Museum Masterpieces

Albert de Belleroche (Welsh-born French painter, 1864-1944) | Woman with a Yellow Hat | Metropolitan Museum of Art

Albert Gustavus de Belleroche, also known as Albert Belleroche, (22 October 1864 - 14 July 1944) was a Welsh-born painter and lithographer, who lived most of his childhood and his adulthood in Paris and England.

He began as a painter, but at the turn of the century focused on lithography, for which he is most well-known.

He was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre de Leopold by King Albert I of Belgium in 1933.

Albert André (1869-1954) | Vase of Flowers and Fruits on the Table / Vase de Fleurs et Fruits sur une Table, 1910 | Sotheby's

Albertus Jonas Brandt (Dutch still life painter, 1788-1821) | Still Life with Flowers and Fruits, 1816-1817 | Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

Still life of fruits and some flowers. In the center a few bunches of grapes surrounded by half a melon, peaches, plums, blackberries, currants and a hollyhock. | Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

Albertus Jonas Brandt (Dutch painter, 1788-1821) | Flowers in a TerraCotta Vase, 1810-1824 | Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

Albertus Jonas Brandt (25 November 1787 - 12 February 1821) was a Dutch still life painter. He was the son of a book printer and seller.

While working in his father's shop, he became a pupil of J. E. Morel.

After Morel's death in 1808, he spent two years with the painter G. J. J. van Os, (who was a son of Pieter van Os). When van Os moved to France in 1810, Brandt taught himself, copying Jan van Huysum.

In 1814 and 1816 he won prizes in the academy Felix Meritis. Soon he became famous, painting dead game, fruit, and flowers.

Brandt died of tuberculosis.

His collection of drawings, paintings and tools were auctioned on 29 October 1821.

The painting Flowers in a Terracotta Vase started by Brandt was finished by Eelke Jelles Eelkema.

Alexandre-Hyacinthe Dunouy (French painter, 1757-1841) | Castel Sant'Elmo from Chiaia, Naples, 1813 | Metropolitan Museum of Art

Dunouy spent the years 1810-15 in Naples at the behest of its queen, Napoleon’s sister Caroline Murat.

Royal patronage enhanced his reputation and it is probable that this modestly-sized painting was intended for sale to a well-to-do visitor to the city.

An inscription on the back suggests that an early owner was a member of the Barre family of engravers, medalists, and sculptors, who belonged to the cultivated milieu of the Monnaie de Paris, the French government institution charged with the minting of coins and medals.| Metropolitan Museum of Art

Alexei Harlamoff (Russian, 1840-1925) | Portrait of a young Girl | Sotheby's

Alexei Alexeievich Harlamov (also Alexej Harlamoff, Alexei Kharlamoff or Alexej Charlamoff) (1840-1925) was a Russian painter, who usually signed his name in the Latin alphabet as Harlamoff.

Alexei Harlamoff (Russian, 1840-1925) | Portrait of a young Girl

Alfred Henry Maurer (American painter, 1868-1932) | La Bal Bullier, 1900-1901 | Smith College Museum of Art

Located in the Latin Quarter of Paris, the Bal Bullier was a dance hall that first opened in the 1840s.

It was a popular gathering place for students, visitors to the city, and a circle of bohemian artists.

In this painting, Maurer includes a glimpse from the ballroom through to the garden with its glowing electric lights, which were a novelty at the time. On the dance floor, just a few remaining guests linger at the end of the night.

Maurer studied at the National Academy of Design in New York but lived in Paris from 1897-1914. Other expatriates, such as James McNeill Whistler, influenced him to experiment with French avant-garde styles, including Impressionism.

This painting specifically reflects the influence of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the French artist most known for capturing the decadent nightlife of nineteenth-century Paris. | Smith College Museum of Art

Alfred Stevens (Belgian painter, 1823-1906) | La villa des falaises À Sainte-Adresse, 1884 | Minnesota Marine Art Museum

La Villa des Falaises à Sainte-Adresse today stands out as one of Alfred Stevens’ greatest achievements, and also perhaps his last major painting.

In the ambition of its composition and in the number of figures portrayed, La Villa des Falaises is unique in Stevens' oeuvre.

The subject matter of elegant families in an exclusive seaside setting alludes to the society that Stevens kept and to the emerging concept of leisure in contemporary France; it also neatly bridges his celebrated vocation in Paris as a painter of graceful women in exotic interiors and his later experience of seaside life on the French coast at Normandy and on the Côte d’Azur.

The painting was done to order, and had to meet specific requirements regarding content which, it is recorded, tested Stevens' abilities to the limit.

Nonetheless, it was his triumph to carry off the commission with considerable skill and flair and the result is a painting that appears both effortless and spontaneous - as if the disposition of the figures and the demanding perspective had all been overcome in one impassioned session of work.

The outcome was a painting that would have struck its new owners as pleasingly modern and, at the same time, wholly in keeping with a rich tradition in French art, that of outdoor scenes of recreation. | Sotheby’s

Ambrose McEvoy (British painter, 1878-1927) | Mrs Claude Johnson, 1926 | Tate Britain

Mrs Claude Johnson is a half-length portrait of Evelyn Maud Johnson (née Mill), painted by the society portraitist Ambrose McEvoy. Mrs Johnson is depicted in a winter coat and a blue broad-brimmed hat, seated in an interior in front of a large, bright window.

The sitter’s clothes and the pink blossom on the trees outside indicate that it is spring. The artist’s surname is inscribed in the lower-right corner of the canvas in red paint.

McEvoy divided the canvas vertically into uneven thirds using the length of the window frames. This makes the painting appear narrower and encourages the viewer to focus on the sitter’s face in the centre of the canvas. McEvoy meticulously built up layers of coloured glazes with broad brushstrokes on a neutral, cream-coloured ground or primer.

Although warmer hues dominate this composition, the slight cracking of the paint on the surface of Mrs Johnson’s coat reveals colder blue tones underneath. McEvoy conducted many of his sittings in his studio at 107 Grosvenor Road, London, and Mrs Johnson would have sat several times before this portrait was completed.

Mrs Claude Johnson has been dated c.1926 although it was almost certainly painted earlier, as no sittings are recorded for Mrs Johnson in McEvoy’s 1925 and 1926 diaries.

This portrait is more likely to have been completed prior to the unexpected death of Mrs Johnson’s husband in April that year; it was then exhibited at the Royal Academy between 3 May and 7 August 1926.

An undated photograph of another version of this portrait shows Mrs Johnson in the same location, with the same hat, but wearing a light-coloured summer jacket, rather than a winter coat.

A third variant of this portrait, also depicting Mrs Johnson in the summer jacket, belongs to the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (NGV) and is titled Maud in Sunlight.

This portrait is dated 1926 and is documented at the NGV as having been painted after Mrs Claude Johnson in Tate’s collection. A pen and wash sketch of Mrs Johnson in the winter coat was sold at Christie’s auction house in 1972.

Evelyn Maud Johnson was the second wife of Claude Goodman Johnson and was known by her close friends as ‘Mrs Wigs’. Claude Johnson was Managing Director of Rolls-Royce from 1906 and famously described himself as the ‘hyphen’ in Rolls-Royce.

In fact, Johnson’s vital management had kept the company solvent when Charles Rolls died in a plane crash in 1910 and Henry Royce became ill. Johnson was an important patron and friend to McEvoy and in 1919 published a tome of McEvoy’s oeuvre.

In 1921 Claude Johnson described McEvoy as ‘perhaps the second greatest painter of the day, and whom I am privileged to call one of my best friends’ (Claude Johnson, letter to Douglas Johnson, 5 January 1921, Estate of Ambrose McEvoy).

In 1916, following the completion of a portrait of Mrs Maude Baring, Ambrose McEvoy became one of the most sought-after portraitists of his age. Among his sitters were future Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the playwright Noel Coward and the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova.

McEvoy painted several portraits of the Johnson family, including the Johnsons’ daughter Joan Claudia Johnson, known as ‘Tink’, Claude Johnson’s elder daughter Elizabeth, and his first wife, Fanny Mary Morrieson. A three-quarter length portrait of Evelyn Maud Johnson in black painted in 1922 is in the collection of the Ferens Art Gallery, Hull.

By the time Mrs Johnson presented this portrait to Tate, Ambrose McEvoy was severely overworked and in increasingly poor health. He died of pneumonia the following year on 4 January 1927. | Tate Britain