10 of the best Impressionist paintings sold at Christie’s

It was rejected, however, and Monet became so despondent he considered suicide. ‘I threw myself en plein air  with body and soul,’ he lamented. ‘I was trying to do something that was a dangerous innovation — effects of light and colour and the full outdoors that shocked accepted customs.’

The painting was later bought by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and remains one of the highlights of the museum’s collection.

In fact, the off-kilter composition, which gives the appearance of the figures being drunk, is down to the artist’s interest in photography. He wanted the painting to look like a snapshot taken by an observer seated at a corner table.

The painting can now be found in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

Cassatt needed a space where she could observe and draw without attracting attention. The Palais Garnier, the city’s newly built opera house, provided her with a rich tapestry of modern life. It was here that the beau monde came to see and be seen, exemplified by the young woman looking through her opera glasses at the audience, rather than the performers on stage.

It was to be the setting for some of Morisot’s most highly acclaimed paintings, notably Après le déjeuner, which was exhibited at the seventh Impressionist exhibition in 1882. On seeing the exhibition, the Symbolist writer Stéphane Mallarmé described Morisot as ‘a great artist, with nothing of the banal’.

Les Poseuses is set in Seurat’s studio, and can be read as an essay on the opposition of nature and artifice, with the relaxed forms of the nude models contrasting with the stilted figures in the park scene behind. The three figures look as if they have just stepped out of the painting, and we can see the clothes and parasols Seurat used as props around them.

It took him six days to complete four works, which had a similar decorative style to Japanese prints. In total, Van Gogh painted seven versions of his sunflowers and together they amount to an iconic body of work, representing the artist at the height of his powers.

In 1987, the Yasuda Fire and Marine Insurance Company in Tokyo bought the painting to replace a version that had been destroyed by fire in the Yokohama City Art Museum in 1945.

Pissarro had been excited by the prospect of painting the writer’s garden, which almost rivalled Monet’s at Giverny in ambition. ‘Have you spruced it up, decked it out, made it more attractive for me?’ Pissarro wrote to his friend in July. ‘If time allows, I will gladly set down a memory of it on a magnificent size 30 canvas.’

Mirbeau was one of Pissarro’s greatest advocates, championing the artist’s Neo-Impressionist Pointillist technique, which he described as ‘revolutionary’.

The painting depicts an agricultural worker, who most probably worked on the Cézanne family estate, seated in front of the artist’s first known work — a screen that resembles an 18th-century tapestry. The setting is deliberate; the faceless woman in the background appears like a ghost behind the solid, sculptural features of the farmhand. Cézanne is showing us how his new technique, with its vibrant patchwork of brushstrokes, is a radical departure from the old.

The painting can now be found in the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.

The translucent skin, contrasted with the dark eyes, recalls those of the Renaissance painter Titian, who Renoir admired very much. The woman is the governess for the artist’s family, who became Renoir’s most painted model. Renoir explained that the strikingly intimate composition was achieved by moving his easel very close to his subject. Femme nue couchée, Gabrielle, 1903, now resides in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. 

He was fascinated by reflections and how light and water were changed by each other, resulting in immersive paintings that exerted a lasting influence on later avant-garde artists.

When Le bassin aux nymphéas  was offered at auction in London in 2008, it had not been seen in public for 80 years, having been in the private collection of the American industrialist J. Irwin Miller.