Helena Lam | Art Déco painter

The artwork of Helena Lam Chinese-born Canadian painter from Hong Kong, is inspired by the Art Déco era. This is a design style that blossomed in Paris in the 1920's and flourished internationally throughout the 1930's, into the World War II era.

The style influenced all areas of design, including architecture, interior design, industrial design, fashion, jewellery as well as the visual arts such as painting, graphic arts and film. At it's zenith, Art Déco embodied elegance, glamour, functionality and modernity.

Georges Seurat | A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884

"Bedlam", "scandal", and “hilarity” were among the epithets used to describe what is now considered Georges Seurat’s greatest work, and one of the most remarkable paintings of the nineteenth century, when it was first exhibited in Paris.

Seurat labored extensively over A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884, reworking the original as well as completing numerous preliminary drawings and oil sketches (the Art Institute has one such sketch and two drawings).

Georges Seurat | A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (detail) | Art Institute of Chicago

Henri Fantin-Latour | Portrait of Madame Léon Maître, 1882

Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) imbued his sitter - the sister-in-law of a friend - with an air of introspective melancholy, and the delicately rendered jewelry, fan, and corsage reveal his talent for still life.

While working on this portrait, the artist likely saw A Bar at the Folies-Bergère in the studio of his longtime friend Édouard Manet.

Madame Maître’s black, lace-trimmed evening dress, her choker, and the flowers at her décolletage are similar to the barmaid’s.

Henri Fantin-Latour | Portrait of Madame Léon Maître, 1882 | Brooklyn Museum

Both paintings were displayed at the 1882 Paris Salon, but whereas Manet’s ambiguous scene of a lower-class woman at work caused a public sensation, critics praised Fantin-Latour’s more sedate portraits, such as this one, as exemplars of femininity and breeding: "No one expresses like Monsieur Fantin-Latour the freshness of flowers and the natural gentleness of women of good solid bourgeois stock". | Source: © Brooklyn Museum

Gustave Caillebotte | Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877

This complex intersection, just minutes away from the Saint-Lazare train station, represents in microcosm the changing urban milieu of late nineteenth-century Paris.

Gustave Caillebotte🎨 grew up near this district when it was a relatively unsettled hill with narrow, crooked streets.

As part of a new city plan designed by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, these streets were relaid and their buildings razed during the artist’s lifetime. In this monumental urban view, which measures almost seven by ten feet and is considered the artist’s masterpiece, Caillebotte strikingly captured a vast, stark modernity, complete with life-size figures strolling in the foreground and wearing the latest fashions.

William Turner (1775-1851) | Romantic painter

J.M.W. Turner, in full Joseph Mallord William Turner, (born April 23, 1775, London, England - died December 19, 1851, London), English Romantic landscape painter whose expressionistic studies of light, colour, and atmosphere were unmatched in their range and sublimity.

Turner was perhaps the greatest landscapist of the 19th century.

Although brought up in the academic traditions of the 18th century, he became a pioneer in the study of light, colour, and atmosphere.