Musée d'art moderne André Malraux

Jongkind arrived in Paris in March of 1846 at the age of 27, but did not begin painting views of the city until two years later, in 1848. From then on, they became a recurring theme in his work. The bridges and quays in particular provided a variety of subjects he enjoyed painting throughout his life. He tirelessly repeated the points of view in series,...

Around 1910, Jean Puy painted a Landscape at Bénodet, purchased by the Algiers museum in 1929. This artwork is painted in exactly the same location as Creek in Brittany, but affords a wider view of the site, with a female figure stretched out under a parasol. It depicts the same pine tree that runs at an angle across the painting from the Senn collection,...

Towards the end of his life crowned with success, Boudin adventured down new paths, expressly leaving his painting with a sketch-like quality. Boats and Breakwater belongs to the series of Boudin's final works and, among these, to a more radical set that moves towards a certain form of abstraction in which the painting abandons the subject and exists...

Nini Lopez first appeared in the work of Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) in La Loge (The Theatre Box), painted in 1874. The young woman from Montmartre, cruelly nicknamed Nini-Gueule-de-Raie, or "fish face", is shown alongside the artist's brother. Although the artwork was immediately purchased by the art dealer "le Père Martin", ...

Pissarro's move to Éragny and subsequent adherence to Neo-Impressionist theories marked a turning point in his artwork. His paintings became genuine odes to agriculture and peasant life, with the monumental human figure at the fore. He composed his artworks in the studio after numerous preparatory studies, resulting in rigorously structured landscapes...

During the summer of 1878, financial difficulties forced Monet to leave Paris and live in Vétheuil. He moved into a little house on the road to Mantes with his family, Camille and their two sons, as well as the Hoschedé family. ...

In this painting of an interior, Vallotton remains visibly true to the realist ambitions that had until then governed the construction of his portraits. The Visit, under the guise of flat objectivity—that desire to tell all that plagued the artist's beginnings—, pursues this exploration of the visual construction and inaugurates, a little ahead of the...

On September 18, 1882, Pissarro, who had to leave Pontoise with great regret for financial reasons, wrote to his friend Monet who was looking for a house to rent in the area: "The countryside is very wholesome, especially on the sides and tops of the hills; lower, along the Oise, fog prevails; the houses are built on dried marshland." ...

On a trip to Corsica in 1898, Matisse discovered the light of the South: "I was in Corsica one year and it was by going to that marvellous land that I learned to know the Mediterranean. I was dazzled there: everything shines, all is colour and light." His renewed interest in landscape marked a departure from his Impressionist and Fauve paintings. ...

"The simplest subjects are eternal. The naked woman rises either from the sea or from her bed; she is called Venus or Nini—there is no better way of portraying it." These were the words of Renoir, who shared with Degas a keen interest in female nudes. But while Degas showed himself to be biting and sometimes cruel in his vision of a woman's body, Renoir...

Matisse turned to painting relatively late in life, joining the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1893, where he studied under Gustave Moreau. On the advice of his professor, Matisse spent long days copying the work of the older masters at the Louvre. In Still Life with Pitcher, Matisse refers to the work of Chardin, opting for a clear and static...

Widely travelled, Albert Marquet set up his easel in a number of cities around the Mediterranean. He met Marcelle Martinet in Algiers, and married her on February 10, 1923. Their honeymoon took them from Tunis to Carthage, and then to Sidi-Bou-Said, a small village on the west flank of a rocky outcrop. "We are pursuing our exploration and, having left our...

In 1891, Guillaumin won a considerable sum in a state lottery and was able to leave his job with the Orléans railway in order to travel. "Chic, I will be able to paint the sea," he wrote. The artist discovered the Mediterranean coast in 1887. The first painting he produced was a View of the Rocks at Agay. Provence would become an annual destination...

In 1905, Albert Marquet and his parents moved to 25, Quai des Grands-Augustins, located on the right bank of the Seine between the Pont Saint-Michel and the Pont-Neuf, barely visible here in the distance, shrouded in fog. Marquet observed the movements of the city, a dark silhouette with its shadow hurrying behind, the procession of barges, the furtive...

Painted in Le Havre, these are two of the final artworks executed by Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), a few months prior to his death. The artist returned to the harbour where he had arrived as a child from the island of St Thomas in the West Indies. Finding himself in a delicate financial position in the spring of 1903, Pissarro was forced to...

In 1888, under Paul Gauguin's instruction, Paul Sérusier (1864–1927) produced The Talisman, the painting that led to the formation of the Nabis as an important example of the movement's aesthetic: simplified shapes, broad planes of pure colour, and a rejection of the codes of realism and perspective. ...

Born in Honfleur and schooled in Le Havre, Eugène Boudin (1824–1898) visited Brittany for the first time in 1855 and travelled there regularly for the next three years. Drawn to the picturesque region, he was interested in the simple life of the peasants from the Finistère and proved to be a keen-eyed witness to their way of living. ...

Le Havre is where Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) discovered the sea, on a trip to the Normandy coast in 1841 with his childhood friend Urbain Cuenot. He returned to the shores of the Channel in 1852 and, from 1865 to 1869, sojourned regularly at Le Havre, Honfleur, Trouville, Deauville and Étretat. There is where he painted what he referred to as ...

Dutch painter Kees van Dongen (1877–1968) moved to Paris in 1897. Between 1906 and 1907, he lived with his family at the Bateau-Lavoir apartment block. Although he had Picasso for a neighbour and, from 1907 to 1909, a contract with the Kahnweiler gallery which specialized in Cubist painting, van Dongen remained on the fringes of the...

Far away from Paris, the Creuse, a harsh and hostile land marked by severe winters, began to appear on the walls of the Salon de Paris in 1830. George Sand's novels set in the countryside made the region known and drew the first "open-air" painters to Nohant. Monet stayed in Fresselines from March to May 1889, but he cursed the changeable weather that...

The Waltz was one of the first Nabi paintings by Swiss artist Félix Vallotton (1865–1925). The Nabi movement, which lasted only a few years (1888–1900), advocated a new spiritual impetus by means of art, combining all forms of artistic expression. ...

When Hubert Robert (1733–1808) was presented at the Salon de Paris in 1767, he was greeted with enthusiasm by the public and highly praised by Diderot. Not surprising, since the work was both a consolidation of the painter's aesthetic choices and a response to the period's propensity for the "sublime". ...

Born in Paris to an English family, Alfred Sisley (1839–1899) was sent to the United Kingdom when he was eighteen. There is where he discovered, prior to the Impressionists, the work of Turner, who was widely exhibited in London, and the work of Constable, another undisputed master of the English landscape. Continuing financial difficulties quickly...

Raoul Dufy (1877–1953) was born in Le Havre to a large family of modest means with good taste in music and painting. Although he was working to support himself by the age of fourteen, he was also enrolled in evening classes at the local École des Beaux-Arts. In 1900, Dufy received a scholarship from the city of Le Havre to pursue his...

This portrait of The Old Italian Woman, placed on deposit by the Louvre in the Le Havre museum in 1872, was part of the major La Caze bequest of 1869, and was attributed to Jean-Victor Schnetz (1787–1870) at the time. On loan to the Château de Flers museum in 2000 for a retrospective on the painter, the artwork was then, most...

Raoul Dufy (1877–1953) discovered Matisse's painting Luxury, Calm and Voluptuousness at the Salon des Indépendants of 1905, and it was a revelation. Particularly struck by the work, he understood that Impressionist realism was a thing of the past and that painting was now turning to a transcription of "the imagination introduced into...