Récréation

Working for two famous film production companies, Yan Leung began his career as a professional photographer in 1965. He was associate editor of Photo Tech, chief editor of Photoart, and he was involved with the editorial work of several photographic publications. For more than thirty years, he has been everywhere across Hong Kong to capture ordinary people's lives and the local landscape and he particularly enjoys shooting children in play or action. Full of nostalgia, every single photo strikes the audience that how Hong Kong has changed so radically over the decades.

In this image, a performer still wearing her slippers follows a lumpy horse into the arena to perform for the spectators in the stands. Toulouse-Lautrec elongated the shadows behind the slippers to emphasize the woman's fatigue. Upon being released from the clinic after only three months, Toulouse-Lautrec declared: "I bought my freedom with my drawings." 

Isaac Israëls portraits of elegant women in hats posing on balconies of chic hotels in Rue Castiglione are now among his most prized paintings. Girl reading was also painted at this time. Using rapid brushwork, Israëls has successfully captured the girl’s elegant appearance without losing sight of the individuality of her facial features.

In nineteenth century France, the gaze of the observer—whether on Napoleon's grand new boulevards or in the opera—was very much structured by issues of economic status. Mary Cassatt's remarkable painting In the Loge (c. 1878-79) clearly shows the complex relationship between the gaze, public spectacle, gender, and class privilege. The girl, Lydia  is shown holding opera glasses up to her eyes; but instead of tilting them down, as she would if she were watching the performance below, her gaze is level. She peers straight across the chamber perhaps at another member of the audience. Look closely and you will notice that, in turn, and in one of the boxes across the room, a gentleman is gazing at her. Lydia is then, in a sense, caught between his gaze and ours even as she spies another.

The Courtship, however, without controversy, shows a young woman, garbed in modest colonial attire, spinning cloth as her suitor looks on. The subject was likely inspired by the recreation of a colonial New England kitchen—which housed a spinning wheel—at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, an event that triggered widespread nostalgia for America’s past. Many scholars believe "The Courtship" was also inspired by Diego Velázquez’s "The Fable of Arachne (The Spinners)"

William Kendall had three daughters whom he loved to paint in tender moments with their mother, Margaret. Here, the closed curtain and open book suggest a bedtime story, but there is a tantalizing hint of another meaning in this image. Margaret Kendall turns her face away from her husband to focus her affection on her daughter, who looks out at us with a wide-eyed, almost haunted expression. The title suggests a quiet moment before something happens, and it is possible that this image foreshadowed the disintegration of Kendall’s family. When An Interlude was painted, the artist had begun a relationship with the adolescent niece of artist Albert Herter. Kendall eventually divorced Margaret, resigned his teaching position at Yale, and retired to Hot Springs, Virginia, with Christine Herter.

The lively public entertainment at the Cirque Fernando is a subject that had long been popular among the Impressionists. Georges Seurat approached his subject in The Circus in an intellectual rather than a responsive manner, using the image to explore his theories about color and line. The result is abstract and decorative, and The Circus was left unfinished at Georges Seurat's death.The Circus is almost a plagiarism. Robert L. Herbert-who has pointed out similarities between certain of Cheret's posters and Seurat's compositions-proves that the clown is identical (only reversed) with one in a poster by Cheret of 1880, executed for the Spectacle-Promenade de l'Horloge in the Champs-Elysees. (Cheret also was acquainted with the works of Rood and Chevreul.) As for the over-all design, Meyer Schapiro has proved that Seurat took it from an anonymous poster for the Nouveau Cirque, printed in 1888, reversing the horse and the bareback rider. But the drawing in that poster bears no comparison with Seurat's painting-it is heavy, clumsy, the horse moves sluggishly, the rider is ungraceful-whereas in Seurat everything gallops and cavorts.

With the title portrait of the Rev. Thomas Levett and Favourite Dogs, Cock-shooting painted by the Romantic period painter James Ward in 1811. This is a depiction of the owner of Hopwas Woods, protagonist of the two Dyott diary stories, and avid hunter. His residence was nearby Packington Hall.

Russian Tea by Irving R. Wiles, ca. 1896, located at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The candlelit table, the sumptuous dresses, and the great silver samovar and glasses for serving Russian tea offer a window into another time.

Nannultera, cricket bat at the ready, looks out at us with a studied pose. His dress, with his bright red jumper and moleskins, is as English as the game of cricket itself. A young Indigenous boy, Nannultera was a resident of the Poonindie Mission Station just north of Port Lincoln in South Australia. Hale commissioned this portrait from J M Crossland as a record of his achievements at the mission, where cricket was introduced as a healthy recreation and useful part of the ‘civilising’ process. However, Nannultera’s sad, wistful expression says more about the reality of the situation for Indigenous boys at the mission, where many died as a result of cramped and unhygienic living conditions.

In a cafe, a fashionable meeting place, a man and awoman, although sitting side-by-side, are locked insilent isolation, their eyes empty and sad, withdrooping features and a general air of desolation.The painting can be seen as a denunciation of thedangers of absinthe, a violent, harmful liquor whichwas later prohibited. The realistic dimension isflagrant: the cafe has been identified – it is "LaNouvelle Athènes", in place Pigalle, a meeting placefor modern artists and a hotbed of intellectualbohemians.

 These depicted events and activities of the multi-cultural society he lived in. ‘'Indian Musicians'’ is one such work, depicting Indian traditional instruments. Liu loved music and this is perhaps best seen in his illustration of the musicians reveling in the activity.

Badham’s creative skills into a scene not only redolent of its time, but also intriguing through its ordinariness highlighted into something surreal. The composition is angled to give a feeling of the rocky ride, the occasional lurching of the motorbus. This is aided by Badham’s use of perspective, in which he had a special interest. While Badham was interested in painting scenes of leisure, of everyday scenes in pubs, at the theatre, or the fair, his approach was entirely objective. He was a bit of a distant observer. 

 the main ingredients of the ‘Kelly’ series were ‘Kelly’s own words, and Rousseau, and sunlight’. The series appears rather as a meditation on the circumstances of Nolan’s own life at the time and on the way in which the actions of one person could ‘change the world’. The series weaves biography and autobiography together, but we can only guess at the details of the autobiographical dimension. The Ned Kelly paintings entered the collection in 1977. Their exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, shortly after Nolan’s death, cemented their position as one of the greatest sequences of Australian painting of the 20th century.The Ned Kelly paintings entered the collection in 1977. Their exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, shortly after Nolan’s death, cemented their position as one of the greatest sequences of Australian painting of the 20th century.

A recurrent central theme in Abraham's work is the depiction of modernity, as witnessed in his portrayal of his friend, the cartoonist Tilghman, as a tennis player, because tennis was the latest fashion with the trendy set of the time, or in his self portrait depicting him in front of a small village. His glorification in the use of warm, contrasting colors is very characteristic of his singular brand of Realism.

Johnson spent decades traveling the world, searching for the authentic spirit of ordinary people from different cultures. In the late 1930s, he found what he was looking for in his own African American community. The strong colors and silhouettes in this painting evoke the African art that black artists and writers had embraced during the Harlem Renaissance. But this affectionate couple also has the fashionable flash of zoot-suiters in the big band era. Above the table, the two figures coolly take in the café scene; below, a tangle of legs and limbs hints at the erotic energy of a night on the town.

Another series which preoccupied Brack in the 1960s was that of professional ballroom dancing. The theme initially appealed to him for its absurdity: people who converted a natural activity, such as dance, into a demanding and challenging ritual. It was also a continuation of the theme of precariousness of being, where couples are thrown together within a competitive environment, where all is set against them: the floors are tilted, slippery and polished, the glare of the spotlights is merciless, the crowd and the judges appear hostile. The painting is also about masks and facades — the costumes, the hair and the smiles are all deliberate disguises used by the competing couples, who have to face the crowd and the judge. The couples, thrown together, whether in a dance, marriage or relationship, cling to one another in gestures of simultaneous attraction and rejection, yet persist with the ritual and the farce. 

The paintings were part of a series of cover illustrations Rockwell created for the magazine between 1917 and 1920, following the antics of four fictional young boys: Master Reginald Claude Fitzhugh, Tubby Doolittle, Rusty Doolittle, and Chuck Peterskin. The two illustrations were published consecutively, in order to complete a narrative about the boys’ varying degrees of success during a fishing trip.

Two wheeled, single-speed "Spacelander" bicycle; streamlined reddish-pink molded fiberglass shell with metal frame. Fiberglass constructed in multiple pieces: two over front wheel, two over remainder of frame with openings for handlebars, seat, pedals and rear wheel. Molded cover has pairs of front and rear cone-shaped head and tail lights. Irregular, organic-shaped openings expose front and rear wheels and area beneath the seat. Trimmed with chromed metal or stainless steel over the seams of fiberglass shell. White plastic handle grips, black and white seat and whitewall tires.