Alexandre Cabanel | Ophelia, 1883

Christie's | Remaining faithful to historical and literary subjects as themes for his paintings, this work depicts perhaps the most complex and vivid of characters immortalised in Shakespeare's Hamlet, Ophelia.

Such a captivating character, she has held the fascination of artists for centuries, widely portrayed by Victorian masters in particular, such as Sir Thomas Francis Dicksee, John Everett Millais and John William Waterhouse among others.

Paul Gauguin | Young Man with a Flower behind his Ear, 1891

Originally in the collection of the great modern master Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin's striking and evocative portrait of a young man, clad in a pink European blouse and loose cravat, with the native adornment of a small white tiaré blossom tucked over his left ear, is among the first paintings the artist completed after arriving in Tahiti in 1891.

The forthright charm of this painting stems from Gauguin's sensitive characterization of his sitter, a handsome and thoughtful man of whom the artist was clearly quite fond.

Samuel Peploe | Colourist painter

Samuel John Peploe, RSA (1871-1935) is one of the group of four artists known as the "Scottish Colourists".

The other colourists were John Duncan Fergusson, Francis Cadell and Leslie Hunter.

Born in Edinburgh, he studied art in Paris and lived there from 1910-1912.

It was through painting holidays in Northern France that he was introduced to the use of bold colour, inspired by the bright sunlight.

Abraham Bloemaert | Circe, 1625-1628

Author: Abraham Bloemaert (Dutch Mannerist painter🎨, ca.1564-1651);
Title: Circe;
Medium: Oil on canvas;
Dimensions: 22 1/8 x 19 ¼ in. (56.2 x 48.9 cm.)
Provenance: Private collection, England - with Salomon Lilian, Amsterdam and Geneva, where acquired by the present owner in 2006;
Current location: Christie's.

Daughter of Helios and Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft, the enchantress Circe was notorious in Greek mythology for her knowledge of herbs and potions.

The story is recounted by Homer in the Odyssey (Book X): Odysseus and his companions came to the island retreat of the cruel sorceress on their journey home from the Trojan War. It was Circe’s way with travelers to offer them food laced with a magic potion that transformed them into swine.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau | Pietà, 1876

Upon its exhibition at the Paris Salon of 1876, William Bouguereau's monumental Pietà received unanimous praise from critics for its sincere emotion and poignant devotion (Doucet, Les peintres français, Paris, n.d., p. 164).

More than a century later, the painting remains one of the most moving interpretations of, not only the Life of Christ, but of man's personal tragedy as well.

The immediate inspiration for Pietà came not from Bouguereau's devout Christianity, but from the painful loss of his eldest son Georges who died on July 19, 1875 at the age of sixteen.

After spending several months overwhelmed by grief, Bouguereau sought to lift his spirits by fully immersing himself in his art.

Georges Picard | Romance under the blossom tree

Georges Gabriel Picard (1857-1946), dit Georges Picard was a French painter and illustrator.

He studied under Jean-Léon Gérôme and was also the protégé of the artist Albert Besnard.

For many years, he exhibited at the Societe Nationale des Beaux Arts and was also its Treasurer.

Picard was commissioned to paint murals for the Casino at Monte Carlo, the French Embassy at Vienna, the Petit-Palais in Paris and most important of all, the Hotel de Ville in Paris.

Camille Pissarro | Le Marché de Gisors, Grande-Rue, 1885

On Monday mornings, Camille Pissarro often joined his wife Julie and a couple of their children, with some household helpers, for the two-and-a-half-mile excursion from their home in Éragny to attend market day in Gisors, a town of about four thousand inhabitants further down the Epte River.

While Julie stocked up on produce and provisions for the coming week, Pissarro sketched the many people from Gisors and nearby villages who gathered among the stalls set up on the Grand-Rue (today the rue de Vienne) near the town hall, as they engaged in selling, buying, or bartering, exchanging news, and socializing during this all-important, weekly communal event.

Camille Pissarro | Femme lavant une casserole, 1879

Included in the seminal Fifth Impressionist Exhibition that took place in 1880, Camille Pissarro’s Femme lavant une casserole encapsulates the quintessential Impressionist style and subject matter of the artist’s figure paintings.

As well as rustic, quotidian scenes of the rural French landscape, Pissarro frequently painted women absorbed in daily activities.

Indeed, from 1879, the year that he painted the present work, Pissarro began to create a number of monumental figure studies that reflected his growing interest in the primacy of the human form within the landscape setting, a theme that would continue throughout his career.

Here, a woman is framed by blossoming shrubs and flowers, bending over slightly as she washes objects in a bowl.

Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) | Femme lavant une casserole, 1879 | Christie's

Marc Chagall | Les Paysans, 1971

The wondrous vitality of Chagall's imagination, as youthfully whimsical and impetuous as ever, empowered him in his late paintings to become - like Picasso, notwithstanding the strong differences in their backgrounds and temperament - the impresario, auteur, director and a leading player in a lively theater of memory. Just as Picasso drew heavily on his ancestral Mediterranean roots, so Chagall became the artificer of a pictorial realm based on multiple personal mythologies he had evolved for himself as the proverbial Wandering Jew.

Claude Monet | Boats below the Cliffs at Pourville, 1882

Bateaux devant les falaises de Pourville / Boats below the Cliffs at Pourville features a bold geometrically structured composition of diagonals and horizontals, reflective of the more simplified approach that Monet was then exploring.

The horizon line bisects the canvas into two parts of roughly equal size; two tranches of nearly identical size and shape form the sand and sea, whilst the diagonal line of the cliff runs to the very centre of the composition.

The slightly raised vantage point from which Monet has captured this view serves, in comparison with other views from this group, to considerably foreshorten the angle of the shoreline.

Edgar Degas | Conversation, 1882-1885

During the mid-1880s, Degas repeatedly explored the motif of two or three women leaning on a wooden railing - at the racetrack, on a pleasure boat, or before a landscape - absorbed in casual conversation..

"Degas was clearly intrigued by the visual possibilities of this moment of female intimacy", Jill DeVonyar and Richard Kendall have written, "making half a dozen variants of the composition with a range of outfits, headgear, and backgrounds" (op. cit., 2007, p. 66).

Claude Monet | Pommiers en Fleurs, 1878

The most consistently explorative of all the Impressionists, more than any artists of the period, Monet represents the movement and all it stood for.

A steady and persistent worker, independent of the necessity of waiting on 'inspiration', he found a prop for creativity in 'serialism', the creation of sets of work using the same motif; thus emphasising that a whole range of equally 'real' paintings could be made of the same subject, each varying according to the quality of light and weather conditions.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau | Idylle: famille antique, 1860

At the time that Bouguereau painted Idylle: famille antique he was a rising star on the Paris art scene. After studying with the esteemed French Academic master François Picot, Bouguereau gained admittance to the hallowed halls of Paris' École des Beaux-Arts.
In 1849, he exhibited for the first time in the Paris Salon and the following year won the prestigious Grand Prix de Rome.

During his time in Italy, Bouguereau traveled extensively, studying the Renaissance masters** who inspired his early fascination with classical antiquity, as demonstrated by the present painting.

Allan Douglas Davidson | An English Yum-Yum, 1906

"An English Yum-Yum: my lady lights the sombre day: A scene from The Mikado", signed and dated 'Allan Davidson 1906', belongs to a tradition going back to Whistler's Japanese subjects of the 1860s and '70s, by way of paintings inspired by visits to Japan by Whistler's pupil Mortimer Menpes (1887), Alfred East (1889) and the two 'Glasgow Boys', George Henry and E.A. Hornel (1893-4).

The picture's title is taken from Gilbert and Sullivan's Savoy opera The Mikado, first staged in March 1885. | Source: © Christie's