La Blouse Roumaine is an oil-on-canvas painting by Henri Matisse from 1940. Measuring 92 × 73 cm, the painting is currently held at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris. It depicts a woman in a blue skirt and a white embroidered blouse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Blouse_Roumaine

The artist in 1945 - photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson -

Stone City, Iowa is an oil on wood painting by the American artist Grant Wood, from 1930. The painting is located at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_City,_Iowa_(painting)

More Grant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Wood#Gallery

During the late nineteenth century, Parisian cafés were the gathering places of artists and writers and were ideal locations for observing the urban scene. Many Impressionist paintings depict the Café Nouvelle-Athènes on the rue Pigalle, where two tables were reserved for Édouard Manet and his circle—a group that included the painters Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and the writers Charles Baudelaire and Émile Zola.

At first glance, this fashionably dressed young woman appears to have been captured sitting at a favorite café: the marble tabletop, beer mug, and magazine attached to a wooden bar suggest such a setting, and her heavy clothing and kid gloves indicate that she is at an outdoor table and that the weather is cool. However, the floral background is actually one of Manet’s paintings and the café a re-creation in his studio.

https://www.artic.edu/artworks/14591/woman-reading

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89douard_Manet

A palpable energy and sense of movement enliven Nightlife, Archibald Motley’s portrayal of a crowded cabaret in the South Side neighborhood of Bronzeville in Chicago. With stylized figures, an array of diagonal lines, and heightened colors keyed to shades of magenta and violet, the artist captured the exuberance of city dwellers out on the town. Motley created a network of gestures and glances among the people, drawing attention to the various social interactions that animate the scene. The composition is an exploration of artificial lighting. Motley was inspired, in part, to paint Nightlife after having seen Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942.51), which had entered the Art Institute’s collection the prior year.

https://www.artic.edu/artists/42445/archibald-john-motley-jr

Oil on canvas; Private collection

https://www.artrenewal.org/artworks/on-the-seashore/george-elgar-hicks/41665

Oil on canvas; Privately owned

"The Birch Forest! It was important, in the year of salvation 1894, one was really brave to paint the ordinary birch that we saw everywhere with us or did not see, and a whole forest of it. Now, as we know, the white-stalmed birch has already become a very popular object in the paintings of modern artists because of its fine color effect. And the idea to let a pair of faunas, who should only be at home in the idyllic south, get into this Nordic forest! Even without this staffage, the picture would certainly have its mood magic, but the forest is, what the artist had in mind, transferred to the fantastic fairytale area by the fauna couple. The trunks with their beautiful bark, the tangle of the branches with the few delicate foliage, the forest grass and the pair of fauns, everything is painted with the most tender delicacy. (Robert Bruck, Karl Mediz, Dresden 1904, p. 20)

Karl Mediz - as well as his wife Emilie Mediz-Pelikan - occupy a singular position in Austrian painting at the intersection of modernism, which is to be positioned between symbolism and naturalism. After studies in Vienna, Munich and Paris, Mediz captured the visible world in a kind of hyperrealism with old-master detail and precision, and, as Robert Bruck has already described, the viewer into a "dreamland of ideas ... in a time when the world was still populated by those fantastic mixed creatures, the demigods of the ancient Greeks." (Bruck, 1904, p. 22)

https://imkinsky.com/ergebnisse/134/697/1/87063

Brilliant collage-like hand-carved wooden sculptures.

Yoshitoshi Kanemaki’s Sculptures Sport Kaleidoscopic Expressions in Their Search for a ‘True Self’
https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/09/yoshitoshi-kanemaki-insight-prism-wood-sculptures/

yoshitoshi kanemaki
Artist
彫刻家 　金巻 芳俊
https://www.instagram.com/kanemaki_yoshitoshi/?hl=en

“Breathing Caprice A,” paint on Torreya, 135 x 75 x 55 centimeters

Detail of “Reflection Prism”

Elihu Vedder depicted the three Fates of Greek mythology working the thread of life: Clotho spins the thread, Lachesis fixes its length, and Atropos cuts it at the appointed time of death. Their symbolic tools—spindle, distaff, and shears—rest in the foreground, emphasizing the Fates’ decisive role in matters of life and death.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elihu_Vedder

https://www.arthistoryproject.com/artists/giovanni-battista-piranesi/architecture-perspectives-grotesques-and-antiquities/

Oil on canvas; located at Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum

https://harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/223133

Oil on canvas; located at Musée d'Orsay, Paris

https://www.artrenewal.org/artworks/the-night-before-the-exam/leonid-pasternak/95131

The Venus de Milo or Aphrodite of Melos is an ancient Greek marble sculpture that was created during the Hellenistic period. Its exact dating is uncertain, but the modern consensus places it in the 2nd century BC, perhaps between 160 and 110 BC. It was discovered in 1820 on the island of Milos, Greece, and has been displayed at the Louvre Museum since 1821. Since the statue's discovery, it has become one of the most famous works of ancient Greek sculpture in the world.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_de_Milo

Oil on canvas; Private collection

Info:

The woman to the far left is Courage. She leans forward with urgency and intensely watches the battle, which we cannot see. She holds a knife in her right hand, the weapon with which she plans to defend herself.

Around her neck, she wears a necklace made of scallop shells. In Greek mythology, scallop shells were associated with Aphrodite; the goddess was born of the sea and carried forth on a scallop shell. In Christianity, the scallop shell is often associated with salvation, as it was used for baptismal waters.

With her left arm, Courage keeps the woman at the far right, Despair, at a distance. Despair sits sadly with her eyes closed. Her posture suggests withdrawal from the intensity of the battle that the other two women watch.

Between Courage and Despair is Anxiety in the shadows. Anxiety’s hand grasps at the pit of her neck as if she is attempting to stop her worry from escaping her slightly parted lips. She peeks from behind the rock and watches the battle with a look of concern.

https://www.arthistoryproject.com/artists/william-holman-hunt/bianca/

Le Violon d'Ingres (French for Ingres' Violin) is a black-and-white photograph created by American visual artist Man Ray in 1924. It is one of his best-known photographs and of surrealist photography. The picture was first published in the Surrealist magazine Littérature in June 1924. It shows model Kiki de Montparnasse from the back, nude to below her waist, with two f-holes painted on to draw similarities between the shape of her body and a violin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Violon_d%27Ingres

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamorphosis_of_Narcissus

Gabriel Lory the Younger, also known as Mathias Gabriel Lori, was a Swiss landscape painter, etcher, watercolorist and illustrator. His father was the painter, Gabriel Lory the Elder.

More Lory: https://artvee.com/artist/gabriel-lory-the-younger/

Delphin Enjolras (1857 Coucouron –1945 Toulouse) was a French academic painter. Enjolras painted portraits, nudes, interiors, and used mostly watercolours, oil, and pastels. He is best known for his intimate portraits of young women performing mundane activities such as reading or sewing, often illuminated by lamplight. Perhaps his most famous work is the "Young Woman Reading by a Window."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphin_Enjolras

Ohara Koson was a Japanese painter and woodblock print designer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, part of the shin-hanga ("new prints") movement.

Ohara Koson was famous as a master of kachō-e (bird-and-flower) designs. Throughout a prolific career, in which he created around 500 prints, he went by three different titles: Ohara Hōson (小原豊邨), Ohara Shōson (小原祥邨) and Ohara Koson.

More Ohara: https://artvee.com/artist/ohara-koson/

Corita Kent (November 20, 1918 – September 18, 1986), born Frances Elizabeth Kent and also known as Sister Mary Corita Kent, was an American artist, designer and educator, and former religious sister. Key themes in her work included Christianity and social justice. She was also a teacher at the Immaculate Heart College.

Corita Kent worked at the intersection of several powerful—and at times contradictory—cultural, political, and religious influences. Corita Kent, inspired by the works of Andy Warhol, began using popular culture as raw material for her work in 1962.

Lots more Sister Kent: https://www.corita.org/

Notice how the edges of everything really pops. There was a whole color theory that went into this: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20250812-seurat-radical-manifesto-bathers-at-asnieres-masterpiece

https://johnbrosio.com/

Ground Swell is a 1939 painting by American artist Edward Hopper which depicts five people on a heeling catboat in a light swell, looking at an ominous buoy. It was in the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art from 1943 until it was purchased by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 2014.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_Swell

Here's a neat timeline of the artist's life: https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/edward-hopper-biography-and-career-timeline/30443/