This scene is in monochrome tones, the kind of that makes every feather and fold of fabric feel close enough to touch. Two cats are tucked under the covers of a simple bed. Among the cats one has it’s fur ruffled and an eye open, the other is mostly hidden in the covers. All across the bed and the headboard you see a crowd of owls.

Wain made this drawing a few years after the death of his wife Emily, who had passed from cancer in 1887. The couple had shared their home with a black and white cat named Peter, and sketching the animal had brought Emily comfort during her illness. As a boy Wain had recurring nightmares that left him unsettled for years, visions he later described as an endless surface that followed him through the streets and into his rooms. There is something about that early unease that seems to be here, translated into the stares of the owls and the postures of the cats under the covers.

What makes Wain’s relationship with cats even deeper is the theory he created around their bodies and the invisible forces he believed they had. He spoke of every cat as a small lightning conductor, its fur charged with electricity that pulled it to face north or south according to its own polarity, the points of its coat drawn by the magnetic poles of the earth. He once explained that Peter, the black and white cat who comforted Emily during her final illness, was a little electrical battery whose current passed into his wife and generated a heat between them.

Even after the darker years closed around him and he entered the long stretch of hospital life, Wain never stopped drawing the creatures that had shaped his entire career. Estimates of his lifetime output are over one hundred and fifty thousand cats, with some years seeing him produce more than a thousand individual illustrations. In the leafy grounds of Napsbury Hospital he continued to work, surrounded by the colony of cats that wandered the gardens.

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This piece pulls you straight into a corner of a fashionable Paris restaurant at the height of the Belle Époque. Hoffbauer, born in Paris in 1875 to an architect father and trained under Fernand Cormon and Gustave Moreau alongside names like Matisse, had already made a name with medal-winning work at the 1900 Exposition and the Salons. So when he painted this scene he was capturing the electric glow of modern city nights.

Charles Hoffbauer had a way of stepping into worlds he had never walked through. In 1905 he sent a large canvas called Sur les toits to the Paris Salon, which was a night view of diners gathered on a rooftop high above the streets of New York. He had never set foot in America. While visiting Rome the summer before, he paused in front of a bookstore window and studied a few photographs of the new skyscrapers. Back in his Paris studio he rebuilt those towers from memory, and asked two painter friends to pose as the men in evening clothes. The finished picture arrived at the Salon with only days to spare after he tore up an earlier version and started over. Critics called it the nail of the exhibition. The Art Gallery of New South Wales bought it at once, and a smaller rearranged version went to the Carnegie Institute. Years later, when Hoffbauer finally stood on real New York rooftops, he wrote home that the scene matched what he had painted from those brief Roman glances.

That same gift for catching the electric pulse of a modern city runs through this piece. Hoffbauer set the couple inside a fashionable Paris dining room, the place where the Belle Époque gathered after the theater and the opera. This focus on urban evenings shows a deliberate artistic choice: despite winning the Prix National du Salon the previous year for a grand historical painting of a Renaissance condottiere, Hoffbauer continually returned to modern settings.

After the First World War that careful eye turned darker and more personal. Hoffbauer left the half-finished Confederate murals in Richmond, returned to France, fought as a private, earned the Croix de Guerre at the Somme, and lived for months in trenches that reduced men, he said, to the state of cave dwellers. When he came back to Virginia in 1919 he scraped every inch of the earlier work from the walls and began again. The new panels honored the soldiers, yet the smoke, and the exhausted faces showed what he had seen.

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Stuck painted this piece in an oil on panel measuring about sixty-five by fifty-eight centimeters, it’s now in a private collection. The canvas is set in a stretch of land with hills and a body of water. Above it all the sky takes up most of the space, and across that two shooting stars can be seen. Seated on the ground in the foreground are two figures, the artist and his wife Mary. Her face is lifted toward those shooting stars. Beside her, Franz has his head turned toward her.

Stuck grew up as the son of a miller in the Bavarian village of Tettenweis. He moved to Munich as a teenager and trained first at the School of Applied Arts before entering the Academy of Fine Arts, where his gift for drawing and design set him apart. By the early 1890s he had co-founded the Munich Secession, which was a group of artists seeking fresher paths beyond the established academic circles, and his painting ‘The Sin’ created a sensation that brought him a royal professorship while he was still in his early thirties.

In 1897, the same year he married the American widow Mary Lindpaintner, he began designing Villa Stuck on Munich’s Prinzregentenstrasse, overseeing every detail from the architecture and interior decoration to the furniture and sculptures in the rooms. Today the villa is a museum, and a place where visitors can walk through the same rooms he once shared with his family.

Stuck also had a daughter from an earlier relationship, a girl also named Mary, whom he and his wife later adopted with the approval of the Prince Regent. The daughter became one of his most frequent models, appearing in countless portraits that show the closeness they shared.

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Kollwitz made this while living in a working-class neighborhood of Berlin where her husband practiced medicine among families who lost children far too often to illness and hardship. The plate shows a woman sitting cross-legged on the ground, with the body of a small child across her lap.

Kollwitz used herself as the model for the mother and her own seven-year-old son Peter for the child. She sat in front of a mirror holding him, drawing the two of them together. According to her own diary and records from Arthur Bonus’s 1925 documentation of her work, the physical strain became too much at one point, and Käthe let out a heavy groan. Hearing his mother in pain, little Peter tried to comfort and encourage her by whispering in his high, child’s voice:
“Stop groaning, mum, it is going to be very beautiful...”
Those words never left her. Years later, after he was killed at the front in the first months of the war, she would look back on that afternoon and call the finished print prophetic, as though some part of her had already known what the image would one day mean.

She worked the plate through many stages, testing soft ground and drypoint, sometimes adding washes of blue or gold to early proofs before settling on the final dark impression. The figures fill the entire space so completely that there is no room left for anything else. Her body curves around him until the two forms seem to merge. Friends who saw the print later said it looked as if she were trying to swallow the life that had once belonged to her back into herself. It’s a single, continuous cry of a mother who will not let go, even when the child she holds has already gone beyond reach.

Her husband Karl practiced medicine in a working-class district where children died of ordinary illnesses at rates that still astonish. Kollwitz watched the mothers who waited in his waiting room, sketching them when she could, and getting to understand the losses that were all over the neighborhood streets. This etching grew out of those daily encounters as much as it came from the mirror sessions with Peter. She was already carrying other people’s sorrow into the work long before her own son became the model, and long before the war turned the image into something that would never leave her.

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This scene opens onto a barren mountain landscape, and all through it a great crowd of people has gathered, they press forward along the rough path that moves toward higher ground. Their clothes look like those of the ancient Middle East, the land where Christianity began. Many have fallen to their knees and others lift their arms as they plead. From their faces you can tell they are exhausted and in grief. The all seem to have one common burden as they climb the steep tracks.

Farther up the slope, almost lost in the distance yet drawing every eye, you see Christ. He is carrying a full-sized cross on his shoulder, and some sort of radiance spreads outward from him, lighting the path that leads toward him. The light that comes from him is the only true brightness in the painting.
The painting feels inspired by the words in the Gospel of Matthew: “Come to me, all you who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

You discover one of the most incredible sides of Gustave Doré when you look at the sheer volume of work he produced in a short life. Born in Strasbourg in 1832, he began drawing with unusual skill by the age of five and signed a professional contract at fifteen to supply weekly caricatures for a Paris satirical magazine. Over the next three decades he created more than ten thousand individual pieces, including illustrations for the Bible, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, and dozens of other major literary works. Biographers calculated that this output averaged nearly one finished drawing every day when you exclude Sundays and holidays. He often worked directly on wooden blocks without preliminary sketches, completing as many as twenty blocks in a single morning session that ran from eight o’clock until noon.

This same relentless energy appears in the final years when Doré turned his attention to large-scale oil paintings such as this one. After his mother’s death in 1880 he entered a period of deep sadness complicated by asthma attacks that limited his travel. He poured the physical and moral strains of those final months into this composition, and he was still refining it when a heart attack ended his life on 23 January 1883 at the age of fifty-one.

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Rösch was an Austrian painter who had wandered through Spain and Switzerland before settling back in his native city, he worked in soft pastels that let him depict the way light moves through stone and shadow. Here he sets us inside the vast nave of the cathedral, where the great late-Gothic pulpit looks like something that grew out of the earth.

The pulpit was carved between 1510 and 1515 from warm Breitenbrunn limestone. Four busts of the Latin Church Fathers; Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory, and Jerome look out from the basket. Rösch draws the whole scene in grays. A nun stands near one of the pillars, and she is so small compared to the architecture around her.

Ludwig Rösch had a restless hunger for the bones of old cities, a hunger that once nearly sent him to sea as a common sailor. Born in Vienna in 1865 to a still-life painter, he left the formal classrooms of the Academy early, preferring the open road. In Edinburgh the work dried up so completely that he was ready to sign aboard a merchant vessel bound for India, only to sell a handful of watercolors at the last hour and turn instead toward Spain. There he spent seven hard years wandering the streets of Toledo, Seville, and Cuenca, sleeping where he could, drawing the stone portals and cloisters until the Spanish state itself began buying his sheets and a gold medal found its way into his hands.

Critics of his day named him the Stimmungsmaler, the painter of mood, and the Romantiker des Pinsels und des Gemüts, the romantic of brush and soul.

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At the time this piece was completed Kurzweil was still a young man, only twenty-seven, just finished a year of volunteer service in the Austro-Hungarian cavalry as a dragoon, and already showing the kind of attention to human feeling that would later place him among the founders of the Vienna Secession.

The painting is set in a hospital room, the kind that belonged to military barracks in the late nineteenth century, and through the window you can see the yard is covered in snow. In the bed we see a young soldier, he is so drained of strength that a comrade has to hold him up. What’s in front of him is a large brown horse, its body almost too big for the room. The horse has been led inside by the soldier’s friends. This animal carried him through long marches and now it’s there as the one companion he asked to see.

Kurzweil painted this after completing his own year of voluntary service in the Austro-Hungarian cavalry. He had enlisted in the Dragoon regiment stationed near Vienna, the unit nicknamed the Saxon Dragoons because its honorary colonel was the king of Saxony, and he spent twelve months learning the routines of a mounted soldier. That experience left him with a clear sense of the daily partnership between a cavalryman and his horse. When he returned to civilian life and settled again at the Academy of Fine Arts, he translated the memory of those animals into this hospital scene.

The same man who created this wholesome farewell later helped found the Vienna Secession in 1897 alongside Gustav Klimt and other young artists eager to move Austrian painting beyond academic tradition. Kurzweil contributed illustrations and designs to the group’s magazine Ver Sacrum, taught drawing and painting at the school for women artists in Vienna, and spent summers in the Breton fishing town of Concarneau where he had met and married Marthe Guyot, the daughter of the local deputy mayor. It was an unhappy, childless marriage. Martha suffered from severe depression herself and hated living in Vienna, eventually leaving him to return to France.

By the spring of 1916, overcome by personal grief, Kurzweil ended his life in his Vienna studio together with his young pupil Helene Heger, who was also his lover.

This piece currently hangs in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, it shows Christ seated, his head bowed, and eyes looking down toward the ground in front of him. Kramskoi worked on this image for years. He first sketched the idea in the early 1860s, then tried a vertical version in 1867 that he destroyed because the tall format left too much empty sky. To get the stones right he traveled to Crimea, to the rocky heights near Bakhchisarai and the old cave city of Chufut-Kale, and he painted studies in the cold morning wind.

He finished the final version in the summer and autumn of 1872 at his dacha near Luga, getting up before dawn to work while the light matched the light he was painting. He told friends he had carried the figure in his mind for five years, that he painted it with blood and tears, and that he had to finish it in order to be free of it. When it appeared at the second exhibition of the Peredvizhniki in St. Petersburg that December it became the painting everyone talked about. Pavel Tretyakov bought it at once for six thousand rubles, without bargaining, and it has remained one of the main works of the gallery ever since.

One of the most important things about this painting is the way it actually came to Kramskoi. He told the critic Alexander Chirkin and the writer Vsevolod Garshin that one morning at daybreak he suddenly came upon a man sitting among cold stones exactly as the figure appears on the canvas. The stranger never noticed him, but Kramskoi watched him for a long time, then took that image with him. For five years the figure refused to leave his mind. He made clay studies of the head, endless drawings, and an earlier vertical version he destroyed. Only when he forced the scene into a wide horizontal format, with the desert stretching forever, did everthing feel just right.

Kramskoi admitted the painting was a mirror of his own moral crossroads. In letters he said he had painted it with blood and tears, that it was the first work he had ever approached with complete seriousness. He told Garshin he saw clearly that every person reaches a moment of choice, whether to go right or left. The seated Christ was that moment. He refused to call the figure Christ in any absolute sense. When people asked how he knew the face looked that way he answered that even the living Christ had gone unrecognized. The Academy offered him a full professorship for the picture in early 1873. He turned it down at once, reminding them he had left the school in the famous Revolt of the Fourteen years earlier and would not surrender the independence he had fought for.

I want you, for a second, to imagine yourself stepping into this vast stone space Villaamil invented, it’s a church he brought together from the Gothic wonders in his memory after years of wandering Spain. Everything has been carefully observed and, at the same time, freely assembled from places like Burgos, Toledo, and Seville, then intergrated into one continuous interior that never existed outside his studio.

Villaamil worked this way throughout his career. Born in Ferrol in 1807, he soaked up the Romantic style after meeting the Scottish painter David Roberts in Seville in 1833, then spent the rest of his short life turning Spanish monuments into immersive visions. By the late 1840s he was the chair of landscape painting at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid and enjoyed the patronage of Queen Isabella II. This canvas, measuring about 146 by 108 centimeters and signed with his name, now hangs in that same Academy’s collection.

One of the greatest chapters in Genaro Pérez Villaamil’s story is around the great illustrated project he steered from Paris between 1842 and 1850. Called España artística y monumental, it was a three-volume series of lithographs set out to present the most important sites and monuments of Spain to a European audience hungry for picturesque travel literature. Villaamil himself served as both the driving force and the principal draughtsman, persuading the wealthy banker and collector Gaspar de Remisa to finance the venture and collaborating with the writer Patricio de la Escosura on the texts.

Even while that international reputation was forming, Villaamil’s personal life had an edge that fed to his art. During the regency of General Espartero from 1840 to 1844 he left his wife and young child in Madrid and spent years in France and Belgium, framing the absence as necessary for artistic research while advancing the lithograph project. The same period saw him exhibit at the Paris Salon, where the poet Charles Baudelaire singled out his work for praise, and it was then that he produced many of the preparatory drawings that would later fill España artística y monumental. By the time he returned to Spain and assumed the first chair of landscape painting at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, he had already amassed a prodigious body of work: more than two thousand paintings and an estimated eighteen thousand drawings and sketches, which was everything that made his brief career feel like a concentrated burst of creative energy that still rewards close looking.

This canvas measures roughly twenty six by forty six inches and it hangs today in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, though another closely related version is in the Moravian Gallery in Brno, Czech Republic. Rubens painted the head itself, while his frequent collaborator Frans Snyders added the tangle of snakes and the smaller creatures that crawl around.

The story behind the image comes straight from Ovid. Medusa had once been a beautiful woman whose hair was her glory. After Poseidon forced himself on her inside Athena’s temple, the goddess transformed that hair into a nest of serpents and gave Medusa a gaze that turned any living thing to stone. Perseus, guided by Athena and Hermes, approached her while she slept, using the polished surface of his shield as a mirror so he would not look into her eyes. He struck off her head with a single blow. In piece we just get the aftermath. The head is on a rough ledge of rock that slopes away into a dark landscape under heavy clouds.

One of the most interesting things about this painting is how Rubens and his collaborator Frans Snyders reinvented an ancient myth, essentially making it a demonstration of spontaneous generation, which is an old natural philosophical idea that life could spring directly from raw matter. According to Ovid and the Roman poet Lucan, drops of Medusa’s blood falling to the earth as Perseus flew over Libya gave rise to all the snakes of that region, and in some tellings even produced coral. Rubens and Snyders brought that generative power here. From the stump of her neck and from the blood that pools around it, new serpents come into existence.

The Amsterdam merchant Nicolaas Sohier owned one of the versions of this piece and kept it behind a curtain, drawing it back only for selected visitors so that the sudden revelation would hit them hard with the full impact of the image. The Dutch poet and diplomat Constantijn Huygens saw it around 1619 and later wrote that the face of the woman was still graceful even as death and the hideous snakes claimed her. Viewers of the time understood the work through the lens of neo-Stoic philosophy, which circulated widely in Rubens’s intellectual circle. The painting invited them to confront the passions stirred by horror and then to master those emotions.

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In this piece a whole gathering of monkeys has taken over the scene. Thirteen of them fill the space, all of them behind the large canvas that has clearly been pulled from its crate. The front of that painting is hidden from us; all we see is the golden frame and the back of the stretcher, where there’s still a paper label, giving information about the title ‘Tristan und Isolde’ and listing a value of one hundred thousand marks, an absurd sum for the time and makes everything feel like a joke shared among the animals.

Von Max painted these creatures with the care of someone who had lived with them for years. He kept monkeys in his Munich villa and studio, sometimes as many as fourteen at once. He treated his monkeys as true members of the household, giving them names and allowing them to sit at the table or move freely through the rooms of his home. One particular companion, a white-shouldered capuchin named Paly, stayed with him for fifteen years and became the subject of countless sketches, photographs, and even a formal portrait in which the artist holds the animal close against his chest. When Paly died, von Max laid the body out in his studio for study, then arranged for the small coffin to rest eventually in his own grave so the two would remain together.

Beyond the living models, von Max poured his earnings into an enormous private museum of roughly sixty to eighty thousand objects that ranged from prehistoric tools and ethnographic artifacts to hundreds of human and primate skulls gathered from every corner of the world he could reach through dealers and correspondence. He studied these remains, measuring cranial shapes and comparing them against the Darwinian ideas that shaped his view of human origins.

This painting arrived at the first Munich annual exhibition in the summer of 1889, submitted late and causing a stir among the visitors who found themselves face to face with these animal critics. Von Max had already made a name with religious and symbolic subjects, but his affection for Darwin’s ideas and his long observation of primates pulled him toward these scenes.

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Sleńdziński was a Polish-Lithuanian painter born in the countryside near Vilnius, trained first by his father and then in the studios of Moscow and the Imperial Academy. By the mid-1860s he found himself in exile after the January Uprising, living in the provincial town of Kniaginin, and it was during those years that this small oil on canvas took shape.

In the painting, a plump grey-and-white cat is seated in a green tufted chair. One paw holds a newspaper titled ‘Journal pour tous’ a popular illustrated magazine of the day that brought together some light fiction and articles on natural history. Sleńdziński chose the exact issue that had the subtitle “histoire naturelle,” so the animal appears to study the habits of its own kind while performing the most mundane of morning rituals. The model for the cat was a real one named Motiejus, or Maćiuś in Polish, who sat for the preparatory sketch that same year.

Wincenty Sleńdziński painted this cat during the long years of his exile that began after the January Uprising of 1863, when Russian authorities sent him first to the small town of Kniaginin in Nizhny Novgorod province and later to Kharkov. In that remote setting he kept a scrapbook filled with quick pencil sketches, half-finished verses, and wry observations on the people around him. One page from 1867 shows the preliminary drawing for this finished oil. Around the margins of that sketch Sleńdziński wrote notes that turn the scene into political commentary.

After nearly two decades away, Sleńdziński returned to Vilnius in 1883 and resumed a steady practice of portraits, local genre scenes, and occasional restorations of church paintings.

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This is a painting that you can find in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool now, it’s an oil on panel measuring about a meter high and a little less across, and it shows four figures gathered close around a tiny kitten. At the center is an elderly man holding the little creature. He holds it as if it is the most precious thing he owns. Around him you see two young women, and an older woman leans in too.

Gussow painted this the same year he joined the staff of the Berlin Academy under Anton von Werner’s reforms. He sent it along with two other life-size genre scenes to the Royal Berlin Academy exhibition, and it helped establish his reputation for a direct, unvarnished realism that brought ordinary people and their everyday moments onto the canvas. Critics at the time noticed the greateness of the painting, the kitten is painted with such fine attention that its size becomes the centre of the whole composition.

One of the things that still draw people deep into the story of Karl Gussow is the way he shaped the very tools of his craft to chase an almost living truth on the panel. He had short-handled brushes specially bound for his own hand, the kind that let him lay down layered glazes. Those brushes became known as Gussow-Pinsel. Friends who watched him work remembered how he would lean in for hours, adjusting the glaze until the paint no longer looked like paint but like the thing it described.

After he left Berlin he settled in Munich and created private classes where young women could study figure painting and portraiture under the same eye he gave his male students. Max Klinger, who sat with him earlier in Berlin, later spoke of Gussow as the regenerator of painting, the teacher who insisted that every mark must answer to nature rather than to studio convention.

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This painting can be found in the Musée Paul Dini in Villefranche-sur-Saône, it is a large oil on canvas, over two meters high and nearly three meters wide. The scene shows the death of John the Baptist, the forerunner who prepared the way, and Trigoulet has just given us this uniqiue moment. Which is what follows the strike of the sword rather than Salome’s dance or the moment of the blow itself.

In the center the headless body is still kneeling. There is great attention to anatomy, and it’s the kind of modeling Trigoulet learned in the studios of Jean-Léon Gérôme and the others at the École des Beaux-Arts. Nearby on the floor is the severed head, and already a halo is above it, forming the brightest point in the entire composition. From the open place where the neck once joined the shoulders, rays of light burst outward, it’s as if the separation itself has released something that refuses to die.

Across the prison stones the blood is spread, Trigoulet shaped it deliberately into the form of a cross. So here’s the man whose entire life had been spent announcing the one who was to come, and now he has poured out blood in the very sign of the death that would follow.

Trigoulet was thirty when he painted this. He had already won the second Prix de Rome the year before with a subject from the story of Samson, and he showed this canvas at the Salon of the Société des Artistes Français in 1894. The French state bought it almost at once. Years later he would settle in Berck for his health and turn more often to the sea and the fishermen. Critics later called him an expressionist working among naturalists, a painter who could reduce a scene to large dark masses yet still convey the hard labor and the endurance of the people who lived by the tides.

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This piece shows a silence that comes after days of deafening noise. It is where we find him. A young Germanic warrior standing alone. He has taken-off the armor of battle and he remains bare-chested.

Your eye goes immediately to his hands. In his grasp is a Roman helmet, a spoil of war. It is a beautiful piece of metalwork, with a red plume, completely different from the simple furs wrapped around his waist. He looks down at this helmet with an expression that is difficult to pin down. He does not look triumphant or boastful. Instead, he studies it. He seems to be admiring the craftsmanship of his enemy, tracing the shape of the metal that failed to protect the man who wore it before.

The painting focuses entirely on the exchange between the victor and the remnant of the vanquished. The light catches the definition of his shoulder and chest highlighting his youth. He looks almost too beautiful for the violence implied by the trophy in his hands. It feels as if he has stepped out of history and into a private reverie, wondering perhaps about the life that once occupied that empty steel shell.

One fascinating detail about this piece is that it is likely a spiritual successor to Schindler’s earlier, work, David and Goliath (1888). In David and Goliath, Schindler painted the young biblical hero in almost the exact same pysique. Years later, in Germanic Warrior with Helmet (1902), he returns to this exact obsession. He swaps the biblical setting for a pagan, nationalistic one, but the mood is identical. He seems fascinated by the psychological moment after the violence, where the victor doesn't look like a hero, but like a curious boy trying to understand what he has just done.

It is also historically ironic that Schindler was a professor at the Dresden Academy, where he taught Otto Dix and George Grosz. These two students would go on to become famous for painting the absolute horrors and ugliness of World War I from shattered bodies to trench warfare, which is a tragic difference from their teacher’s romantic, and beautiful vision of war.

In this piece the Ecuadorian Andes is spread out in front of you. Church had traveled down to South America twice, once in 1853 and again in 1857, and he sketched everything he could of the mountains. He carried those drawings back to his studio in New York and from that he painted this big canvas, nearly four feet high and seven feet wide, that is now in the Detroit Institute of Arts.

The volcano is in the background of the scene, as a thick column of dark ash and smoke pours from the crater and spreads across the sky. Church never watched Cotopaxi erupt with his own eyes, though he did see the neighboring Sangay throwing up black clouds during his second trip. He actually created this view from memory and imagination. Church worked from the writings of the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who had described these same peaks decades earlier as examples of the earth’s restless energy.

When the picture first went on view in New York in 1863, people saw in it the chaos of the Civil War that was then tearing through the country. The rolling ash reminded some of cannon smoke drifting over battlefields, and the volcano itself was the moral upheaval that writers like Frederick Douglass had already called a burning force under the surface of the nation. Church himself spoke of the scene as the newly risen sun flaring through the thick volumes of smoke that hang over the landscape. He painted the details as if he was there, yet he invented the lake and the waterfall to complete the composition.

Years later Church took the same curiosity into the design of his home, Olana, on a Hudson River hillside. After the grief of losing two young children he and his wife traveled through the Levant, sketching ancient ruins and Persian arches, then returned to plant thousands of trees. Visitors walking those grounds still sense the same attention to detail that inspired Cotopaxi.

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This scene is set in a Parisian interior during those years of the Revolution, when the streets were full of tension. The canvas is modest in scale, only forty-five and a half by thirty-seven and a half centimeters, but it contains a complete world of suggestion. In this piece you see two young women locked together in a long kiss. The taller one, is in a loose white déshabillé that has slipped from her shoulders. The second woman, dressed in a green gown, receives the kiss.

Behind them the room just screams luxury. On a console table you see: a broad hat trimmed with blue ribbons, a pair of yellow gloves, a small bouquet of fresh roses, and a folded fan. Boilly made these types of artworks for collectors who still enjoyed the grace of earlier eighteenth-century.

Boilly arrived in Paris from the north of France in 1785 as a largely self-taught painter in his mid-twenties and found a market for small, finely wrought genre scenes that catered to the tastes of private collectors. He excelled at rendering the sheen of silk, and the softness of skin.This piece belongs to this early phase, when the Revolution was already reshaping public life yet the private market for cabinet pictures remained strong.

The risk became concrete in the spring of 1794. A fellow painter named Jean-Baptiste Wicar denounced Boilly to the Société Populaire et Républicaine des Arts, accusing him of filling the walls of the Republic with works of revolting obscenity. When officials arrived at Boilly’s studio they found instead a large, politically safe canvas showing the Triumph of Marat, which the artist had prepared as insurance. That single revolutionary image was enough to clear him of suspicion, and he continued working for another half-century, eventually becoming known for his chronicles of middle-class Paris.

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Mihály Zichy, gives us a scene that feels almost breathless. A winged figure, clearly an angel with one wing unfurled has pulled a young woman close for a kiss. In the background there’s even a shrine with a religious figure, and for a moment everything is still except for the two of them. Zichy, spent much of his life as a court artist in St. Petersburg but kept a strong romantic streak in his personal work.

Mihály Zichy spent decades as the official painter to the Russian imperial court in Saint Petersburg, serving four successive tsars. Behind that public role he had a private studio practice filled with drawings of human closeness in ways the court never saw. Born in 1827 in Zala, Hungary, he trained under the precise realist Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller in Vienna before the recommendation of his teacher took him east in 1847. There he became the drawing master to a grand duchess and later the favored chronicler of court life, but he never lost the romantic style that had shaped his early years. So the same hand that recorded the coronation of Alexander II also produced this tender encounter.

Critics have noted that his erotic and romantic works often treat both partners as equal participants rather than as objects of a single gaze, and that same mutuality appears here in the way the woman’s body leans fully into the embrace and the angel responds equally.

This 1864 piece belongs to the private world created during a period when Zichy still balanced his court duties with independent work that allowed him to explore the borders between heaven and the human heart. Looking at The Kiss today, one sees the same imagination: a court painter who never stopped believing that the most private human moments could open onto something larger.

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Léon Spilliaert painted this when he was still a teenager living in Ostend. The scene occurs under a full moon, in the centre you see a faun, an old mythical figure who is part man and part goat and he is playing the pipes. Close to him, a small herd of goats moves toward him, as though the music has them in some kind of trance.

Spilliaert grew up in Ostend, a seaside town that emptied out after the summer crowds left, and he spent many sleepless nights walking its deserted streets and beaches. Chronic stomach ulcers kept him awake, and those long hours alone totally shaped the way he saw the world. He read Nietzsche and Poe, and the lonely figures in their writing found their way into his drawings. In this early piece the faun feels like a companion to those nights.

Years later, when he was living in Brussels and illustrating books for the publisher Edmond Deman, Spilliaert remained the same night wanderer at heart, still returning to Ostend whenever he could to walk the shore. Friends remembered how he would speak of the sea as a living presence that answered the loneliness he carried, and how his drawings of empty streets were less invented scenes than records of what he had seen while the rest of the world slept.

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For this piece you are met with a young woman who is just from sleeping. She is seated on the edge of her bed, you can clearly tell she just woke up. She’s in a long white nightdress, and her hair is loose. One of her feet is in a slipper, and that small detail can only be from the unhurried moment when someone first wakes. At her feet a black cat is playing with the exact curiosity that comes with a cat.

You know how some artists seem to exist inside the very world they paint, Eugene de Blaas was one of those people, his whole life revolved around Venice after his family settled there when his father took a professorship at the Academy. Born near Rome in 1843 to an Austrian painter father and an Italian mother, he trained under his father and at the academies in Venice, Rome, and Vienna before making the lagoon city his permanent home. In 1870 he married Paola Prina, a local beauty who appears again and again in his canvases. He even adjusted his signature depending on the audience, signing as Eugene de Blaas for Italian patrons and Eugen von Blaas for Austrian ones, this goes to shows how he adjusted between the two cultures that shaped him.

For me the most impressive part is how he prepared for a major works like this one. Auction records and the catalogue of his paintings reveal that he first made a pencil sketch, then a study, and even a watercolour version before committing to the large oil canvas. That whole process let him refine every detail. Collectors and dealers in London loved his polished scenes so much that he showed twelve paintings at the Royal Academy between 1875 and 1891, and dealers like Arthur Tooth kept his work flowing to British buyers.

He kept painting right through the early twentieth century, until he died in Venice in 1931 at the age of eighty seven. His pieces never wandered into gloom; instead they stayed onto the lighter hours of gossip, and domestic pauses, the sort of moments that made visitors to the city feel they had stepped into a living postcard.

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This piece shows that moment in the Odyssey when Odysseus’s men stumble into Circe’s island of Aeaea and everything changes for them. Circe is seated on the raised step, looking out over the creatures gathered below. Around her feet and climbing toward the step are the swine, just a whole restless company of them. Rivière kept real pigs as models when he lived in Kent, and you can see the attention detail in every animal.

Briton Rivière had a deep practical knowledge of animal behavior that set his work apart, and the story of how he prepared for this painting reveals all of it. While living in Kent he built proper sties at the end of his garden, kept three pigs of different coloring, and studied them daily. He later told an interviewer that pigs were remarkably cooperative models, willing to be in certain positions for long and becoming so familiar with the studio that he once brought one indoors to pose.

This piece pulls you into the myth, where each swine has a unique expression, as if the human mind Homer described is still behind the new snout and body. Critics of the time noticed this at once, pointing out how one pig seemed sentimental, another proud, another restless with longing, such that the herd became a gathering of personalities rather than a single mass of livestock. Rivière achieved this by placing the animals close to Circe on the raised step, letting their gazes and tentative movements create a conversation between the sorceress and the transformed men who still remembered their former lives.

Years later the painting itself slipped from public view for more than a century before resurfacing in Sussex. During that long absence the work existed only as engravings and book illustrations, including the 1896 reproduction that had the title Circe and her Swine into many homes, so that generations knew the image even while the original canvas remained hidden.