Norton Simon Museum （诺顿·西蒙博物馆）的欧洲绘画藏品欣赏

Art Historian

诺顿

帕萨迪纳

博物馆

西蒙

绘画

藏品

雕塑

花车游行

电视直播

雕塑公园

The Norton Simon Museum is an art museum located in Pasadena, California, United States. It was previously known as the Pasadena Art Institute and the Pasadena Art Museum.

诺顿·西蒙博物馆是一家位于美国加州帕萨迪纳的艺术博物馆。它的前身是帕萨迪纳美术馆和帕萨迪纳艺术博物馆。诺顿·西蒙的藏品包括：欧洲绘画、雕塑和挂毯；亚洲雕塑、绘画和木刻印刷品；以及陈设了众多雕塑家作品的雕塑公园，环绕着一个大池塘。 该馆还包含西蒙·诺顿剧场，日常放映电影、举办讲座、专题讨论会以及舞蹈和音乐表演。博物馆位于玫瑰花车游行的沿线，其独特的棕色瓦片外墙会出现在电视直播的背景中。

2016/04/24 Cody 陪我去那里参观游览。

Cody sits at sculpture garden displaying many sculptors’ work in a landscape setting around a large pond in Norton SImon Museum.

The thinker1880

Auguste Rodin (French, 1840-1917)

Medium: Bronze, Edition of 12, Cast No. 11

Dimensions: 79 x 38 x 59 in. (200.7 x 96.5 x 149.9 cm)

The image of The Thinker is not that of a passive dreamer, but of a man actively engaged in creative thought. Thinking has been expressed not only through the meditative attitude of the body, but through the effort of every muscle. As Rodin said, "What makes my Thinker think is that he thinks not only with his brain, with his knitted brow, his distended nostrils and compressed lips, but with every muscle of his arms, back and legs, with his clenched fists and gripping toes."

Bacchante Supported by Bacchus and a Faun 1795

Clodion (Claude Michel) (French, 1738-1814)

Medium: Terracotta

Dimensions: 20 in. (50.8 cm)

Claude Michel, known as Clodion, was one of the most creative and technically gifted French sculptors in the second half of the eighteenth century. Although skillful at executing monumental sculpture in marble, his genius was expressed most fully in his small terracottas as shown in Bacchante Supported by Bacchus and a Faun. In this exuberant ensemble a young Bacchante, or female follower of Bacchus, is playfully carried aloft by the god of wine and a faun. Clodion fuses the movement and energy of the Baroque seventeenth century with antique themes in a lighter, more delicate and more subtly sensual style than previously achieved by contemporaries.

European art: 14th-16th centurie

Raphael, Madonna and Child with the Book, 1503

Madonna and child 1340

Paolo Veneziano (Italian, active 1333-1358)

Medium: Tempera and gold leaf on panel

Dimensions: 43-5/8 x 24-3/8 in. (110.8 x 61.9 cm) Paolo Veneziano's Madonna and Child marries the Venetian aestheticbased on color and its unifying, deive aspectwith the reserved, hieratic Byzantine style. The Christ Child, looking closely at His mother, holds a palm branch, symbolizing His future entry into Jerusalem and subsequent death. The goldfinch, perched on the Madonnas hand, is a bird associated with thorns and thistles and so is a further allusion to the Passion of Christ. The artist has woven these solemn reminders of Christs sacrifice into a visually rich web of color and line.

Coronation of the Virgin Altarpiece 1344

Guariento di Arpo (Italian, c.1310-c.1370)

Medium: Tempera and gold leaf on panels (32)

Dimensions: overall: 86 x 104-3/8 in. (218.4 x 265.1 cm)

Marys coronation as Queen of Heaven occupies the center of the altarpiece, with smaller narrative scenes and representations of saints and angels surrounding it. The altarpiece illustrates the major events of the New Testament in pictorial form. It likely occupied the place of honor above the main altar in the church of San Martino in Piove di Sacco, outside of Padua.

Guariento di Arpo worked in Padua, where the influence of Giotto was primary. Like his famous predecessor, Guariento endows his figures with solidity and naturalism. His own highly individual expression is evident in the refined linear technique and limpid color, which anticipate the International Gothic style. The gold-leaf background emphasizes the spiritual nature of these Christian mysteries.

Branchini Madonna 1427

Giovanni di Paolo (Italian, 1403-1482)

Medium: Tempera and gold leaf on panel

Dimensions: 72 x 39 in. (182.9 x 99.1 cm)

Credit Line:The Norton Simon Foundation

Accession Number:F.1978.01.P

Copyright:© The Norton Simon Foundation

"Surrounded by multi-winged seraphim, the Virgin Mary is presented holding the infant Jesus who reaches tenderly for his mother and slightly touches her diaphanous veil. God the Father is also surrounded by a heavenly host above and gestures in both blessing and judgment. The dove representing the Holy Spirit radiates divine light. A variety of luminous effects were achieved with stamping and tooling gold, and as a result of the inclusion of glass gems set within Marys crown. Seen in candlelight, the whole ensemble would have been spectacularly spiritual. Attention to such natural details as the flowers strewn beneath Mary and the sumptuous fabrics contributes to the overall splendor and the theological message. Roses, carnations, marigolds and corn-flowers, for example, are symbols associated with the Holy Family and the Trinity and interestingly are also elements woven into the textiles. The painting is in a fine state of preservation. It is rare for a panel of this scale to have survived almost completely intact. The artist inscribed on the bottom of the frame in Latin "Giovanni of Siena son of Paolo painted [this in] 1427." Additional inions include the opening lines of the Ave Maria and a poignant petition written within Marys halo: "I painted this for you. Virgin, Protect this man."

Resurrection, 1455

Dieric Bouts (Flemish, c.1420-1475)

Medium: Distemper on linen

Dimensions: 35-3/8 x 29-1/4 in. (89.9 x 74.3 cm)

One of the leading Northern European artists of his generation, Dieric Bouts favored a contemplative approach to painting that embodied an austere, powerful spirituality. As Christ rises from the tomb, the drama and theatricality of the moment are stilled by His serene yet intent gaze and by the lyrical landscape background. The scene unfolds in front of a wide, placid expanse of land, depicted with a sure-handed knowledge of luminous, atmospheric perspective. Successful and revered in his lifetime for his approach to landscape painting as well as his half-figure images of the Madonna and Child, the Haarlem-born Bouts oversaw an active workshop in Louvain after the 1440sthat is, for the majority of his career. His work draws from a variety of Northern and Southern Netherlandish predecessors, most notably Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden.

The Resurrection belongs to a now-dismembered four- or five-part altarpiece that tells the story of the life of Jesus. Other pieces of the original ensemble are now at the National Gallery in London (The Entombment) and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles (The Annunciation).

Madonna and Child with Adoring Angel 1468

Sandro (Alessandro Filipepi) Botticelli (Italian, c.1444-1510)

Medium:Tempera on panel

Dimensions: 35 x 26-3/4 in. (88.9 x 68 cm)

Botticelli was one of the most individual and influential painters in Florence at the end of the fifteenth century. His melodic, linear designs have been greatly admired and are readily apparent in this panel. This composition is unusually sculptural for the artist. Forms are substantial and their disposition leads the eye into a space firmly defined by the stone parapet and middle ground arcade. The rounded hills of the landscape in the background complete the plasticity of the design. In this work, lyricism is bound to the deion of natural data and the suggestion of human grace. The subtle combination of function and decoration in Botticelli's use of line provides the poetry of his paintings.

Portrait of Joerg Fugger1474

Giovanni Bellini (Italian, c.1430-1516)

Medium: Oil on panel

Dimensions: 10-1/4 x 7-7/8 in. (26 x 20 cm)

Jeorg Fugger, the heir of a wealthy German banking family, was born in Augsburg in 1453. Depicted here at age 21, he wears in his hair a garland of small blue blossoms, which designates him as a student of ancient learning. This portrait is notable on several accounts: it is the first known portrait by Giovanni Bellini, the greatest Venetian painter of the early Italian Renaissance. It is also one of the first paintings by an Italian artist executed in oil rather than tempera. Further, the portraits objective realism departs from the stiff, stylized, late-Gothic tradition of portraiture that then prevailed in Venice.

Bellinis compositional and stylistic innovations can be traced to a variety of local Italian sources, including his brother-in-law, Andrea Mantegna, and his father, Jacopo. He also demonstrates an awareness of the work of a Southern Italian painter, Antonello da Messina, who was himself present in Venice in the mid-1470s. It is unclear whether this latter artists work informed Bellini directly, or whether both drew from Northern European influences that were already present in Italy by the mid-fifteenth century. Works by Rogier van der Weyden, Hugo van der Goes, Jan van Eyck, Petrus Christus, Dieric Bouts and Hans Memling were certainly commissioned by Italian patrons and were readily available to Bellini, who, especially in his portraiture, emulated the three-quarter rather than profile view, set against a neutral background or later alla fiamminga, that is, "in the Flemish style," with sky and landscape. Bellinis portrait of the young Fugger, who resided in Venice in 1474, when this panel was commissioned, marks the seminal moment that would inform portrait painting, as well as devotional images, in Italy for the next generation of artists such as Raphael, Leonardo, and Fra Bartolomeo who followed in his creative wake.

Until a restoration of the panel was undertaken in the early 20th century, the back of the painting bore this inion, written in a Venetian dialect: Jeorg Fugger a di XX di Zugno MCCCCLXXIIII [Jeorg Fugger on this day of 20 June 1474].

Saints Benedict and Apollonia 1483

Filippino Lippi (Italian, 1457-1504)

Medium: Tempera glazed with oil on panel

Dimensions: 62 x 23-5/8 in. (157.5 x 60 cm)

This panel, along with its companion Saints Paul and Frediano, were cited admiringly by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Artist when he saw them in the Church of San Ponziano in Lucca, where they formed an ensemble, flanking a polychrome sculpture of St. Anthony Abbot. St. Benedict, the founder of Western Christian monasticism, accompanies St. Apollonia, a third-century martyr and the principle female saint associated with the Benedictine order. She holds the instruments of her torture. Paul the Apostle bears a sword, symbol of his death, and St. Frediano, patron saint of Lucca accompanies him.

An exceptional draftsman and fluid painter, Lippi easily absorbed the multiple artistic trends in painting that made Florence, and the whole of Tuscany, such a vital art center in the fifteenth century. The beautiful landscape background, particularly the fortified city and anecdotal details, reveal Lippis admiration of Northern European art and the inspiration of Hans Memling whose work was seen in Florence by 1480. Lippis decorative linear manner, filtered through Botticelli, is integrated with the representation of mass and his knowledge of Leonardos studies of physiognomy is resident in the individualized features of each saint. Indeed the melancholic grace of the figures is almost unprecedented in Italian painting at this date, and extraordinary in light of the artists age of twenty-five.

Saints Benedict and Apollonia// Saints Paul and Frediano 1483

Filippino Lippi (Italian, 1457-1504)

Medium: Tempera glazed with oil on panel

Dimensions: 62-1/8 x 23-1/2 in. (157.8 x 59.7 cm)

This 2 panel, were cited admiringly by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Artist when he saw them in the Church of San Ponziano in Lucca, where they formed an ensemble, flanking a polychrome sculpture of St. Anthony Abbot. St. Benedict, the founder of Western Christian monasticism, accompanies St. Apollonia, a third-century martyr and the principle female saint associated with the Benedictine order. She holds the instruments of her torture. Paul the Apostle bears a sword, symbol of his death, and St. Frediano, patron saint of Lucca accompanies him.

An exceptional draftsman and fluid painter, Lippi easily absorbed the multiple artistic trends in painting that made Florence, and the whole of Tuscany, such a vital art center in the fifteenth century. The beautiful landscape background, particularly the fortified city and anecdotal details, reveal Lippis admiration of Northern European art and the inspiration of Hans Memling whose work was seen in Florence by 1480. Lippis decorative linear manner, filtered through Botticelli, is integrated with the representation of mass and his knowledge of Leonardos studies of physiognomy is resident in the individualized features of each saint. Indeed the melancholic grace of the figures is almost unprecedented in Italian painting at this date, and extraordinary in light of the artists age of twenty-five.

Madonna and Child with Saints Jerome and Francis 1500

Francesco Raibolini called il Francia (Italian, c.1450-1517)

Medium: Oil on panel, transferred to canvas, retransferred to panel

Dimensions: 24-3/4 x 18-5/8 in. (62.9 x 47.3 cm) Francia, a native of Bologna, was born into a family of painters and goldsmiths. His paintings are technically accomplished and his rich, high-key coloring was praised by Vasari, the Renaissance biographer of the artists, who noted that "people ran like mad to see them." Altarpieces, especially those representing the Virgin and Child enthroned with Saints, were his specialty. Stylistically eclectic, the artist absorbed contemporary developments from Venice, Florence and Umbria, as well as Flemish painting Here, the importance of his two Umbrian counterparts, Perugino and Raphael, are evident in the tender, poetic expression of Francias figures. This intimate sacra conversazione (a holy conversation between the Madonna, Child and Saints,) where the Child is presented on a parapet, is representative of the type of private devotional images found in homes and convents.

Bust Portrait of a Courtesan 1509

Giorgione (Giorgio da Castelfranco) (Italian, 1477/78-1510)

Medium: Oil on panel, transferred to canvas

Dimensions: 12-1/2 x 9-3/8 in. (31.8 x 23.8 cm)

The subject of this intriguing painting remains unclear. The informal arrangement of the figures clothing, the delicate, floral head wreath and jeweled element have led to her designation as a courtesan or bella, a genre of idealized, female busts invented by the innovative painter known as Giorgione. Her likeness should not be viewed as a portrait in the real sense because Giorgione, as well as Titian and Leonardo da Vinci, developed variations on the close-up, half-length personification of female beauty. Such sensuous portrayals were meant to be affective, and expressive of a thought or a mood. They correspond to similar preoccupations in the literary world where the celebration of female beauty in sonnets was highly fashionable. 

Overall, the poetic mood, suggestion of movement, and interest in morbido, (softness), were characteristics shared by both Giorgione and the young Titian at this moment in their careers. In fact, since the mid-19th century, some Venetian painting specialists have suggested Titian as the author. Head of a Venetian Girl, which has an illustrious pedigree, was included in the landmark "Art Treasures of Great Britain" held in Manchester, England in 1857. One of the largest exhibitions ever mounted, it greatly influenced the presentation of objects in public collections according to period and national schools.

The Coronation of the Virgin 1515

Gerard David (Netherlandish, c.1460-1523)

Medium: Oil on panel

Dimensions: 27-7/8 x 21-1/4 in. (70.8 x 54 cm)

The subject paraphrases the deion of the Woman of the Apocalypse in Revelations 12:1: "A woman adorned with the sun, standing on the moon with twelve stars on her head for a crown." The sumptuous, if archaic, gold background refers to the celestial radiance of the sun. Two angels hold a crown above Mary's head, signifying her position as Queen of Heaven. The crescent moon (chastity), the white rose (purity) and her costume all allude to the Immaculate Conception, the doctrine that Mary was conceived without Original Sin. Gerard David based his image of Mary of the Heavens on a lost Deipara Virgo (Virgin Immaculate) painting by the Flemish master Hugo van der Goes, but infuses his composition with generous, atmospheric lighting and sfumato, balanced modeling, delicate coloring, and a refined, draftsman-like quality of the faces, all of which are characteristic of his late style. Technical analysis has revealed that David sketched a highly finished underdrawing on the panel before he undertook the painting of the composition.

In Bruges, by the second half of the fifteenth century, the theme of the Immaculate Conception was increasingly popular, especially after 1476, when Pope Sixtus IV decreed it a feast day on the church calendar, promising indulgences to anyone who prayed to the image. David fortifies the idea of the Immaculate Mary as intercessor by depicting her in a heavenly zone above four supplicants. The artists gift as a portraitist is admirably realized here in these four male figures, which have variously been identified as prophets, the four Doctors of the Church or the four Evangelists. All are undoubtedly based on portraits of living men. The young man on the left may well depict John the Evangelist, who is generally credited with being the author of Revelations.

Adam and Eve 1530

Lucas Cranach the Elder (German, 1472-1553)

Medium: Oil on panel (one of a pair)

Dimensions: 75 x 27-1/2 in. (190.5 x 69.9 cm)

The son of a painter, Cranach was born in the town of Kronach in Franconia. In 1504, Frederick the Wise of Saxony called him to Wittenberg, where he became Court Painter. Cranach received his noble patron's coat of arms in 1508. This emblem, a winged serpent bearing a ring in its mouth, can be seen on the trunk of the tree beside Adam.

His treatment of forms and space is rather abstract, even though our initial impression may focus on their apparent naturalism. The highly linear, ornamental manner, and corresponding emotional detachment, are consistent with the Mannerist aesthetic of the sixteenth century. The sensual body of Eve, for instance, is stylized and defined by unlikely anatomical proportions. The spiraling curves of her hair have a life of their own. Cranach envisioned her as a temptress, and her blushing cheeks and small breasts are clearly meant to allure. This secular treatment of an Old Testament subject was meant for pleasure rather than instruction. Adam and Eve were probably painted for a member of the court of the Elector and intended to hang in domestic surroundings.

The Flight into Egypt 1544-45

Jacopo Bassano (Italian, 1510-1592)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: framed: 60-5/8 x 90 in. (154.0 x 228.6 cm); canvas: 48-1/2 x 77-1/4 in. (123.2 x 196.2 cm)

Jacopo Bassano specialized in the production of Biblical, pastoral scenes featuring peasants and animals. His paintings were admired for their richness of color and complex designs. Here the procession is animated by a strong sense of diagonal movement, the swirling draperies and the emphatically gesturing angel. Only the Madonna and Child, the physical and spiritual apex of the composition, appear tranquil. The sublimely eccentric angel leads them into undefined, even precipitous territory. His right hand points to a sprouting tree, a symbol of Christ's resurrection. This type of intricate, picturesque composition, pleasing in every detail, was inspiring to later generations of artists.

Susanna and the Elders 1564

Jan Massys (Flemish, c. 1509-1575)

Medium: Oil on panel

Dimensions: 42 x 77-1/2 in. (106.7 x 196.9 cm)

Jan Massys was the son of painter Quentin Metsys. He left Antwerp in 1544 to travel to Italy and France, where he aligned himself with the School of Fountainebleau. When he returned to Antwerp, he popularized a style that emphasized the primacy of the figure set in complex poses, as well as discrepancies in scale between the figures and between the figures and their setting. His style is essentially subjective, based on an ideal of elegant artifice.

The story, taken from the Apocrypha, tells how a heroine's innocence and virtue triumph over villainy. Susanna, a married woman, is secretly desired by two elders of the community who plot to seduce her. She is shown dispatching her maids before beginning her bath; the elders lie in wait. Later she is falsely accused of adultery by the men, whose advances she refused, and is found guilty by a court and condemned to death. Her innocence is proven by the young prophet Daniel.

European art:

17th-18th centuries

The museums early Baroque paintings from Italy and Spain are represented by such noted artists as Guido Reni, Guercino, Murillo and Zurbarán. The Northern Baroque collection is profoundly expressed in the works of Peter Paul Rubens. The remarkable group of 17th-century Dutch genre, portrait and landscape paintings is crowned with three portraits by Rembrandt. Capping off the 17th century are Flemish and German still lifes, and religious landscapes by the French masters Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. The French component of the 18th century collection contains paintings by Watteau, Fragonard and Boucher, while Italy is represented with capriccios and historic glimpses into the daily life of Rome and Venice with works by Longhi, Pannini, Guardi, Canaletto, and Tiepolo.

Rembrandt,self-portrait, c. 1640

Portrait of a Boy 1655-60

Rembrandt van Rijn (Dutch, 1606-1669)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 25-1/2 x 22 in. (64.8 x 55.9 cm)

In its unfinished state, this exceptional picture offers invaluable insight into Rembrandt's working method. Over the rich, dark ground, the body and costume have been indicated merely with a few broad, sure brushstrokes. The collar, hair and head have been developed further, with layers of scumbles and glazes, while the face, particularly the eyes, has been fully modeled and highly finished. The child's face, bathed in an even, frontal light, radiates from the velvety darkness of the background. This unusually straightforward presentation reflects and enhances the engaging charm and openness of the ingenuous child, who eagerly presents himself to the viewer.

Interior with a Dordrecht Family 1657

Nicolaes Maes (Dutch, 1634-1693)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 44-1/4 x 47-5/8 in.(112.4 x 121.0 cm)

One of the most talented students of Rembrandt, Nicolaes Maes worked in his native city of Dordrecht and in Amsterdam. Maes specialized in domestic scenes and portraiture, both of which provide valuable information about how the Dutch pictured themselves. Viewing this elegantly orchestrated composition, where each figure is linked to another in pose or gesture, we can deduce associations that were meaningful to this family: The fathers gesture, with his right hand placed over his heart, declares his marital commitment. The seated mother holding the infant reminds us of her important maternal role. Maes tenderly captures the innocent attention of the two older children. The basket of fruit they both hold alludes to biblical references that characterize children as the fruits of marriage. Centered in the composition and visible through the open , Dordrecht Cathedral symbolizes the familys Protestant affiliation. Evidence of their affluence can be read in the fine if sober quality of their clothing and in the expensive Chinese porcelain arranged along the shelf at right.

Manusso Theotokopoulos 1603-04

Domenikos Theotokopoulos called El Greco (Spanish, born in Greece, 1541-1614)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 18-1/2 x 15-1/4 in. (47.0 x 38.7 cm

Born on the island of Crete, El Greco was trained as an icon painter. In 1567 he moved to Venice where the tradition of Venetian coloring and facture, expressed in the art of Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese, inspired him. El Greco courted patronage from the Church in Rome, and later when he moved to Spain from the royal court of Madrid, with limited success. In the Spanish city of Toledo however, he discovered an enthusiastic audience for his religious images and portraits.

No other artist painted like El Greco. Explanations for his audacious use of color, erratic light effects, and elongated figures have included an innate spiritual mysticism, personal eccentricity, and even visual aberrations. His singular approach to portraiture is evident in this depiction of his brother Manusso (c. 15291604), a mariner by profession. Though El Grecos palette is restrained, a convention for male portraiture of this period, his brothers attenuated features, take on an otherworldly character thanks also to the robust brushwork employed to describe the stiff fur collar and cap, and Manussos unfocused, ruminative aspect.

Saint Cecilia 1606

Guido Reni (Italian, 1575-1642)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 37-3/4 x 29-1/2 in. (95.9 x 74.9 cm)

St. Cecilia, the patron saint of musicians, was an early Christian martyr. According to legend, she could play any musical instrument and was so exalted she could hear the singing of angels. Following the discovery of her remains in 1599, Cardinal Emilio Sfondrato, who was deeply involved in the archaeological investigations then being carried out in Rome, built a church in her honor in Trastevere. He commissioned Guido Reni to portray the saint as though communicating, by means of music, with the heavens above. The great Bolognese artists gift for depicting outward beauty and pious sentiment combine movingly in this fictive portrait of Cecilia.

In 1608 the painting sold to Cardinal Scipione Caffarelli-Borghese who was, at that time, a patron of Reni. It remained in his private collection until the beginning of the nineteenth century when it passed to Lucien Bonaparte, the brother of Napoleon.

The Sense of Touch 1615-16

Jusepe de Ribera (Spanish, 1591-1652)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 45-5/8 x 34-3/4 in. (115.9 x 88.3 cm)

Jusepe de Ribera was one of the giants of seventeenth-century naturalism. The Sense of Touch forms part of an early and famous series of the five senses he created while living in Rome. Ribera, however, intended more than an illustration of one "sense." He has invited a comparison between the tactile and deive qualities of painting and sculpturethat is, between the brush and the chisel.

The artist demonstrates that with touch, sculpture is recognizable to the blind man. Ribera skillfully presents the illusion of a three-dimensional marble object within the confines of the flat surface of the canvas. He then takes one additional, amusing step by including a foreshortened painting that only the sighted can see. Ribera thus asserts the preeminence of painting over sculpture, signifying his stance in the long-standing competition between the art forms (principally architecture, painting and sculpture), known as paragone.

Still Life with Fruits and Flowers 1630

Balthasar van der Ast (Dutch, 1593/4-1657)

Medium:Oil on panel

Dimensions: 16-1/4 x 29-1/2 in. (41.3 x 74.9 cm)

A seventeenth-century viewer would have delighted in the vivid display of motifs described with such care here by Balthasar van der Ast. The compositions possible associations are as diverse as the motifs themselves. The four elementsearth, air, water and fireare symbolized by the fruit, the flowers, the crayfish and shells and the fine china plate, respectively. Birth, death and rebirth, parts of the natural cycle of life, are signified by the spring and summer flowers and the autumn fruits. Fallen petals and drying leaves atop the cluster of grapes underscore the passing of time.

Some of the objects here would have been particularly admired by an educated, affluent audience. The Chinese porcelain plate was a much sought-after appointment in the Dutch patrician home, and only a well-to-do household could have afforded a bouquet of flowers, particularly one with tulips, in a beautiful thorn-prunt beaker. Those viewers with an interest in natures curiosities would have been rewarded not only with the depiction of shells but also with the artists detailed deion of insects and the bright red crayfish. In this way, the panel functioned like a collectors cabinet full of the rare, exotic and beautiful, conveying a sense of wealth and connoisseurship.

Still Life with Fruit and Vegetables 1625-35

Frans Snyders (Flemish, 1579-1657)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 68-1/4 x 101 in. (173.4 x 256.5 cm) Frans Snyders, a master of the Flemish Baroque still life, is renowned for his bold brushwork and monumental compositions. One of the themes of this painting, which likely depicts the larder of a fine house, is that of abundanceparticularly as the idea relates to productivity and prosperity. Our first impression may be of a chaotic layering of producethe fruits and vegetables on the table, in a bowl or basket, or on the ground. Closer inspection shows, however, in a manner that would be apparent to a 17th-century spectator, that the produce is arranged in a hierarchy reflecting value and rarity. Root vegetables are picturesquely arranged on the ground, whereas highly prized peas and asparagus are placed in the basket at right.

In this collaboration, Snyders painted the still-life elements, and his brother-in-law, the portrait painter Cornelis de Vos, painted the figures. The interaction of the boy and the woman through touch and gaze and the inclusion of live animals enhances the sense of animation. The painting certainly resonates with allusions to all five senses.

Prior to becoming part of the Norton Simon collections, this painting was one of four large market and larder scenes painted by Snyders and installed in the state dining room of the dukes of Newcastle at their estate in Clumber Park, Nottinghamshire.

Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose 1633

Francisco de Zurbarán (Spanish, 1598-1664)

Medium:Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 24-1/2 x 43-1/8 in. (62.2 x 109.5 cm)

This extraordinary painting by Zurbarán, the only signed and dated still life by this great master of the school of Seville, has been widely admired as a masterpiece of the genre. To devout Spanish Catholics in the 17th century, the apparently humble objects portrayed here contained significant religious meaning. The measured placement of the three motifs, for example, would have been instantly understood as an allusion to the Holy Trinity. The painting has also been interpreted as an homage to the Virgin, with the oranges, their blossoms, and the cup of water symbolizing her purity, and the thornless rose referring to her Immaculate Conception.

Zurbarán depicted the physical character of the objects, and the space they inhabit, with unparalleled focus and skill. By modeling the rough-skinned yellow citrons with hints of green and russet, he suggests the fruits protuberance and weight. The arrangement of the orange leaves creates a rhythm of light and shadow, echoed again in the reflective surfaces of the pewter plates. Presented as a quiet, meditative piece within a shallow, minimally described space, this still life evokes a mystical intensity that transcends time in its appeal.

The Holy Family with the Infant St. John the Baptist and St. Elizabeth 1650-51

Nicolas Poussin (French, 1594-1665)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 39-5/8 x 52-1/8 in. (100.6 x 132.4 cm) Nicolas Poussin is considered to be one of the great French painters of the modern world. He is revered for developing a personal, innovative and rigorous style based on classical precedents and the High Renaissance. Through precisely orchestrated narratives, and the concentration of emotional response, Poussin produced paintings of outstanding originality.

This is one of Poussins most lyrical depictions of the Holy Family, a subject that occupied him during the 1650s. The Virgin and Saint Joseph look on as Saint John the Baptist and Christ playfully embrace. On the right is a procession of Christs first martyrs, the Holy Innocents. Their gestures point to the Christ Child, whose sacrifice on the cross will redeem their martyred souls. Two Innocents carry a basin with water, one carries a towel, which may refer to the Shroud of the Passion, and another kneels to adore the Holy Child. In the distance, a family in a boat, and two men on horseback, may recall the Holy Familys flight into Egypt. The combination of figures and motifs in the composition suggest a message of purification and salvation.

Vase of Flowers 1654

Jan Davidzoon de Heem (Dutch, 1606-1683/84)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 26-1/2 x 21-3/4 in. (67.3 x 55.2 cm) Utrecht-born Jan de Heem specialized in virtuosic flower and banquet pieces that were enthusiastically collected by aristocrats and wealthy merchants alike. This exquisite still life presents a harmonious marriage of color and line and attests to the artists ability to describe with great precision a range of forms, textures and colors. All the elements are ordered along several axes that meet at the center of the composition, while myriad details throughout, including flowers rendered with the accuracy of a botanist, encourage prolonged examination. However, the sense of movement created by these dynamic lines guides the eye through the still life, so that it does not rest on any one particular detail for too long.

The vanitas theme that was so popular in early examples of the genre waned by the second half of the 17th century, as an interest in the decorative supplanted the emphasis on moralizing iconography. Though de Heem included certain symbols associated with the theme (drooping flowers, a shaft of wheat and short-lived insects), his focus lay in the bravura painting of beautiful motifs in arrangements that signify abundance.

The Birth of St. John the Baptist 1655

Bartolomé-Esteban Murillo (Spanish, 1617-1682)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions:57-3/4 x 74-1/8 in. (146.7 x 188.3 cm) Murillo, a native of Seville, was a generation younger than Zurbarán and Velazquez. Immensely popular throughout Spain and Europe, he was often called the "Spanish Raphael" for his sweet, idealized Madonnas and the softness and delicacy of his modelling. The characters in this painting are portrayed naturalistically yet retain the ideal, innate grace and elegance that are consistent with Murillo's figures from the late 1640s on. His modeling is solid yet handled with a painterly touch. Although this work displays a strong chiaroscuro, the general effect is one of luminosity: the darks are not so opaque, the lights are strong and the colors are saturated.

Woody Landscape with a Pool and Figures 1660

Jacob van Ruisdael (Dutch, 1628/9-1682)

Medium: Oil on panel

Dimensions: 27-1/2 x 36-1/4 in. (69.9 x 92.1 cm)

Jacob van Ruisdael is considered to be the greatest and most versatile Dutch landscape painter of the seventeenth century. He probably studied painting with his uncle Salomon van Ruysdael, becoming an accomplished landscape painter by the time he was eighteen. The figures were painted by his friend Nicolaes Berchem. Such collaboration between Dutch artists with different specialties was not uncommon.

Three Great Trees in a Mountainous Landscape with a River 1665-70

Jacob van Ruisdael (Dutch, 1628/9-1682)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions:54-3/8 x 68-1/8 in. (138.1 x 173.1 cm) Born in Haarlem, Ruisdael was the son of a frame-maker and art dealer. In the 1660s, and at the height of his powers, Ruisdael was creating landscapes of unprecedented force and majesty. In this painting, nature is vividly rendered, rich in color, brilliantly illuminated and vast. The handling of the sky and light is refined and diffuse; combined with a warm palette that creates a calm mood.

For all its richly observed detail, the landscape is an image of nature in general: beautiful, bountiful, varied and expansive. In capturing the mutable elements of nature, Ruisdael has preserved them, perhaps so that we might contemplate the Creator in the creation.

The Piazzetta, Venice, Looking North 1730

(Giovanni Antonio Canal) Canaletto (Italian, 1697-1768)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 29-7/8 x 47-1/8 in. (75.9 x 119.7 cm)

A native of Venice, Canaletto began his career as a scene painter in the Baroque theater, designing sets for operas. When he left the theater to take up landscape painting, he probably did more to popularize the image of Venice than any other eighteenth-century artist. Responding to the demand of the numerous visitors to Venice, he created an extraordinary number of view paintings, depicting the city from every possible vantage point. No painter of the time was more popular with the British nobility, and there was a steady flow of Canalettos to England. Canaletto had the unique ability to describe a scene faithfully and accurately and at the same time give it an evocative, personal, poetic quality. His linear precision is complemented by the effect of the bright sunlight, which accents architectural detail and filters into the cool, gray shadows.

Beautiful Country Woman 1732

François Boucher (French, 1703-1770)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 16-1/8 x 12 in. (41.0 x 30.5 cm) 

In the decades before he was appointed first painter to King Louis XV in 1765, François Boucher painted many cabinet-sized pictures of a wide variety of subjects for private collectors. Although best known for his sensuous mythological and pastoral paintings, during this early period Boucher also experimented with subjects from everyday life, including peasant "low-life" scenes inspired by seventeenth-century Northern European art. The Beautiful Country Woman (La Belle Villageoise) lacks the coarse or satirical features often associated with Dutch paintings of this subject, however. Instead, Boucher treats with great sympathy the young country woman surrounded by her three robust yet scruffy children in a humble domestic interior. In front of the family, on the kitchen floor, Boucher has rendered a Dutch-inspired still life of copper pots and plump root vegetables to underscore the association between peasant life, simplicity and closeness to nature.

Saint Jerome in Penitence 1798

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (Spanish, 1746-1828)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 75-1/8 x 45 in. (190.8 x 114.3 cm)

An early Christian scholar, St. Jerome produced the first Latin translation of the Bible. He lived the life of an ascetic for four years in the desert while studying and praying to free himself from worldly desire. Emaciated and scantily clad, here he contemplates a crucifix in his harsh wilderness retreat. Around him lie his books and writing materials, as well as the scourge used for his repentant self-reproof and a skull (the symbol of death) that served as aids in spiritual contemplation. In his hand he holds the stone with which he beat his breast in penitence.

Goyas beautifully rendered St. Jerome in Penitence may have originally formed part of a series of the four Fathers of the Church, along with his St. Ambrose (Cleveland Museum of Art), St. Gregory (Museo Romántico, Madrid) and St. Augustine (private collection). However, while all of these paintings are almost identical in size, the intimate depiction of St. Jerome as the fervent anchorite contrasts starkly with the less spontaneous and more classical depiction of the other church fathers in their sumptuous Roman liturgical robes.

The Triumph of Virtue and Nobility Over Ignorance 1740-50

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (Italian, 1696-1770)

Medium: Oil on canvas (Ceiling painted for the Palazzo Manin, Venice)

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was the purest exponent of the Italian Rococo. He created fresco decorations and paintings for palaces and churches throughout Europe with an unprecedented, inventive freedom of form and expressive, shimmering colors. A master of the airborne figure and of perspective, he excelled in creating the illusion of infinite space articulated with luminous colors and atmospheric effects.

This painting was designed for a ceiling in the Palazzo Manin in Venice. Virtue is dressed in white with a sun symbol on her breast. Beside her, Nobility holds a statuette of Minerva and a spear. To the left, Fame blows her trumpet. Below, the figure of Ignorance is being vanquished. The poppy wreath falling through the sky alludes to the "sleep of the mind." The bats symbolize ignorance, which refuses to see the light of wisdom and knowledge. The figures of Virtue and Nobility display a distinctly lofty, detached air indicative of the mythological world they occupy.

Portrait of Theresa, Countess Kinsky 1793

Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (French, 1755-1842)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 54-1/8 x 39-3/8 in. (137.5 x 100.0 cm) As a devoted Monarchist and friend of the Queen, Marie-Antoinette, Vigée-Lebrun chose exile during the French Revolution. While in Vienna in 1793, she produced this image of Theresa, Countess Kinsky. The Countess was the unfortunate victim of an arranged marriage. Her husband, a man whom she had never met, abandoned her at the church immediately after their wedding, and returned to his mistress. Clearly, Vigée-Lebrun was captivated by the beauty and amiable character of Countess Kinsky, as well as by her sad history.

European art:

19th century

The museum's paintings by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Francisco de Goya mark the beginning of the 19th century and lead to superb examples of mid-century Realism executed by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet. The museum has the most significant collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art in Southern California. Works by Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas, who alone is represented by over one hundred works of art, are displayed alongside the vibrant palettes of Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin. Complementing these works are Auguste Rodins monumental bronze sculptures, displayed in the Museums front garden. Outstanding paintings by Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard lead to the doorstep of 20th-century Modernism.

Vincent van Gogh, The Parsonage Garden at Neunen in the snow, 1885

Vieux Paysan: Patience Escalier, 1888

Vincent Van Gogh (Dutch,1853-1890)

Patience Escalier was a gardener and a shephardby trade, and his portrait the result of Van Gogh's desire to paint an older peasant who resembled his father in features.

There are two versions of this portrait. One held by the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, and the other in the private collection of Philip Niarchos.

The Mulberry Tree 1889

Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853-1890)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 21-1/4 x 25-1/2 in. (54 x 65 cm) 

Van Gogh suffered from delicate mental and physical health throughout his life. In the spring of 1889, following a series of nervous breakdowns, he committed himself to an asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. There his work evolved away from the hallucinatory color of his Arles period toward the ever more vigorous brushwork and ever more liberally applied paint of his late manner. Here the flaming foliage of the mulberry tree, the rushing sky and hillside are so richly painted that the pictures surface becomes a kind of bas-relief sculpture. Van Gogh was particularly pleased with this painting, remarking in letters to his siblings that he considered it his most successful treatment of its theme.

Baron Joseph-Pierre Vialetès de Mortarieu 1805-06

jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (French, 1780-1867)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 24-1/8 x 19-3/4 in. (61.2 x 50.2 cm

This portrait was painted just before Ingress departure for Rome in September 1806. The bust-length likeness of the baron is carefully described within a triangular silhouette that descends from the soft curls of the subjects head to his blue-black coat. Within this outline, one sees Ingress unswerving attention to detail and local color tempered subtly by his attempt to idealize the subject, who makes a vivid impression with his gaze. The sinuous rhythms defined by the multiple white collars and the cravat provide additional animation. As in other portraits of this early period, Ingres shows the impeccably attired baron standing before a vast sky punctuated with soft and airy clouds, a romantic conceit with precedents that date back to the Renaissance, but which serves here as a foil to the calm and secure expression of the subject.

Baron Vialètes was an avid collector and patron of the arts. Elected mayor of Montauban, Ingress hometown in southwest France, his appointment may have occasioned this portrait. In 1843 the baron founded the city museum, which later became the Musée Ingres.

Doña Francisca Vicenta Chollet y Caballero 1806

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (Spanish, 1746-1828)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: overall: 40 1/2 in x 31 7/8 in

In 1799, Francisco de Goya was made First Court Painter to King Charles IV of Spain. For the next ten years he painted numerous official portraits of the royal family, and many portraits of subjects of the court circle. In 1801, he painted Antonio Noriega de Bada y Bermúdez (National Gallery, Washington), the court treasurer and the husband of the sitter in this picture, who in that year was awarded the honorific membership in the Order of Carlos III. Five years later, the painter finished this portrait of Doña Francisca, in which he combines elements of delicate detail with great finessethe embroidery of her silk dress, her sparkling tiara, and the dogs outrageous collarwith an equally free, palpable brushwork. X-rays of portions of the composition, including her pose and the scampish pug, reveal final alterations made by Goya, causing some scholars to speculate that the portraits of husband and wife were originally intended as pendants. The ultimate simplicity of the composition and reduction of spatial depth give the subject a quiet and intimate character, despite her diffident aire.

The Pont des Arts, Paris 1867-68

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841-1919)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 24 x 39-1/2 in. (60.9 x 100.3 cm)

Planted in the heart of Paris, we stand on the Left Bank of the Seine, looking upstream toward the wrought-iron Pont des Arts. A ferry pulls up to the quayside, crowded with commuters and idlers from all walks of life: leisured ladies in bright crinolines and smartly turned-out dandies, scrappy street urchins and soldiers in crimson trousers, romping dogs and a blue-smocked working man, seated on the riverbank. Up the ramp at right, secondhand booksellers trade in the shadow of the domed Institut de France, while on the horizon at left appear the brand-new theaters of the Place du Châtelet. The crisp shadows and liberally applied black are typical of Renoirs early career, when the artist and his friend Monet set out to document their changing city in a celebrated series of views to which this one belongs.

The Ragpicker 1865-70

Édouard Manet (French, 1832-1883)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 76-3/4 x 51-1/2 in=194.9 x 130.8 cm

During the 1860s, Manet undertook a series of pictures portraying street characters from the neighborhood of vacant lots and construction sites that surrounded his studio. Perhaps the masterpiece of the series, the Ragpicker (or Chiffonnier) represents the nineteenth-century equivalent of todays homeless man pushing a shopping cart full of tin cans. With a stick in hand and a sack slung over his shoulder, the chiffonnier salvages rags from the garbage for sale to paper manufacturers. Ragpickers were a source of fascinationand sometimes fearin nineteenth-century Paris: emblems of the modern city and those it had left behind.

Vase of Lilacs, Roses, and Tulips 1863

Gustave Courbet (French, 1819-1877)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 25-5/8 x 21-3/8 in. (65.1 x 54.3 cm) Best remembered for the incendiary politics and technique of his early peasant pictures, Courbet was not above painting for the market. Between May 1862 and May 1863, while a guest at the country estate of Étienne Baudry, a collector and amateur horticulturist, the artist turned out an accomplished series of flower still lifes with frankly commercial intentions. Mixing exotic blooms from Baudrys greenhouses with flowers from his gardens, Courbet created compositions that defy the seasons, presenting spring tulips and lilacs alongside summer poppies and nasturtiums. The results recall seventeenth-century Dutch flower paintings, coveted by nineteenth-century collectors.

Stream of the Puits-Noir at Ornans 1867-68

Gustave Courbet (French, 1819-1877)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 39-3/8 x 59-1/4 in. (100 x 150.5 cm) Courbet likely worked on this canvas during a fall 1868 visit to his birthplace at Ornans in the far eastern reaches of France. The painting depicts a stretch of the river Brème little more than two miles from Ornans itself and bears a scratched-out, over-painted date of "68" in the lower left-hand corner. The picture is thickly painted, worked up with both brush (for the bare, wispy tree branches) and palette knife (for the lichen-crusted limestone cliffs and the frothy water). The paintings rough, almost mineral surface gives literal form to its rocky subject.

Cliff at Etretat, thr Porte d’Aval, 1869

Gustave Courbet (French, 1819-1877)

Oil on canvas

The extension of a railway line from Paris via Le Havre brought tourism to the tiny fishing village of Etretat in the 1850s. Writers and artists soon flocked to the town, it’s picturesque half-mile of beach, and its striking rock formations. guy de Maupassant, Jacques Offenbach, Camille Corot, Eugène Boudin, and Claude Monet all spent time there l, but none conjured it’s crumbled cliff faces and chill, frothy sea more efficiently than Courbet, who spent 5 weeks in an Etretat cottage during the fall of 1969.

Apples, Pears, and Primroses on a Table 1871-72

Gustave Courbet (French, 1819-1877)

Medium:Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 23-1/2 x 28-3/4 in. (59.7 x 73 cm)

In an 1872 letter, Courbets sister Zoë described this picture as "a large painting, a dozen pears, apples, etc., heaped pleasingly on a table . . . Gustave is enchanted with it. He says that he never achieved such gracious effects of color." It is among the finest still lifes Courbet painted, describing with poignant sensuality the irregular form, the scarred, lustrous skin of each fruit. But the picture is more than an exercise in "gracious effects of color": in the lower right-hand corner, Courbet signed and dated it, adding the inion "Sainte-Pélagie." These words refer to the prison where the artist was detained in 1871 for his participation in a popular uprising known as the Commune.

Beach at Trouville 1873

Louis-Eugène Boudin (French, 1824-1898)

Medium: Oil on panel

Dimensions: 8-1/4 x 16-1/4 in. (21.0 x 41.3 cm) 

Boudin was the great painter of Normandys beach resorts: the casinos and grand hotels of Trouville and Deauville that sprang into being once the railway reached the sea. Working rapidly and outdoors, he captured vacationing Parisians in changing coastal light. Boudins fascination with changeability, whether of fashion or the weather, anticipated the Impressionist movement, inspiring Monets and Renoirs first forays into outdoor painting.

Women Ironing 1875-76, reworked c.1882-1886

Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 32-1/4 x 29-3/4 in. (81.9 x 75.5 cm)

Once a private, domestic chore, laundry was big business in nineteenth-century Paris, where it employed roughly twenty-five percent of the female workforce. Steamy, dark storefronts, often open to the sidewalk, gave passersby a glimpse of women ironing, bare-armed in the heat. Born into an aristocratic family, Degas was fascinated by working women and by the increasingly porous distinctions between private and public, domestic and commercial in the modern city. His paintings of laundressesnone finer than the present examplereflect this fascination. Probably begun in the 1870s and reworked about a decade later, this picture suggests the brutalizing effects of hard labor. The women hunch, yawn, and drink over a pile of starched shirts, yet the peculiar delicacy of Degass touchmimicking, in the flesh tones, his own work in pastelsreminds us of the laundresses youth and femininity.

Waiting 1879-82

Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917)

Medium: Pastel on beige laid paper

Dimensions: 19 x 24 in. (48.2 x 61 cm) 

With its raking composition and abrupt contrast of black and white, this picture grants us a glimpse backstage at the Paris Opéra without revealing any clear, coherent narrative. The two figures, each apparently absorbed in her own thoughts, may represent a young dancer and her chaperone or, indeed, one dancer dressed for rehearsal and another in street clothes. Only their shared sense of exhaustion and anxiety is clearsuggesting, perhaps, the anticipation or aftermath of an examination. Degas, as no artist before or since, took a keen interest in the physical routine of ballet dancers lives, the labor behind their art. At the Opéra, examinations played an important role in this routine, determining dancers salaries and professional advancement.

Dancers in Pink 1886

This picture is a pure pastel, whose range of texturesfrom gleaming silk to airy tulle to powdery, gas-lit fleshDegas seems to have achieved without wetting or mixing media. Two corps de ballet dancers, peculiarly anonymous in their matching costumes and poses, turn "upstage," away from an imaginary audience beyond the picture plane. Although these women might at first seem caught unawares, like Degass many bathers, the elegant artifice of their movements and attire reminds us that this is a performance staged for our enjoyment.

Dancers in the Rotunda at the Paris Opéra 1875-78 and 1894

Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 34-7/8 x 37-3/4 in. (88.6 x 95.9 cm)

This view of the main rehearsal studio at the Paris opera house (known as the Palais Garnier) demonstrates Degass tendency to revisit and reimagine pictures, sometimes many years after he first painted them. He began work on this canvas around 1875, when the Palais Garnier had just opened. X-rays suggest that the original composition included a spiral staircase at left and a different pose for the dancer at right, but the most dramatic alterations Degas made when he returned to the painting nearly twenty years later have to do with the texture of its surface and the use of color. Thin, overlapping veils of pigmentoften applied with fingertips, rather than a brushcreate a dreamy, opalescent effect far removed from the crisp naturalism of Degass early career.

Tahitian Woman and Boy 1899

Paul Gauguin (French, 1848-1903)

Date: 1899

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 37-1/4 x 24-3/8 in. (94.6 x 61.9 cm)

Gauguin sailed for Tahiti in 1891. A former stockbroker and primarily self-taught artist, he left behind both his family and what he regarded as the bourgeois constraints of modern French society, but what he found in the South Seas was not the primitive paradise hed hoped for. Tahiti was already a French colony; the wicker chair and the high-necked gown shown in this portrait testify to the presence of European merchants and missionaries. Despite his initial disappointment and his rapidly declining health Gauguins years in Tahiti were the most important of his career. Drawing inspiration from his tropical surroundings and a cast of island models (the female sitter for this portrait may have been his teenaged consort, Pauura), Gauguin forged a new vision for modern art: sensuous, mysterious, radiantly, riotously colorful.

Tulips in a Vase  1888-90

Paul Cézanne (French, 1839-1906)

Medium: Oil on paper, mounted on board

Dimensions: 28-1/2 x 16-1/2 in. (72.4 x 41.9 cm)

The exuberant vertical format of this still life makes it almost unique in Cézannes oeuvre. Though he had begun painting flowers in the 1870s alongside his friend and mentor Pissarro, Cézanne seldom painted tulips. More familiar in his work are the glowing fruits gathered on the table at left, a counterpoint to the bright blooms in the upper half of the composition. Although the artist likely painted this picture while visiting his wife in Paris, the earthenware vase in which the flowers are arranged is a souvenir of his native Provence.

Modern art

The museum has an extensive collection of Modern art, with seminal works by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, and Diego Rivera on permanent view. The "Galka Scheyer collection of works by the Blue Four artists" boasts paintings and works on paper by Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Alexei Jawlensky, and Wassily Kandinsky. Scheyer, a German art dealer and collector who had represented these artists and settled in L.A. in 1925, left 450 works by the Blue Four and other modern artists (plus an archive of 800 documents) to the Pasadena Art Institute after plans had failed to give them to UCLA.[

Exotic Landscape 1910

Henri Rousseau (French, 1844-1910)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 51-1/4 x 64 in. (130.2 x 162.6 cm)

A low-level bureaucrat in the toll collectors office of the Paris city government, Rousseau received no formal training as an artist. Frankly naive, richly imagined dreamscapes like this scene of humanoid monkeys at play earned him the affection of avant-garde artists and writers, including Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire, who nicknamed him "Le Douanier" (the Customs Officer). Rousseau referred to his jungle landscapes as "my Mexican pictures," claiming they were inspired by his military service in Mexico. But in fact Le Douanier had most likely never left France. His compositions packed with exotic flora and fauna were based on a careful study of picture books and animals at the Paris zoo.

Portrait of the Artist's Wife, Jeanne Hebuterne 1918

Amedeo Modigliani (Italian, 1884-1920)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 39-3/4 x 25-7/8 in. (101 x 65.7 cm) With elongated proportions and mask-like faces, Modiglianis mature portraits share an unsettling family likeness. The pictures he painted of one sitter, however, are distinguished by particular grace and reverence. Modigliani met Jeanne Hébuterne, an aspiring artist, in the summer of 1917; she fell passionately in love and, in November of the following year, bore him the daughter she may already have been carrying when she sat for this picture, assuming the pose of an Italian Renaissance Virgin Annunciate. Born in Italy, Modigliani had moved to Paris in 1906, immersing himself in the bohemian artistic communities of Montmartre and Montparnasse. He frequented Picassos studio, dabbled in Cubism, and developed an addiction to drugs and alcohol. By the time he met Hébuterne, he was already gravely ill but had evolved the distinctive styleinfluenced by Botticelli and the early Italian mastersdeployed in this picture.

The Black Shawl (Lorette VII) 1918

Henri Matisse (French, 1869-1954)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 26-1/2 x 50-3/4 in. (67.3 x 128.9 cm)

Matisse hired an Italian model known as Lorette or Laurette to pose for him in late 1916. Over the course of the next year, he painted her almost fifty times: standing, sitting, lying down; clothed, nude, oras heresomewhere in between. Wrapped in a black lace mantilla, the models body is at once revealed and concealed. Her direct but sightless gaze lends the encounter a peculiar erotic charge. The painters obsession with Lorette coincided with a transformation in his style, a shift from the abstract approach of his youth to the more concrete and harmonious manner of his maturity. Like many paintings of its model, The Black Shawl perches uneasily between the avant-garde provocations of early Matisse and the sensuous forms of late.

Odalisque with Tambourine (Harmony in Blue) 1926

Henri Matisse (French, 1869-1954)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 36-1/4 x 25-5/8 in. (92.1 x 65.1 cm) The image of the odalisque, a concubine of a Near Eastern harem, has a rich history in French painting, especially from the time of nineteenth-century artists such as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Eugène Delacroix. It became the primary theme of Henri Matisses work during the 1920s. His single

dancer in motion forms a robust arabesque. The red patterns in the blue background seem to be swelling and contracting in rhythm with the sound of the music to which she is moving.

Open Green 1923

Vassily Kandinsky (Russian, 18661944)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 38-1/4 x 38-1/4 in. (97.2 x 97.2 cm) Kandinsky was a trailblazer of modern art, a practitioner of ever-more-radical abstraction and the author of key theoretical works concerned with the spiritual and formal content of art. In Open Green, painted in 1923, his interests in spirituality and form seem to converge in a dreamscape of color and shape at once abstract and gnomically figurative. Born in Russia, Kandinsky was a devoted student of Russian folklore and icon painting, and the conglomeration of swooping shapesa circle pierced by a long, slender diagonal; two curving, whiskered commas; a receding checkerboard of translucent colorin the upper right-hand quadrant of this composition has sometimes been read as a depiction of the equestrian Saint George, patron of the Russian Orthodox church, holding his lance and shield and galloping into the heavens.

The Ram’s Head 1925

Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 31-1/2 x 39 in. (80.0 x 99.1 cm)

Pablo Picasso, one of the most influential and celebrated artists of the 20th century, is perhaps best known for his championing of Cubism. During the 1920s, he combined elements from the Classical, Cubist, and Surrealist movements creating a series of still life paintings. Compactly arranged, Picasso's "Ram's Head" imposes the cubist idiom over cups, tablecloths, and other motifs re-presenting them as geometric circles and flat planes of color, which then border and taunt the imposing head of a ram. The classically derived subject matter of the still life, a table laden with sea life and an animal head -- all the elements necessary for a meal -- slips into a disorienting, Surrealist dreamscape in which still life appears to float in water, suggested by the blue waves, as much as it exists on a flat table.

Woman with a Book 1932

Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 51-3/8 x 38-1/2 in. (130.5 x 97.8 cm)

Among Picassos most celebrated likenesses of his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter, Woman with a Book balances sensuality and restraint, enclosing exuberant, thickly applied color in a network of sinuous black lines. The composition pays homage to the Neoclassical master of line, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, whose work Picasso had admired since his youth, and whose Portrait of Madame Moitessier the Spanish painter had first encountered in 1921. Resting his models head on her hand, and replacing Madame Moitessiers fan with the fluttering pages of a book, Picasso tapped into the eroticism latent beneath Ingress image of bourgeois respectability. The serene profile reflected in a mirror at right in Picassos portrait likewise references its Neoclassical precedent but may also constitute an abstract self-portrait.

The Flower Vendor (Girl with Lilies) 1941

Diego Rivera (Mexican, 1886-1957)

Medium: Oil on masonite

Dimensions: 48 x 48 in. (121.9 x 121.9 cm)

Rivera was among the leading North American artists of the twentieth century, best remembered for the public murals he painted throughout Mexico and the United States. He arrived at his distinctive brand of stylized naturalism after a decade in Paris (1909-1919), where he had befriended such European artists as Picasso and Duchamp and experimented with various avant-garde approaches. Pre-Columbian art of his native country, however, would present the key source for Riveras mature style, characterized by emphatic color, simplified forms, and a dramatic tension between flatness and three-dimensional modeling. The figure of the flower vendor formed a recurring theme in Riveras work, appearing both in his murals and in easel paintings like this one. The Indian girl, kneeling before her pile of calla liliesa flower associated with funerals and deathconstitutes an ode at once to the beauty of Mexicos native cultures and to the suffering of her native peoples.