Claude Monet | Woman Seated under the Willows, 1880

A woman sits among loosely painted, crescent-shape blades of emerald and lemon-lime green grass, under tall trees in this vertical scene.

The brushstrokes are unconnected and visible, so many of the details difficult to make out.

Facing our left almost in profile, the woman’s form is suggested with thick strokes of eggshell white, periwinkle blue, mint green, and deep pink.

We get the impression of a light-colored dress that pools around her hips and legs, and a hat atop dark hair. Her face is painted with an area of blush peach.

Claude Monet | Woman Seated under the Willows, 1880 | National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Childe Hassam | Poppies on the Isles of Shoals, 1890

Throughout his career, Frederick Childe Hassam (American, 1859-1935) made several extended trips to Europe, where he was inspired by the sights and the many artists he met there.

A Back Road, completed the year after his first European tour, demonstrates a compositional daring and freedom of brushwork that were still unusual in American art of this period.

Influenced by the work of the nineteenth-century French Barbizon School, Hassam emphasized heavy brushstrokes and intense lighting effects.

Childe Hassam | Poppies on the Isles of Shoals, 1890 | Brooklyn Museum

Gustave Caillebotte | Dahlias, Garden at Petit Gennevilliers, 1893

A leader of the impressionist movement - a central exhibitor and organizing force for several of their exhibitions between 1876 and 1882 - Gustave Caillebotte was also an avid gardener.

Like his close friend Claude Monet, with whom he shared gardening expertise and exchanged tips, he created lush, vibrantly colored landscapes and translated them into paint on canvas.

This marvelous addition to the Gallery's singular impressionist collection celebrates his prized dahlias exploding in the foreground in front of his greenhouse and home.

Claude Monet at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Claude Monet | Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son, 1875

From: National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

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From low on a hillside, we look up at a light-skinned woman and boy standing in tall grass against a sunny blue sky in this vertical painting.

The woman stands at the center of the composition, and the moss-green parasol she holds over her head almost brushes the top edge of the canvas.

Her body faces our left but she turns her head to look at us.

Her long dress is painted largely with strokes of pale blue and gray with a few touches of yellow.

Her voluminous skirts swirl around her legs to our left.

Édouard Manet | The Railway / La Ferrovia, 1873

With her back to us, a young girl stands looking through a fence. Facing us directly, a woman sits with a small dog in her lap and a book in her hand.

Billowing steam from an unseen train obscures the center background, but the edge of a bridge juts out at right, identifying the setting as Gare Saint-Lazare - Paris’ busiest train station and emblem of the city’s unsettling 19th-century makeover. Beyond depicting the modern city, The Railway disturbingly suggests how people experienced it.

Pinned against a long black iron fence, these fashionably dressed female figures are physically cut off from the railroad beyond and also seem estranged from each other: facing in opposite directions, they are absorbed in their individual activities. Manet offers us no clues to their relationship, even as we viewers seem to interrupt the woman reading.

She looks up at us directly with an expression that is neutral and guarded - the characteristic regard of one stranger encountering another in the modern metropolis.

Tintoretto at the National Gallery of Art

The Samuel Kress Collection encompasses more than 3,000 works of European art, and is distinguished for its abundance of Italian Renaissance paintings.

The Collection was donated to scores of regional and academic art museums throughout the United States between 1929-1961, with the single largest donation reserved for the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. | © Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York

Tintoretto | The Conversion of Saint Paul, 1544 | National Gallery of Art, Washington

Van Gogh | La Mousmé, 1888

The intention and determination that inform Van Gogh's art can be obscured by the sensational legends that have arisen about his life.

The artist's correspondence, particularly frdeom his brief mature period of 1888-1890, contradicts popular lore and attests to the deliberateness, sensitivity, and integrity of his work.

On July 29, 1888, Van Gogh wrote his younger brother Theo, an art dealer in a Parisian gallery, that "if you know what a 'mousmé' is (you will know when you have read Loti's Madame Chrysanthème), I have just painted one.

Pietro Magni | The Reading Girl / La Lettrice, 1856

Pietro Magni's marble statue The Reading Girl brought the Milanese sculptor international fame and recognition.

It was exhibited numerous times at international exhibitions throughout Europe and America, each time to great public and critical acclaim. Stylistically it owes much to the artistic tradition of verismo or "realism" that characterized Italian art during the middle years of the nineteenth century, but it also recalls earlier aspects of Italian romanticism.