Everyday life as art (the ordinary)

Featured Artworks

The Card Players by Paul Cézanne | Equilibrium and Form

Paul Cézanne

In The Card Players, Paul Cézanne turns a rural café game into a study of equilibrium and monumentality. Two hated peasants lean inward across an orange-brown table while a dark bottle stands upright between them, acting as a calm, vertical axis that stabilizes their mirrored focus [2][3].

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].

Woman with a Parasol

Claude Monet (1875)

Claude Monet’s Woman with a Parasol fixes a breezy hillside instant in high, shifting light, setting a figure beneath a green parasol against a vast, vibrating sky. The low vantage and broken brushwork merge dress, clouds, and grasses into one atmosphere, while a child at the rise anchors depth and intimacy [1]. It is a manifesto of plein-air perception—painting the sensation of air in motion rather than the contours of things [2].

Luncheon on the Grass

Édouard Manet (1863)

Luncheon on the Grass stages a confrontation between modern Parisian leisure and classical precedent. A nude woman meets our gaze beside two clothed men, while a distant bather and an overturned picnic puncture naturalistic illusion. Manet’s scale and flat, studio-like light convert a park picnic into a manifesto of modern painting [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].

Summer's Day

Berthe Morisot (about 1879)

Two women drift on a boat in the Bois de Boulogne, their dresses, hats, and a bright blue parasol fused with the lake’s flicker by Morisot’s swift, zig‑zag brushwork. The scene turns a brief outing into a poised study of modern leisure and female companionship in public space [1].

The Artist's Garden at Vétheuil

Claude Monet (1881)

Claude Monet’s The Artist’s Garden at Vétheuil stages a sunlit ascent through a corridor of towering sunflowers toward a modest house, where everyday life meets cultivated nature. Quick, broken strokes make leaves and shadows tremble, asserting light and painterly surface over linear contour. Blue‑and‑white jardinieres anchor the foreground, while a child and dog briefly pause on the path, turning the garden into a domestic sanctuary [1][2].

Camille (The Woman in the Green Dress)

Claude Monet (1866)

Monet’s Camille (The Woman in the Green Dress) turns a full-length portrait into a study of modern spectacle. The spotlit emerald-and-black skirt, set against a near-black curtain, makes fashion the engine of meaning and the vehicle of status.