The modern lens: urban life & speed

Featured Artworks

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].

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère

Édouard Manet (1882)

Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère stages a face-to-face encounter with modern Paris, where commerce, spectacle, and alienation converge. A composed barmaid fronts a marble counter loaded with branded bottles, flowers, and a brimming bowl of oranges, while a disjunctive mirror unravels stable viewing and certainty [1][2].

The Swing

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1876)

Renoir’s The Swing fixes a fleeting, sun-dappled exchange in a Montmartre garden, where a woman in a white dress with blue bows steadies herself on a swing while a man in a blue jacket addresses her. The scene crystallizes modern leisure, flirtation, and optical shimmer, as broken strokes scatter light over faces, fabric, and ground [1][4].

Poppies

Claude Monet (1873)

Claude Monet’s Poppies (1873) turns a suburban hillside into a theater of light, time, and modern leisure. A red diagonal of poppies counters cool fields and sky, while a woman with a blue parasol and a child appear twice along the slope, staging a gentle echo of moments rather than a single event [1]. The painting asserts sensation over contour, letting broken touches make the day itself the subject.

The Railway

Édouard Manet (1873)

Manet’s The Railway is a charged tableau of modern life: a composed woman confronts us while a child, bright in white and blue, peers through the iron fence toward a cloud of steam. The image turns a casual pause at the Gare Saint‑Lazare into a meditation on spectatorship, separation, and change [1][3].

Gare Saint-Lazare

Claude Monet (1877)

Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare turns an iron-and-glass train shed into a theater of steam, light, and motion. Twin locomotives, gas lamps, and a surge of figures dissolve into bluish vapor under the diagonal canopy, recasting industrial smoke as luminous atmosphere [1][2].

The Ballet Class

Edgar Degas (1873–1876)

The Ballet Class shows the work behind grace: a green-walled studio where young dancers in white tutus rest, fidget, and stretch while the gray-suited master stands with his cane. Degas’s diagonal floorboards, cropped viewpoints, and scattered props—a watering can, a music stand, even a tiny dog—stage a candid vision of routine rather than spectacle. The result is a modern image of discipline, hierarchy, and fleeting poise.

Boulevard Montmartre at Night

Camille Pissarro (1897)

A high window turns Paris into a flowing current: in Boulevard Montmartre at Night, Camille Pissarro fuses modern light and urban movement into a single, restless rhythm. Cool electric halos and warm gaslit windows shimmer across rain‑slick stone, where carriages and crowds dissolve into pulse-like blurs [1][2].

The Boating Party

Mary Cassatt (1893–1894)

In The Boating Party, Mary Cassatt fuses intimate caregiving with modern mobility, compressing mother, child, and rower inside a skiff that cuts diagonals across ultramarine water. Bold arcs of citron paint and a high, flattened horizon reveal a deliberate Japonisme logic that stabilizes the scene even as motion surges around it [1]. The painting asserts domestic life as a public, modern subject while testing the limits of Impressionist space and color.

La Grenouillère

Claude Monet (1869)

Monet’s La Grenouillère crystallizes the new culture of modern leisure on the Seine: crowded bathers, promenading couples, and rental boats orbit a floating resort. With flickering brushwork and a high-key palette, Monet turns water, light, and movement into the true subjects, suspending the scene at the brink of dissolving.