Seasons & cycles

Featured Artworks

The Artist's Garden at Giverny

Claude Monet (1900)

In The Artist's Garden at Giverny, Claude Monet turns his cultivated Clos Normand into a field of living color, where bands of violet irises surge toward a narrow, rose‑colored path. Broken, flickering strokes let greens, purples, and pinks mix optically so that light seems to tremble across the scene, while lilac‑toned tree trunks rhythmically guide the gaze inward [1][3].

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].

Sunflowers

Vincent van Gogh (1888)

Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888) is a yellow-on-yellow still life that stages a full cycle of life in fifteen blooms, from fresh buds to brittle seed heads. The thick impasto, green shocks of stem and bract, and the vase signed “Vincent” turn a humble bouquet into an emblem of endurance and fellowship [1][2].

The Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning

Camille Pissarro (1897)

From a high hotel window, Camille Pissarro renders Paris as a living system—its Haussmann boulevard dissolving into winter light, its crowds and vehicles fused into a soft, rhythmic flow. Broken strokes in cool grays, lilacs, and ochres turn fog, steam, and motion into texture of time, dignifying the city’s ordinary morning pulse [1][3].

The Magpie

Claude Monet (1868–1869)

Claude Monet’s The Magpie turns a winter field into a study of luminous perception, where blue-violet shadows articulate snow’s light. A lone magpie perched on a wooden gate punctuates the silence, anchoring a scene that balances homestead and open countryside [1].

Red Roofs

Camille Pissarro (1877)

In Red Roofs, Camille Pissarro knits village and hillside into a single living fabric through a screen of winter trees and vibrating, tactile brushwork. The warm red-tiled roofs act as chromatic anchors within a cool, silvery atmosphere, asserting human shelter as part of nature’s rhythm rather than its negation [1][3]. The composition’s parallel planes and color echoes reveal a deliberate structural order that anticipates Post‑Impressionist concerns [1][2].

Jeanne (Spring)

Édouard Manet (1881)

Édouard Manet’s Jeanne (Spring) fuses a time-honored allegory with modern Parisian fashion: a crisp profile beneath a cream parasol, set against luminous, leafy greens. Manet turns couture—hat, glove, parasol—into the language of renewal and youth, making spring feel both perennial and up-to-the-minute [1][2].

Wheatfield with Crows

Vincent van Gogh (1890)

A panoramic wheatfield splits around a rutted track under a storm-charged sky while black crows rush toward us. Van Gogh drives complementary blues and yellows into collision, fusing nature’s vitality with inner turbulence.

San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk

Claude Monet (1908–1912)

Claude Monet’s San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk fuses the Benedictine church’s dark silhouette with a sky flaming from apricot to cobalt, turning architecture into atmosphere. The campanile’s vertical and its wavering reflection anchor a sea of trembling color, staging a meditation on permanence and flux.

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].

Snow at Argenteuil

Claude Monet (1875)

Snow at Argenteuil renders a winter boulevard where light overtakes solid form, turning snow into a luminous field of blues, violets, and pearly pinks. Reddish cart ruts pull the eye toward a faint church spire as small, blue-gray figures persist through the hush. Monet elevates atmosphere to the scene’s protagonist, making everyday passage a meditation on time and change [1][2].