Class & inequality

Featured Artworks

Young Girls at the Piano

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1892)

Renoir’s Young Girls at the Piano turns a quiet lesson into a scene of attunement and bourgeois grace. Two adolescents—one seated at the keys, the other leaning to guide the score—embody harmony between discipline and delight, rendered in Renoir’s late, luminous touch [1][2].

The Tub

Edgar Degas (1886)

In The Tub (1886), Edgar Degas turns a routine bath into a study of modern solitude and embodied labor. From a steep, overhead angle, a woman kneels within a circular basin, one hand braced on the rim while the other gathers her hair; to the right, a tabletop packs a ewer, copper pot, comb/brush, and cloth. Degas’s layered pastel binds skin, water, and objects into a single, breathing field of warm flesh tones and blue‑greys, collapsing distance between body and still life [1].

Pont Neuf Paris

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1872)

In Pont Neuf Paris, Pierre-Auguste Renoir turns the oldest bridge in Paris into a stage where light and movement bind a city back together. From a high perch, he orchestrates crowds, carriages, gas lamps, the rippling Seine, and a fluttering tricolor so that everyday bustle reads as civic grace [1].

The Hermitage at Pontoise

Camille Pissarro (ca. 1867)

Camille Pissarro’s The Hermitage at Pontoise shows a hillside village interlaced with kitchen gardens, stone houses, and workers bent to their tasks under a low, cloud-laden sky. The painting binds human labor to place, staging a quiet counterpoint between architectural permanence and the seasonal flux of fields and weather [1][3].

Laundresses Carrying Linen in Town

Camille Pissarro (1879)

In Laundresses Carrying Linen in Town, two working women strain under white bundles that flare against a flat yellow ground and a dark brown band. The abrupt cropping and opposing diagonals turn anonymous labor into a monumental, modern frieze of effort and motion.

The Loge

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1874)

Renoir’s The Loge (1874) turns an opera box into a stage of looking, where a woman meets our gaze while her companion scans the crowd through binoculars. The painting’s frame-within-a-frame and glittering fashion make modern Parisian leisure both alluring and self-conscious, turning spectators into spectacles [1][2].

Woman Reading

Édouard Manet (1880–82)

Manet’s Woman Reading distills a fleeting act into an emblem of modern self-possession: a bundled figure raises a journal-on-a-stick, her luminous profile set against a brisk mosaic of greens and reds. With quick, loaded strokes and a deliberately cropped beer glass and paper, Manet turns perception itself into subject—asserting the drama of a private mind within a public café world [1][2].

Woman Ironing

Edgar Degas (c. 1876–1887)

In Woman Ironing, Degas builds a modern icon of labor through contre‑jour light and a forceful diagonal from shoulder to iron. The worker’s silhouette, red-brown dress, and the cool, steamy whites around her turn repetition into ritualized transformation—wrinkled cloth to crisp order [1][2].

Madame Monet and Her Son

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1874)

Renoir’s 1874 canvas Madame Monet and Her Son crystallizes modern domestic leisure and plein‑air immediacy in Argenteuil. A luminous white dress pools into light while a child in a pale‑blue sailor suit reclines diagonally; a strutting rooster punctuates the greens with warm color. The brushwork fuses figure and garden so the moment reads as lived, not staged [1][2][5].

The Floor Scrapers

Gustave Caillebotte (1875)

Gustave Caillebotte’s The Floor Scrapers stages three shirtless workers planing a parquet floor as shafts of light pour through an ornate balcony door. The painting fuses rigorous perspective with modern urban labor, turning curls of wood and raking light into a ledger of time and effort [1][3]. Its cool, gilded interior makes visible how bourgeois elegance is built on bodily work.

Paris Street; Rainy Day

Gustave Caillebotte (1877)

Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day renders a newly modern Paris where Haussmann’s geometry meets the anonymity of urban life. Umbrellas punctuate a silvery atmosphere as a central gas lamp and knife-sharp façades organize the space into measured planes [1][2].

The Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage

Edgar Degas (ca. 1874)

Degas’s The Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage turns a moment of practice into a modern drama of work and power. Under harsh footlights, clustered ballerinas stretch, yawn, and repeat steps as a ballet master/conductor drives the tempo, while abonnés lounge in the wings and a looming double bass anchors the labor of music [1][3][4].

Regatta at Sainte-Adresse

Claude Monet (1867)

On a brilliant afternoon at the Normandy coast, a diagonal pebble beach funnels spectators with parasols toward a bay scattered with white-sailed yachts. Monet’s quick, broken strokes set wind, water, and light in synchrony, turning a local regatta into a modern scene of leisure held against the vastness of sea and sky [1][2].

Dance at Bougival

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1883)

In Dance at Bougival, Pierre-Auguste Renoir turns a crowded suburban dance into a private vortex of intimacy. Rose against ultramarine, skin against shade, and a flare of the woman’s scarlet bonnet concentrate the scene’s energy into a single turning moment—modern leisure made palpable as touch, motion, and light [1][2].

The Beach at Sainte-Adresse

Claude Monet (1867)

In The Beach at Sainte-Adresse, Claude Monet stages a modern shore where labor and leisure intersect under a broad, changeable sky. The bright blue beached boat and the flotilla of rust-brown working sails punctuate a turquoise channel, while a fashionably dressed pair sits mid-beach, spectators to the traffic of the port. Monet’s brisk, broken strokes make the scene feel caught between tides and weather, a momentary balance of work, tourism, and atmosphere [1][2].

Dance in the City

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1883)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Dance in the City stages an urban waltz where decorum and desire briefly coincide. A couple’s close embrace—his black tailcoat enclosing her luminous white satin gown—creates a cool, elegant harmony against potted palms and marble. Renoir’s refined, post‑Impressionist touch turns social ritual into sensual modernity [1][2].

Girl with a Watering Can

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1876)

Renoir’s 1876 Girl with a Watering Can fuses a crisply perceived child with a dissolving garden atmosphere, using prismatic color and controlled facial modeling to stage innocence within modern leisure [1]. The cobalt dress, red bow, and green can punctuate a haze of pinks and greens, making nurture and growth the scene’s quiet thesis.

Place de la Concorde

Edgar Degas (1875)

Degas’s Place de la Concorde turns a famous Paris square into a study of modern isolation and instantaneous vision. Figures stride past one another without contact, their bodies abruptly cropped and adrift in a wide, airless plaza—an urban stage where elegance masks estrangement [1][2].

The Millinery Shop

Edgar Degas (1879–1886)

Edgar Degas’s The Millinery Shop stages modern Paris through a quiet act of work rather than display. A young woman, cropped in profile, studies a glowing orange hat while faceless stands crowned with ribbons and plumes press toward the picture plane. Degas turns a boutique into a meditation on labor, commodities, and identity [1][2].

The Bellelli Family

Edgar Degas (1858–1869)

In The Bellelli Family, Edgar Degas orchestrates a poised domestic standoff, using the mother’s column of mourning black, the daughters’ mediating whiteness, and the father’s turned-away profile to script roles and distance. Rigid furniture lines, a gilt clock, and the ancestor’s red-chalk portrait create a stage where time, duty, and inheritance press on a family held in uneasy equilibrium.

Combing the Hair

Edgar Degas (c.1896)

Edgar Degas’s Combing the Hair crystallizes a private ritual into a scene of compressed intimacy and classed labor. The incandescent field of red fuses figure and room, turning the hair into a binding ribbon between attendant and sitter [1].

The Umbrellas

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (about 1881–86)

A sudden shower turns a Paris street into a lattice of slate‑blue umbrellas, knitting strangers into a single moving frieze. A bareheaded young woman with a bandbox strides forward while a bourgeois mother and children cluster at right, their hoop echoing the umbrellas’ arcs [1][5].

The Fifer

Édouard Manet (1866)

In The Fifer, Édouard Manet monumentalizes an anonymous military child by isolating him against a flat, gray field, converting everyday modern life into a subject of high pictorial dignity. The crisp silhouette, blocks of unmodulated color (black tunic, red trousers, white gaiters), and glints on the brass case make sound and discipline palpable without narrative scaffolding [1]. Drawing on Velázquez’s single-figure-in-air formula yet inflected by japonisme’s flatness, Manet forges a new modern image that the Salon rejected in 1866 [1][2][3].

Music in the Tuileries

Édouard Manet (1862)

Édouard Manet’s Music in the Tuileries turns a Sunday concert into a manifesto of modern life: a frieze of top hats, crinolines, and iron chairs flickering beneath toxic green foliage. Instead of a hero or center, the painting disperses attention across a restless crowd, making looking itself the drama of the scene [1][2].

The Dead Toreador

Édouard Manet (probably 1864)

Manet’s The Dead Toreador isolates a matador’s corpse in a stark, horizontal close‑up, replacing the spectacle of the bullring with silence and abrupt finality. Black costume, white stockings, a pale pink cape, the sword’s hilt, and a small pool of blood become the painting’s cool, modern vocabulary of death [1].

Bathers at Asnières

Georges Seurat (1884)

Bathers at Asnières stages a scene of modern leisure on the Seine, where workers recline and wade beneath a hazy, unified light. Seurat fuses classicizing stillness with an industrial backdrop of chimneys, bridges, and boats, turning ordinary rest into a monumental, ordered image of urban life [1][3]. The canvas balances soft greens and blues with geometric structures, producing a calm yet charged harmony.

Circus Sideshow (Parade de cirque)

Georges Seurat (1887–88)

Circus Sideshow (Parade de cirque) distills a bustling Paris fairground into a cool, ritualized threshold between street and spectacle. Under nine crownlike gaslights, a barker, musicians, and attendants align with geometric restraint while the crowd remains a band of silhouettes, held at the edge. Seurat’s Neo‑Impressionist dots make the night hum yet stay eerily still, turning publicity into a modern icon of order and mood [1][2].

The Garden of Pontoise

Camille Pissarro (1874)

In The Garden of Pontoise, Camille Pissarro turns a modest suburban plot into a stage for modern leisure and fugitive light. A woman shaded by a parasol and a child in a bright red skirt punctuate the deep greens, while a curving sand path and beds of red–pink blossoms draw the eye toward a pale house and cloud‑flecked sky. The painting asserts that everyday, cultivated nature can be a modern Eden where time, season, and social ritual quietly unfold [1][3].

Little Girl in a Blue Armchair

Mary Cassatt (1878)

Mary Cassatt’s Little Girl in a Blue Armchair renders a child slumped diagonally across an oversized seat, surrounded by a flotilla of blue chairs and cool window light. With brisk, broken strokes and a skewed recession, Cassatt asserts a modern, unsentimental view of childhood—bored, autonomous, and out of step with adult decorum [1][4]. Subtle collaboration with Degas in the background design sharpens the picture’s daring spatial thrust [2].

In the Loge

Mary Cassatt (1878)

Mary Cassatt’s In the Loge (1878) stages modern spectatorship as a drama of mutual looking. A woman in dark dress leans forward with opera glasses, her fan closed on her lap, as a man in the distance raises his own glasses toward her—turning the theater into a circuit of gazes [1][2].

The Terrace at Sainte-Adresse

Claude Monet (1867)

Claude Monet’s The Terrace at Sainte-Adresse stages a sunlit garden against the Channel, where bourgeois leisure unfolds between two wind-whipped flags and a horizon shared by sail and steam. Bright flowers, wicker chairs, and a white parasol form an ordered foreground, while the busy harbor and snapping tricolor project a confident, modern nation. The banded design—garden, sea, sky—reveals Monet’s early Japonisme and his drive to fuse fleeting light with a consciously structured composition [1].

Boulevard des Capucines

Claude Monet (1873–1874)

From a high perch above Paris, Claude Monet turns the Haussmann boulevard into a living current of light, weather, and motion. Leafless trees web the view, crowds dissolve into flickering strokes, and a sudden pink cluster of balloons pierces the cool winter scale [1][2].

The Theater Box

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1874)

Renoir’s The Theater Box turns a plush loge into a stage where seeing becomes the performance. A luminous woman—pearls, pale gloves, black‑and‑white stripes—faces us, while her companion scans the auditorium through opera glasses. The painting crystallizes Parisian modernity and the choreography of the gaze [1][5].

The Piazza San Marco, Venice

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1881)

Renoir’s The Piazza San Marco, Venice redefines St. Mark’s Basilica as atmosphere rather than architecture, fusing domes, mosaics, and crowd into vibrating color. Blue‑violet shadows sweep the square while pigeons and passersby resolve into daubs of light, declaring modern vision as the true subject [1][3].

American Gothic

Grant Wood (1930)

Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930) turns a plain Midwestern homestead into a moral emblem by binding two flinty figures to the strict geometry of a Carpenter Gothic gable and a three‑tined pitchfork. The painting’s cool precision and echoing verticals create a compressed ethic of work, order, and restraint that can read as both tribute and critique [1][2][3].

The Ballet Rehearsal

Edgar Degas (c. 1874)

In The Ballet Rehearsal, Edgar Degas turns a practice room into a modern drama where discipline and desire collide. A dark spiral staircase slices the space, scuffed floorboards yawn open, and clusters of dancers oscillate between poised effort and weary waiting [1][4].

Las Meninas

Diego Velazquez (1656)

In Las Meninas, a luminous Infanta anchors a shadowed studio where the painter pauses at a vast easel and a small wall mirror reflects the monarchs. The scene folds artist, sitters, and viewer into one reflexive tableau, turning court protocol into a meditation on seeing and being seen [1][3]. A bright doorway at the rear deepens space and time, as if someone has just entered—or is leaving—the picture we occupy [1][5].