)

Edgar Degas started his career painting relatively traditional-looking portraits, but while The Bellelli Family seems such a work, it bears clear signs of his mature style and is extremely unusual and accomplished for a younger artist. Some of Degas’s relatives lived in Italy, and this picture shows his aunt Laure, her husband, Baron Bellelli, and her two daughters, Giula and Giovanna. It was painted while Degas was in Italy for some years, studying the masters. There is an echo of Flemish portraiture such as those by Anthony van Dyck in this work, but Degas has added his characteristic “freeze-frame” approach. Everyone looks in different directions, and only one of them out toward the viewer, while the baron turns in his seat but essentially has his back to us. One of the girls has her leg crossed up under her and the little family dog disappears partly out of frame. This is on one hand a fleeting moment, but it is also a very truthful family portrait. Each family member remains stoically isolated in their own space. Laure is in mourning after the recent death of her father, whose portrait hangs on the back wall, while her husband, an Italian patriot living in exile in Florence, sits in profile. The pictures, mirrors, reflections, and doorway, plus the fairly restricted somber colors, heighten the claustrophobic mood. Already Degas has established the core of his approach, where certain things seem casual and others very carefully studied and constructed. He said of himself: “No art was ever less spontaneous than mine.” (Ann Kay)

As the 19th century drew to a close, the powerful elite of traditionalists who controlled the galleries and salons of Paris held the work of the artists depicted in this painting in contempt. Threatened by the accelerating shift toward Impressionism, the establishment rejected more and more of the new works. Every exhibition provoked alternative exhibitions featuring the work of the avant-garde, to the fury of the public and critics alike. Édouard Manet, who is seated at the center of the composition staring defiantly out at the viewer, was a figurehead for this new movement and bore the brunt of much reactionary criticism. For Henri Fantin-Latour, his friend and admirer, the decision to paint A Studio at Batignolles constituted a personal petition in favor of Manet’s genius and the desire to capture a moment of revolution in the history of art. It has the feel of an early daguerreotype, thanks to the quality of light and the carefully posed stance of each subject. Although he was closely allied with the revolutionaries depicted here, including Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet, Fantin-Latour was in fact a far more traditional painter than any of them, and this work is therefore a brave statement of support. Toward the end of his life, Fantin-Latour became increasingly absorbed in music and developed a passion for Richard Wagner. The composer inspired Fantin-Latour’s more imaginative works that, both in subject and style, were to exert a significant influence on the Symbolist movement. (Roger Wilson)

A talented early Impressionist, Jean-Frédéric Bazille’s work is little known due to his untimely death—he was killed in the Franco-Prussian War, at the age of 29. His works exhibit a distinct but often varied style, as Bazille sought to create his own artistic identity. His paintings show a freshness, great attention to detail, understanding of anatomy, and realistic facial expression. Had he lived longer, it is likely his name would be as well known today as that of major contemporaries. Born in Montpellier, Bazille moved to Paris as a young man, where he studied at the studio of Swiss painter Charles Gleyre. His fellow pupils included Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, and Alfred Sisley. Gleyre was an exponent of plein-air painting, and Bazille embraced this concept of painting in the open, rather than a studio. Bazille was from a wealthy family and was studying to become a doctor. He gave a great deal of financial assistance to Monet. During the 1860s, he gave up his medical studies in favor of art. He shared studios with Monet and Renoir, and he exhibited at the Paris Salon from 1866 onward. Among his finest paintings are the sexually charged Toilette (1869–70), After the Bath (1870), and The Improvised Field Hospital (1865), actually a portrait of Monet recovering from a leg injury. Bazille’s later works were strongly influenced by Édouard Manet. Bazille’s Studio depicts Bazille’s own studio. Among the figures in this scene are Manet, Monet, Renoir, and the writer Émile Zola. The tallest figure is Bazille himself, added in by Manet after Bazille’s death. (Lucinda Hawksley)

The singular vision that James McNeill Whistler brought to bear on his Nocturnes, the series of paintings that largely consisted of views of the River Thames, he also applied to the genre of portraiture. Moreover, what connected the two series was an indubitable conviction that it was the task of the artist to reveal what resided underneath the surface appearance of observed, empirical reality. First exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1872, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (also called Portrait of the Artist’s Mother) was acquired by the French state in 1891. Whistler presents a pared-down, analytical study organized around a series of discrete and overlapping axes, both vertical and horizontal. Indeed, it is only the contour of Anna Whistler’s body that provides any form of visual contrast with and visual respite from the painting’s overarching angularity. Although the formal qualities of the painting provide some form of visual counterpoint, the actual appearance of Anna Whistler, seen in profile, remains consonant with the painting’s overarching pictorial style—both are foregrounded by an austerity and economy of means, and both, in effect, are lacking any extraneous, unnecessary detail or embellishment. Arrangement is unprecedented and remarkable when one considers that the painting also functions as a portrait. If the artist’s Nocturne series anticipated the experiments carried out under the rubric of lyrical abstraction, then Arrangement predates a related movement, Geo-abstraction, by at least half a century. (Craig Staff)

The first part of the 1870s saw Edgar Degas defining his style, and the dance pictures he painted at this time—often “through-the-keyhole” glimpses of backstage life—were radical for the times. Sharing the Impressionists’ passion for contemporary subject matter, Degas’s depiction of the dramatic world of ballet and theater added a certain titillation. But he was also an outstanding draftsman who had great admiration for the Old Masters and the work of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. This helped to foster the fascination with human forms that is so clearly present here. This painting, one of two of the same scene, shows dancers waiting to be assessed by ballet master Jules Perrot. Degas prepared assiduously by making numerous drawings of dancers posing for him in his studio. His lively brushwork and light, bright colors were typical of the Impressionists. Their use of color was partly influenced by Japanese prints, which also made dramatic use of the “cut-off” composition—where the subject is chopped off at the frame—that Degas deploys so cleverly here and throughout his work. Degas was heavily influenced by photography and by overturning traditional compositional rules. This work looks like a snapshot, but it is meticulously planned, with the eye drawn instantly to the arresting foreground group of two dancers before being taken into the picture by the receding floor planks. Degas admired the Dutch school and here shows the same ability to combine both traditional and modern approaches to give a new status to everyday life. (Ann Kay)

Dancers, the theater, the circus, horse races, and here a bar—all the kinds of potentially seedy subjects that Edgar Degas painted. This glimpse of real, modern life was a little too modern and real for many. Originally called In a Café, it acquired the title Absinthe (which refers both to a highly alcoholic beverage and those who drink it) when shown at the Grafton Gallery, London, in 1893, where it caused a massive stir. For some, this was a ghastly affront to Victorian morals. How could what was obviously a sex worker (drinking absinthe) and her equally depraved sidekick (drinking a hangover cure) in a backstreet Paris bar possibly be a fit subject for a painting? Even more scandalous, the couple were well known—actress Ellen André and bohemian artist Marcellin Désboutin. Others thought it a radical masterpiece. What was Degas’s motivation? Some see the slumped shoulders and glazed eyes of addiction here, others an off-guard moment of pensive companionship. It is unlikely that Degas was warning of the horrors of alcoholism, and more probable that he was capturing a truthful snapshot of modern life. The artist produces a powerful composition by placing his main subject off-center with a large area of “blank” space in the foreground—something he often did. The tones are somber but balanced harmoniously across the canvas, with dramatic use of shadow. Those who judged this to be a scrappy little image of street life failed to see it as the technically adept piece of portraiture and reportage that it undoubtedly is. (Ann Kay)

This scene shows farm buildings on a hillside called La Côte des Boeufs, near Pontoise. It was painted when Camille Pissarro, often considered the father of French Impressionism, was spending much of his time in this rural area, northwest of Paris. He painted many landscapes here, often in the company of Paul Cézanne, and the two had a profound influence on each other. What may seem a charming country scene is far from straightforward from an artistic point of view. Pissarro chooses to show houses glimpsed through a screen of trees—a difficult task, but the screen makes the viewer’s eye move quickly beyond it, into the heart of the painting to try and sort out the many layers of color. The artist has built the painting up from many short brushstrokes, sometimes in thick layers, in a wide range of colors. From a distance the colors harmonize, many of the individual brushstrokes disappear, and the scene comes fully alive. The center of the composition is strongly horizontal, thanks to the roofs and the shape of the hillside, while on the right the buildings are at an angle to the picture surface and the hill slopes down. This gives the picture movement, helping the eye to pick objects out of the pattern of strokes. Pissarro was reconsidering his style at the time of this painting. He experimented with many approaches through his career, but what is clear in The Red Roofs is his devotion to making art that was an almost subconscious reaction to the scene before him, and to recording the pure effects of color and tone in nature, a theme central to Impressionism. (Ann Kay)

In the early 1880s, Belgian artist James Ensor worked on traditional subjects, such as portraits, still lifes, and seascapes. His work was described as “trash” by one critic. With constant rejection, his insecure personality became more inward-looking, and he increasingly blended reality with dreams. His interior paintings of the period show this transition. They evoke unsettling moods through his use of light and subtle color. This work depicts a room in his parents’ house. Heavy curtains screen the sunlight, excluding the outside world and the atmosphere is eerie and oppressive. A muted, almost imaginary light pervades the darkness, lending a sense of drama to the dismal atmosphere. The light alienates objects such as the fabric loops holding back the curtains, transforming them into strange birdlike figures that appear to watch over the silent young woman on the bed. (Susie Hodge)

Henri Fantin-Latour was a painter of romantic figure subjects, portrait groups, and still lifes. He received his earliest training from his father, a portrait painter, and in 1850 entered the studio of Lecoq de Boisbaudran. Later he studied under Gustave Courbet at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Fantin-Latour was known for his regular attendance at the Louvre, where he made countless studies of the works of the great masters. In this painting the artist depicts a simple subject—roses in a dish—and finds within it a delicacy and ephemeral beauty. He painted with an elegant restraint that greatly appealed to his growing number of supporters and collectors in England. Fantin-Latour was a man of contradictions, for while his own work was heavily indebted to the Old Masters he socialized with the young and daring new artists of the time. Also, despite Fantin-Latour’s desire to paint images of fantasy and reverie inspired by music, it was his flower paintings that became his signature subject matter. Greatly admired by his contemporaries, Jacques Emile Blanche wrote, “Fantin studied each flower, each petal, its grain, its tissue, as if it were a human face…." Eventually, however, Fantin-Latour began to feel frustrated and constrained by the focus on what he considered to be lesser facet of his artistic practice, and the flower paintings, which he was almost creating under duress, betrayed his boredom with the subject. Yet he was not able financially to give up the lucrative market for these works for many years. (Roger Wilson)

Finnish painter Albert Edelfelt studied in Helsinki and Antwerp before being lured to Paris by the prospect of fame. Most of his paintings were portraits, and his bright, informal, and Impressionistic canvases show the influence of the contemporary vogue for Realism on his art. His portrait of the scientist Louis Pasteur in his laboratory is his most well known work. Edelfelt was fascinated by Pasteur, and he spent several months studying his work before he began painting the portrait of the chemist. Here, the scientist is seen dressed for an evening out yet still engrossed in an experiment. His elegance and dedication are rendered as desirable qualities. This portrait expertly demonstrates how an artist can balance the demands of representing his sitter while also creating an arresting image regardless of biographical context. (Ana Finel Honigman)

Vincent van Gogh did the first version of this painting in the autumn of 1888, during one of the happiest interludes in his life. He believed that his move to Arles would mark a new chapter in his art. He asked his brother, Theo, to persuade Paul Gauguin to come and join him and rapidly painted a series of pictures to hang on the walls and create a welcoming atmosphere for his new guest. To a large extent, these paintings were designed simply as decorations for the house, but van Gogh also wanted to show that his own works could bear comparison with those of Gauguin’s, whose talent he was in awe of. In Van Gogh’s Bedroom at Arles, many of the items are shown in pairs—two chairs, two pillows, two pairs of pictures—signaling his expectation of companionship. Yet his friendship with Gauguin turned sour just two months after his arrival, and van Gogh had a mental breakdown. Recuperating in an asylum in St. Rémy, he painted this third version of the painting; it was for his mother. Although structurally very similar to the first two, certain details are significantly different. In the first version, van Gogh painted the floor a rosy pink; here it is a brownish-gray color, reflecting his more depressed mood. The two top right-hand paintings are different in each version as well. In the first two versions, the portraits are indistinct and cut off. In this version, though, they are very much discernible—the one on the left is van Gogh himself and the one on the right is of his sister, Wil. Ten months after he painted this picture, van Gogh killed himself. (Iain Zaczek)

The last picture Georges Seurat painted was this unfinished, stylized depiction of the Parisian entertainment Cirque Fernando. Seurat considered it good enough to exhibit in 1891, and it was on show when he died suddenly of diphtheria that year. By the time he painted The Circus, Seurat had abandoned his early interest in Naturalism. Whereas his adoption of the pointilliste style of dot painting had been inspired by the science of optics, here he explores the emotional qualities of color and line. The dashes of primary red, blue, and yellow are not deployed to create an illusion of artificial lighting but with expressive intent. Where Seurat’s earlier large-scale works had been static, here all is movement. The arc of the ring and the foreground clown’s curving streamer or curtain set up a vertiginous movement continued by the acrobatic bareback rider and the leaping clown. (Reg Grant)

The Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir depicted Parisian daily life with the feathery touch of his brush and a palette heavy on pastels. His lush paintings of jolly crowds flirting and drinking, angelic children playing, voluptuous women bathing, and mothers cuddling their infants are still astoundingly popular. Young Girls at the Piano is one of Renoir’s most enduring images and an excellent example of his technique, known during this time as his “pearly” period, in which he replaced his linear drawing techniques with a more fluid brushstroke. In late 1891 or early 1892, he was invited by the French government to contribute to a new museum in Paris, the Musée du Luxembourg, devoted to the work of living artists. He produced five canvases in an attempt to perfect his vision of the intimacy of bourgeois domestic life. (Ana Finel Honigman)

Peter Vilhelm Ilsted was one of the foremost artists in Denmark during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His work expresses the essence of contemporary life in Copenhagen, and his figures are removed from the political and social turmoil that affected southern Denmark at the time. Tranquillity, neatness, contentment, and peace are the main subjects of his work, and his figures merely appear to emphasize this. Heavily influenced by 17th-century Dutch genre painting, Ilsted belonged to the Copenhagen interior school, which concentrated on painting interiors bathed in subtle light. Ilsted’s accomplished style and use of color articulate the tonal gradation and shimmering highlights of this quiet interior. The sparsely furnished room is delicately lit by diffused sunlight filtering through the window. The still coolness of the room, the dappling of light over the walls, furniture, and floors, and the tactile appeal of the fabrics and glass together create equanimity and quietude. Sensitively applied paint in muted and understated colors emphasizes the plainness of the interior, while minimal furniture and a few homely objects contribute to the simplistic composition. Nothing dramatic or assertive disrupts the atmosphere of peaceful serenity as the girl quietly replaces a jug in a dresser, going about her daily business. The female figure often plays an important role in Ilsted’s work. This intimate and voyeuristic style echoes Edgar Degas’s works and emerged as photography became more accessible. (Susie Hodge)

Although Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was raised in the country, by the 1880s he was immersed in the Parisian scene and had become a true city dweller. During this period Lautrec was fascinated by the “life beneath the surface” of Paris after dark. He drew his inspiration from the cafes, circus, brothels, dance halls, and the people—especially the women whose swirling-colored forms were recreated through his paints and pencils. Lautrec sometimes lodged in brothels for weeks at a time, and the sex workers came to regard him as a friend. He concentrated on depicting the everyday aspects of their lives and was particularly sensitive in depicting the lesbian relationships that often developed between them. In the early 1890s Lautrec made a series of drawings and paintings of lesbians in their intimate surroundings, and The Bed is part of this series. Here he has created an image of infinite ease and tenderness as the two women talk to each other, and he represents their lives with no attempt to moralize or glamorize. He also sets up a divergent dynamic between the voyeur and the sympathizer. Lautrec was primarily a documenter of character, and his work is full of human sympathy: he often captured the fatigue masked by powdered faces, or the weariness of the sex worker at the end of the evening. There are few artists who equaled Lautrec in terms of sensitivity to subject combined with a strident, bold use of color, line, and movement. (Tamsin Pickeral)

In the 1880s, Edgar Degas’s sight began to deteriorate, and he turned increasingly to working with pastels, a medium he enjoyed. Women had always been a favorite subject, and his later work included numerous studies of women in highly intimate moments, bathing and doing their toilette—as in this pastel piece. This work appeared at the eighth Impressionist exhibition, in 1886, and as before, certain people were shocked. This is not romantic, idealized womanhood, but a more truthful depiction of a woman’s body, in a pose that some considered vulgar and voyeuristic. However, there is a delicacy and vulnerable beauty in the way this picture shares a very private moment. Far from being animal-like, as some critics said, the crouching position was based on the “crouching Aphrodite” pose of classical sculpture, and the body’s lines echo the classicism of Degas’s early training. True to form, Degas’s picture seeks to freeze a truthful moment in modern life, with the unorthodox viewpoint, chopped-off composition, and strange perspective of Japanese prints. In his later years his work moved closer to the Impressionists in some ways—seen here in the purer coloration, sparkling natural lighting, and interesting textures. Here is a timeless classical nude and traditional still life so seamlessly blended with a modern approach that it stands as one of the artist’s finest, bravest works. Little wonder that Camille Pissarro counted him the “greatest artist of our epoch.” (Ann Kay)