Browse Items (1279 total)

The title of this painting isn't clear; it's inscribed as "Gray Day" on the frame, but listed as "The Two Birches" in its NDG and General Services Administration records--which is followed here for the sake of institutional continuity. The canvas…

A neoclassical mansion, accessorized by ancestral family tree, looms over a woman wearing a long dress at lower left. Upon closer viewing the coherence of this scene breaks down; she's carrying an axe in her left hand, a la Lizzie Borden, along with…

A riot of fourteen sunflower blossoms fills the borders of Gubin's composition, in hues of vivid red, orange, and yellow. Combined with their foliage, it takes an effort to locate the flower's container--a warm brown vase possibly incorporating a…

The setting of this composition blurs the genres of En plein air landscapes and still lifes; there is no "background" to situate the basket of flowers in space, but the grass underneath them departs from carefully artificial indoor settings. A few…

Nature's bounty is gathered into a late-summer array: grapes, pears, peaches, a plum and a melon; behind them, heads of wheat and various flowers. It is not a haphazard grouping, given the wheat stalks poking out from green grass; the effect is…

More than a dozen species of fruit and flowers are mounded on a bed of grass. The painting's upper half, a skillfully mottled background, is crucial for establishing the space necessary to make sense of the lower half--without it, those objects…

At the time of this painting, marine art in its modern form was less than a hundred years old. Henning shows the influence of Gustave Courbet's "landscapes of the sea" and of subsequent artists like Claude Monet, albeit in more representational form.…

A soothing rural landscape fades into the hazy distance. Its design is mostly symmetrical, save for a red barn and fence at left center; humans and livestock are conspicuous in their absence. Perhaps the painting's most remarkable feature is its…

In circular composition, we behold a miniature world. Three glamorous horseback performers; a clown and his costumed dog at lower left; a crowd of spectators beholding the action: all orbit around a circular red carpet. At right is an ambiguous…

Whereas other paintings may have smoothed out some of the elements in this classic northeastern fall landscape, Jacoby creates a network of lines. We see them as stone walls in the fields below, tree trunks and branches (and their many shadows), and…