The John A. and Audrey Jones Beck Collection

The painting “Russian Dancers” falls into the category to which Edgar Degas devoted more than half of his artistic output: dancers. The repetitive motions and strictly choreographed movements of ballet dancers held a special fascination for him. However, the dancers represented here are not classical ballerinas performing at the opera, but a troupe of Russian folk dancers who came to Paris in the late 1890s, and whom Degas probably saw in the dance halls of Montmartre.

Edgar Degas found the colorful costumes and odd yet graceful movements of the Russian folk dancers as fascinating as he found ballerinas. Here, Degas sets the dancers in a landscape, an unusual choice for the artist and a very different background from the stage sets and rehearsal rooms generally seen in his works.

“Russian Dancers” is the only pastel in the Beck Collection. Edgar Degas loved the medium of pastel for the astonishing variety and coloristic effects it afforded him. With the help of fixatives, whose formula still remains a secret, he put down layer after layer of these chalks, building the powdery pigment into a shimmering translucence.

In this instance, as in many others, Degas used tracing paper to serially produce the figures.

Berthe Morisot often used family members as models, especially her older sister Edma. For this painting, however, the artist used a professional model.

The identity of the model used for this painting is unknown, but she is certainly not one of the sisters Morisot had used for the 1869 double portrait “The Sisters” (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC). Although this young woman bears a great resemblance to them, and even the white-and-blue dresses are similar, Morisot wrote that she would never use them again because they had been such difficult, fidgety sitters.

Compared with the subtly modeled face in this portrait,

the light summer dress with its tiny floral motifs is painted in loose brushstrokes, a style Berthe Morisot continued to develop during her association with the Impressionists.

This painting is in wonderfully fresh condition and is an excellent example from Berthe Morisot’s early career.

Berthe Morisot was invited by Edgar Degas to join the Impressionist group of artists in 1874, and she remained a steadfast supporter throughout its existence. At the time of this painting in 1871, Morisot enjoyed a close personal and artistic relationship with Édouard Manet, who considered himself a Realist painter. He regarded Morisot as extremely talented, and he mentored her for years. He not only advised her, he is also known to have taken brush in hand when reviewing her work. She describes one such incident in great detail, but with a somewhat biting sense of humor. Manet may possibly have painted part of the model’s left hand in this work.

Édouard Manet uses the large pyramidal shape of the boat and its mast to give his composition great stability, yet at the same time, the boat—seen from an unusually high viewpoint—seems to thrust itself across the waves, bringing a sense of motion to the composition.

In a forceful and novel way, Édouard Manet has realistically captured the daily struggle of three rugged fishermen plying their trade despite the dangerous elements.

Fittingly, Édouard Manet depicts these robust men with vigorous brushwork, while using more fluid, shorter brushstrokes to paint the wispy waves.

Painting scenes of everyday life outdoors directly in front of the subject, in a technique of open brushwork that reflects subtle changes in light, were fundamental endeavors of Impressionist painters. Gustave Caillebotte fulfills them brilliantly in “The Orange Trees,” one of his most accomplished paintings.

Although this painting is titled “The Orange Trees,” these symbols of an elegant, privileged lifestyle play a minor role in the composition. The focus is really on the artist’s brother, Martial; and young relative, Zoé. They are enjoying a leisurely moment, reading in the shade of the orange trees on the terrace of the family’s beautiful French country estate at Yerres.

The casual arrangement of the typically French garden furniture underlines the snapshot-like quality of the composition.

Sunshine and peace—note the happily dozing dog at the edge of the path—pervade the painting.

Painting with open, rapidly placed brushstrokes, Gustave Caillebotte evokes with glowing reds and whites the flowers in the circular flowerbed, the mauves and pinks of the path, and the varied greens of the grass and trees.

In 1876 Gustave Caillebotte was invited by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri Rouart to join the group of independent artists who would become known as the Impressionists. Caillebotte not only exhibited with them but also became one of the mainstays of the group. He organized several of the exhibitions and used his significant personal wealth to generously support many of his struggling colleagues by purchasing their paintings. Caillebotte thus assembled one of the finest collections of Impressionist works, which he left to the French government in his will.

A native of Aix-en-Provence in France, Paul Cézanne devoted much of his energy to depicting the magnificent landscape of the region of Provence.

Yet Paul Cézanne struggled with the intense light, complaining that “the sun here is so frightful that it seems to me the objects are silhouetted not only in white or black, but in blue, red, brown, and violet. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that this is the opposite of modeling.”

Indeed, in this painting, the side of a rocky ravine—where brush and scraggy trees struggle for a foothold—scintillates in a reduced palette of ochers, grays, greens, and blues.

Working painstakingly slowly, Paul Cézanne evoked the subtle variations in stone and earth with his characteristic “constructive brushstrokes” that define the subtle differences in the hard surfaces as they are touched by light.

On closer examination, it is possible to read the small brick-like patches of contrasting color Paul Cézanne used to create this impression.

Paul Cézanne also uses dark outlines for boulders and tree trunks to define their volumes, adding a graphic aspect to the overall composition at the same time.

Although Paul Gauguin had spent some years of his childhood with his paternal grandparents in Peru, his stay on the Caribbean island of Martinique from June to November 1887 was his first experience of a tropical part of the world as an adult. The impact of these months on his painting was enormous.

Paul Cézanne’s influence on this Paul Gauguin still life is palpable both in the diagonal brushstrokes and the overall composition,

but Martinique’s sunny climate informs Gauguin’s palette and permeates the entire work. Mangoes and cashew nuts, native to the island, are arranged on a simple white enameled plate in such profusion that they spill onto the table.

They are balanced by a vividly red hibiscus flower in a stemmed glass placed next to the plate.

The rich oranges, purples, and intense greens of the fruits, as well as the vivid red of the flower, play against the creamy white of the table cover, which is traversed by a dark swath that anchors the composition.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was the scion of an ancient aristocratic family, though his usual subjects were the demimonde—those considered to be on the fringes of respectable society—of the Montmartre district in Paris. This work, however, portrays a circle of friends from a completely different segment of society: artists and members of the intellectual elite.

Misia Natanson, at center, dominates the group in this composition—which includes painters Édouard Vuillard at left; Félix Vallotton at right; and her husband, Thadée Natanson, seen from the back. A lawyer, businessman, art collector, and critic, Thadée Natanson was also the publisher of the important periodical “La Revue blanche.” Born Misia Godebska, in Russia, Misia Natanson was one of the most fascinating women of her time. An accomplished pianist, she hosted a distinguished salon, where luminaries such as Coco Chanel, Jean Cocteau, Stéphane Mallarmé, Vaslav Nijinsky, Pablo Picasso, and Maurice Ravel gathered.

Why did Toulouse-Lautrec turn his friend Misia Natanson, a celebrated beauty, into the caricature of a hideous madam? According to her, he did so in revenge for her criticism of a portrait he had painted of her shortly before, in which she felt he made her neck too short, her eyes too small, and her chin too heavy. With this painting he “playfully took his revenge.”

With much of the picture space left blank and the stippled brown of the artist’s board exposed, this work looks more like an unfinished drawing than a fully realized oil painting. However, that was Toulouse-Lautrec’s intention.

To enhance the effect of a spontaneous creation, Toulouse-Lautrec also thinned his oil paints with turpentine, quite the opposite of meticulously worked-out academic paintings.

“The Rocks,” painted by Vincent van Gogh in early July 1888 near the town of Arles in southern France, depicts a lone oak tree, bent and twisted by the mistral winds, standing on an outcropping of rocks.

The oak tree rises against an empty but subtly colored sky. The tree’s trunk consists only of zigzagging green lines, and the foliage is indicated by simple dabs in a variety of greens.

In a letter to his brother Theo, Vincent van Gogh complained that strong winds were buffeting the canvas to such a degree that it was difficult to control his brush. Yet the result, although painted with high energy, is controlled and deliberate, exemplifying the very personal technique Van Gogh developed in Arles.

In Paris, Vincent van Gogh had explored Impressionist and Pointillist techniques. But under the brilliant southern sun, he started to paint with bold, open brushstrokes, often applying paint in thick layers that create crags and dips across the canvas. Objects, such as the rock here, are often outlined in black, adding a graphic quality to the paintings.

Vincent van Gogh’s work gives the impression of having been created in a single frenzied sweep, but in fact, his compositions are carefully worked out. Although he painted en plein air—that is, outdoors directly in front of his subject—he often made preliminary drawings, as he did for “The Rocks.” In some cases, especially in those works where the paint has been laid down more sparingly, his detailed underdrawings can be seen by the naked eye; in other instances, they can be seen using infrared reflectography.

This jewel of a small painting, which Audrey Jones Beck may have kept in her dressing room, was the preliminary sketch for a larger work of the same title (Courtauld Gallery, London).

The most outstanding quality of this work is the technique with which it is painted. Georges Seurat, who had developed the technique, called it Divisionism, but it is often referred to as Pointillism. No longer satisfied with the achievements of the Impressionists, Seurat strove for a novel means of bringing even more light onto his canvases and at the same time giving his compositions a more permanent air. To this end, he studied the color theories of Charles Blanc called Chromoluminarism, or Divisionism. According to Blanc, placing dots of complementary colors (red/green, yellow/violet, orange/blue) next to each other maximized their intensity and made paintings as luminous as scientifically possible.

In an entirely novel manner, Georges Seurat worked with tiny individual dots of pure color instead of mixing his paints on his palette.

For this portrait of a young lady, who was in fact his mistress Madeleine Knobloch, Georges Seurat chose a cool color scheme of blues and yellows.

The remarkable serenity of Madeleine Knobloch is beautifully set off by the energized brushwork,

just as her Junoesque figure contrasts decidedly with the delicate dressing table in front of her.

Georges Seurat demanded that picture frames harmonize with their compositions. Here, he has painted a frame on the canvas itself, but often his brushstrokes would continue even onto the white wooden frames preferred by the Pointillists.

After Georges Seurat’s early death in 1891 at age 31, Paul Signac became the main representative and driving force behind the Pointillist movement.

Although still based in Paris, Paul Signac spent the summers at the seashore, mostly in Saint-Tropez. To his mother he wrote, “I am settled here since yesterday and overjoyed. Five minutes out of town, in the midst of pine trees and roses, I discovered a pretty little furnished cottage.… In front the golden coast of the gulf, the blue sea breaking on a small beach, my beach … In the background the blue silhouettes of the Maures and the Esterel—there is enough material to work for the rest of my days. Happiness—that is what I have just discovered.”

Paul Signac’s sense of contentment seems to permeate this portrait of a majestic pine, its branches stretching from one end of the canvas to the other. The lone tree with its huge canopy is the very symbol of shelter and strength.

Paul Signac’s later works become more abstract, but also more poetic, as all anecdotal incident falls away. In 1894 he wrote, “Several years ago, I, too, tried very hard to prove to others, through scientific experiments, that these blues, these yellows, these greens were to be found in nature. Now I content myself with saying: I paint like that because it is the technique which seems to me the most apt to give the most harmonious, the most luminous, and the most colorful results … and because I like it that way.”

From early in his career, Pierre-Auguste Renoir established himself as the finest figurative painter and portraitist of the group that became known as the Impressionists. He achieved his earliest successes with large group paintings such as “Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette” (1876, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), but it was the superlative portrait “Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children” (1878, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), that brought him the greatest acclaim. Particularly sensitive to feminine charms, Renoir continued to paint numerous portraits not only of his elegant patronesses and of celebrated actresses, but also of women from the working class, until the very end of his life.

In this painting, Pierre-Auguste Renoir shares a private moment with a lovely young girl who is completely absorbed in her book. So engaged is she that her cheeks are flushed and her mouth slightly open as she marvels at the story she is reading.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir lets the light, which falls into the picture from the left, reflect off the open pages of the book to light up the girl’s face. The identity of the sitter is unknown, but at this stage of his career Renoir often used professional models as well as family members.

No longer painting with the nervous, short brushstrokes of his early Impressionist works, in the 1890s Pierre-Auguste Renoir sought to achieve harmony in his compositions through softened shapes and a boundless wealth of color.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s colors are applied with long, sensuous brushstrokes, allowing reds, greens, and yellows to resonate against each other and to resound in pleasing harmony.

This highly decorative work was commissioned by artist Paul Ranson’s niece for the dining room of her Paris apartment. Ranson was one of the leading Symbolist members of Les Nabis, an avant-garde group of painters in late 19th-century Paris. Here, however, symbolism is suppressed in favor of a more naturalistic and decorative rendering of a landscape. The dark trunk and branches of a flowering apple tree reach across the entire canvas. A few flowers and brambles grow in front of a low wall that serves to divide the foreground from the mountainous landscape in the background.

The sinuous lines of the branches and flower stems are echoed in the mountains as well as in the beautifully painted golden sky with its mauve clouds.

The limited overall tonality of browns and golds is offset by a few lively red accents from the apples and flowers.

The pleasing but strong composition is designed to stimulate the senses without overworking them, perfectly suited to the painting’s intended location: the dining room of a Paris apartment.

A strong Japanese influence can be felt in this work, which is even more evident in the painting’s pendant, or companion work: “Landscape with Vines” (1902, private collection), which includes a representation of Mount Fuji.

While studying at the Académie Julian in Paris in the late 1880s, Pierre Bonnard was introduced by fellow student Paul Sérusier to an innovative artistic group known as Les Nabis. Together with Édouard Vuillard, Bonnard became a leader of the Intimiste artists among Les Nabis, who were chiefly interested in domestic scenes and decorative painting, without espousing the Symbolist iconography embraced by Sérusier and other members of the group, such as Maurice Denis, Paul Gauguin, and Paul Ranson.

In this Pierre Bonnard painting, the focus is an elegant dressing table, which probably belonged to Bonnard’s wife. The table appears in numerous still lifes by Bonnard, but this version is one of the finest examples in his entire oeuvre.

Pierre Bonnard’s “Dressing Table and Mirror” displays objects that also appear in some of his other paintings: a ceramic vase decorated with cherries and holding luscious yellow and orange flowers, a large round basin, three smaller blue-and-white dishes, and two small flasks.

The beautifully painted fabric, falling from the tabletop to the floor, shimmers in ribbons of white, mauve, and light blue.

Pierre Bonnard expertly uses the mirror above the table to open up the picture space and add complexity to the composition. In the background, but actually behind the viewer and seen only as reflections, are an androgynous nude and a small, curled-up dachshund—still but animate elements in this carefully balanced still life. However, Bonnard’s bravura technique and subtle color choices truly animate the work.

Amedeo Modigliani successfully transferred the elements of his sculptures into paintings when he started to produce his now-celebrated nudes and portraits. The features that typify Modigliani’s portraits—the almond-shaped eyes without irises, the slender bodies with elongated necks—are all seen in this work.

With legs crossed and holding a small book in his lap, Léopold Zborowski is seated in an empty space, its cool shades of blue forming a striking contrast with the rich brown of Zborowski’s suit and hair. Amedeo Modigliani, in his highly stylized manner, placed great emphasis on the contours of both the finely drawn facial features and the entire figure. A second version of this portrait can be found at the Museu de Arte in São Paulo, Brazil.

“The Japanese Footbridge, Giverny,” characterized by heavy layers of paint in abstract patterns, depicts the footbridge over the water-lily pond at Claude Monet’s home. Even though the bridge’s elegant double arch is well known from many of Monet’s other paintings, this rendering is difficult to make out at first.

This work is strikingly different from Claude Monet’s other delicately brushed paintings, which are typically dominated by light blues, mauves, and pink highlights.

“The Japanese Footbridge, Giverny” is not an impression of the ephemeral qualities of light and atmosphere on Claude Monet’s favorite site, which he so often captured expertly with his brush, but the expression of a deeply felt emotional reaction.

“The Japanese Footbridge, Giverny” dates from a period in Claude Monet’s life when his sight was greatly impacted by cataracts in both eyes. This condition had progressed over many years and became so severe by the early 1920s that he could no longer make out the writing on the tubes of paint he was using. Yet Monet continued to work, painting a series in the style of this one, until he finally submitted to the dreaded cataract operation in early 1923.