Provenance

Munich Central Collecting Point

1945 - 1951

Explore Selected Works

See all 17 works of art
François Boucher, Design for a Funeral Monument, c. 1767, black chalk and stumping with touches of graphite, heightened with white, on brown laid paper, Gift of Arthur L. Liebman, 1992.87.28

Design for a Funeral Monument

François Boucher · c. 1767 · black chalk and stumping with touches of graphite, heightened with white, on brown laid paper ·  Accession ID  1992.87.28

We look down onto a plaza with a sliver of a tall building rising along the left edge of the painting, a row of verdant, green trees to our right, and a row of buildings enclosing the space in the distance in this nearly square landscape painting. The peanut-brown building to our left nearly reaches the top edge of the canvas. It has three oversized, tall stories under a high, sloping roof with a slender chimney. A promenade with carriages runs in front of the tall building. In the plaza closer to us but tiny in scale, people gather in small and large groups, along the bottom edge of the composition. They are painted with dabs and short strokes of cobalt blue, butter and golden yellow, brick red, black, and white. The trees create a diagonal line running from the lower right corner into the scene, along the edge of the plaza to our right. Beyond the plaza and trees, the corners of a formal garden with sand-white walking paths stretch back to the row of buildings in the distance, which come halfway up the painting. That long line of buildings is painted with tones of light brown with rows of tall, narrow windows. The roofs are slate gray, and several cupolas and towers are spaced along its length. The buildings span the width of the painting and disappear behind the tall building to our left. Loosely painted, white, puffy clouds float across the ice-blue sky above. The artist signed and dated the work with brown paint in the lower left corner: “C. Pissarro. 1900.”
Camille Pissarro, Place du Carrousel, Paris, 1900, oil on canvas, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection, 1970.17.55

Place du Carrousel, Paris

Camille Pissarro · 1900 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  1970.17.55

François Etienne Villeret, Rue de Rivoli and Pavillon Marsan, watercolor over graphite on wove paper, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1995.47.69

Rue de Rivoli and Pavillon Marsan

François Etienne Villeret · · watercolor over graphite on wove paper ·  Accession ID  1995.47.69

Gustave Courbet, La Bretonnerie in the Department of Indre, 1856, oil on canvas, Gift of the W. Averell Harriman Foundation in memory of Marie N. Harriman, 1972.9.8

La Bretonnerie in the Department of Indre

Gustave Courbet · 1856 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  1972.9.8

Seven pale-skinned people crowd around a wooden table to our right in this horizontal painting, as several more gather around a fire in a deeply shadowed room beyond, to our left. The room we are in has high ceilings and peanut-brown walls and floor. At the center of the composition, a man dressed in mustard yellow with a yellow and burnt-orange jester’s cap stands facing us. His smiling mouth is agape, and he lifts his left arm, to our right, to gesture toward the group at the table there. His feet are widely planted, and a ceramic jug dangles from his other hand. At the table to our right, one man sits at the front, left corner of the table, leaning back in his chair as he raises his black hat high in his right hand, closer to us. His face is tipped up and his mouth is wide open. Across from him is another young man in a blue-gray jacket who wears a paper crown. With the back of the wrist closer to us planted on his hip, he tilts back his head to drink from a tall tankard held in his other hand. One young and one older woman women sit smiling among the men. The younger woman wears a navy-blue dress with a white cap covering the back of her blond hair, and the older woman is in ocean blue with a white head covering. Two more men at the table also have their mouths open and wear earth-toned clothes. A man has poked his head through a small, squared opening high on the wall above the table to our right, to look down at the group. Over the the man in the jester's hat, a gray owl sits chained to a perch driven into the wood stud that frames the wall behind the group. Bits of paper are scattered on the floor and two terracotta jugs sit gleaming in the lower right corner. A tawny cat peers out from behind the drinker’s seat. A dog with sable-brown fur lies near a low table in the lower left corner of the painting. A shallow, terracotta dish with short feet sits on the table and a brown ceramic jug, oyster shells, and a few stalks of straw sit near the dog and table. In the dimly lit room beyond this one, a man, woman, and four children gather around a fireplace. The woman holds a long-handled griddle over the flame, and she turns to look back over her shoulder. The artist signed and dated the work as if he had written on the front edge of the low table to our left: “D. TENIERS F 1635.”
David Teniers the Younger, Peasants Celebrating Twelfth Night, 1635, oil on panel, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 1972.10.1

Peasants Celebrating Twelfth Night

David Teniers the Younger · 1635 · oil on panel ·  Accession ID  1972.10.1

A woman plays an upright piano as two boys play checkers at a table in this horizontal painting. The scene is loosely painted with areas of flat color and pattern. The people have pale, peachy skin and dark brown hair. Their facial features are painted with dots or short strokes of black. The piano is against the wall to our left. The woman wears a short-sleeved, lemon-yellow dress with a long skirt. A music book is propped on the music stand, and loosely painted objects line the top of the instrument. The wall behind the piano is patterned with white and pale yellow flowers under and around arches against a cranberry-red background. The table where the boys play is in the middle of the room. The players sit in wooden chairs and wear black and white striped jackets with white collars. The boy to our right looks at the board while resting his left cheek, closer to us, in his hand. The other boy looks on with his arms on the table in front of him. The checkerboard sits on a red and white striped cloth, which has lines of black dots in the white strips. Beneath the table is a floral rug with blue and black flowers against a red background. The border is painted loosely with leafy shapes against bright white. Beneath the area rug the floor or another carpet is garnet red with a diamond-shaped grid painted in orange. A petal-pink, upholstered chair sits in front of a tall wardrobe in the back corner of the room. A picture with two violins against a blue background hangs on the side of the furniture to our right. A chest of drawers next to the wardrobe holds a few bowls or objects and a white statue, about half human height. The statue is of a person standing with one knee bent in front of the other, one elbow tucked by the side with that hand held to the chest, and the other bent elbow raised overhead. Pictures hang on the wall around the statue, and the wallpaper there is ivory white with a dark yellow pattern. The artist signed the work in the lower right corner, “Henri Matisse.”
Henri Matisse, Pianist and Checker Players, 1924, oil on canvas, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1985.64.25

Pianist and Checker Players

Henri Matisse · 1924 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  1985.64.25

Albrecht Dürer, Male Nude with a Lion [verso], c. 1500, pen and brown ink on laid paper, Woodner Collection, 1991.182.11.b

Male Nude with a Lion [verso]

Albrecht Dürer · c. 1500 · pen and brown ink on laid paper ·  Accession ID  1991.182.11.b

About a dozen men and women gather around three men hanging from wooden crosses, all against a deep landscape beneath a shiny gold sky in this horizontal painting. All the people we can see have pale or tanned skin. The men on the crosses wear only white loincloths, and a gold halo encircles the head of the man in the middle, Jesus. Jesus hangs with his hands and feet nailed to the cross, and a man on the ground has pierced his right side with a lance. Blood drips down his face from a ring of thorns. Four winged angels, small in scale to the rest of the people, catch the blood pouring from the nails in his hands and feet, and the wound on his side in golden chalices. The crosses to either side angle in toward Jesus, and the men are tied to them with their arms hooked backward over the crosspiece. Their legs are tied to the vertical beam of the cross, and they bleed from wounds on their thighs. Near the head of the man to our left, an angel hovers and holds up a miniature man, like a doll. The man on the cross to our right turns his head away from the demon holding out another miniature man. Across the bottom of the composition, the people in the crowd wear garments in ginger brown, cranberry and burgundy red, and olive green. Three women, two young men, and a man on horseback are tightly clustered on the ground in the left half. The woman closest to us, Mary, wears a marine-blue gown and a white head covering. She is partly slumped to one side, supported by a woman on her left, to our right, and a young man standing just behind her. The third woman kneels on Mary’s other side, near the lower left corner of the composition, with her hands clasped together. Behind the women, the horse and its elderly, bearded rider and the cleanshaven man piercing Jesus’s side with a spear both look up at Jesus. The rider touches his left eye with the index finger of that hand, and short, red rays emanate from his eyelid. Near the back end of the horse, a man holds a bucket and a long pole supporting a sponge in a U-shaped crook at the top. A cluster of eight men are gathered in the lower right half. Two are on horseback, and the rider closest to us wears peanut-brown armor and helmet. He holds a tall staff with a red pennant bearing the letters “SPQR.” Beyond the crosses, pale green hills topped with trees and bushes lead back to a town skyline painted in shades of baby and teal blue. Scenes with people, tiny in scale, are scattered across the city and landscape. There, a crowd greeting a man entering the city on a donkey is seen in the distance to our left. A group lowers a man from a cross on a hill to our right, and a man hangs from a tree along the right edge of the composition. The gold sky fills the top quarter of the scene.
Master of the Death of Saint Nicholas of Münster, Calvary, c. 1470/1480, oil on panel, Patrons' Permanent Fund, 2001.70.1

Calvary

Master of the Death of Saint Nicholas of Münster · c. 1470/1480 · oil on panel ·  Accession ID  2001.70.1

We look down onto papers and books piled on a small wooden table with delicate, spindle legs, with a dog and cat on a sofa in the background in this vibrantly colored, stylized, vertical painting. The scene is loosely painted with dabs and visible brushstrokes in butterscotch and golden yellow, azure and navy blue, apple red, and white. The square table takes up most of the bottom two-thirds of the composition. Its surface is almost entirely covered with a spread of papers and stacks of books, including two thick, white volumes near the front, right corner and a thin red book on the other front corner. Smaller squares between the books are painted with streaks and washes of turquoise blue, scarlet, and brick red. A tall, narrow vase with abstracted, ice-blue flowers sits behind the stacked books, to our right. Beyond that, at the back right corner of the table, a sheet of paper reads “ALBUM MUSICAL,” with the final L partially obscured by a piece of bubblegum-pink paper set askew atop the stacked books. The artist’s name appears in rust-red letters on a paper at the back left corner of the table: “Bonnard.” The rug beneath the table is dominated by a vivid, azure-blue ring. The blue ring is surrounded by a white band decorated with widely spaced, black ovals dotted with pale lemon yellow. At the center of the blue ring is a black circle dotted with abstracted rosettes made with rings of apricot orange and gray around yellow centers. At the back edge of the rug, at the top left corner of the painting, a white cat sits and brown spotted dog lies on a mustard-yellow sofa, which has a wooden arm on the end we can see. There is a tangerine-orange chair next to it, in the upper right corner of the painting, and a teal-blue block there could be a pillow. The floor between the furniture is goldenrod yellow.
Pierre Bonnard, Work Table, 1926/1937, oil on canvas, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 2006.128.12

Work Table

Pierre Bonnard · 1926/1937 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  2006.128.12

Shown from the chest up, a cleanshaven man with peachy skin sits angled to our right in this vertical portrait painting. He has chin-length, curly, auburn-red hair. He gazes off to our right with hazel eyes under thick brows. He has a slightly humped nose, and his wide mouth is closed. Loose jowls line his jawline. A large, soft, scarlet-red cap covers the top of his head and hangs down over the far ear, to our right. The brim is upturned and the underside lined with brown ovals. He wears a salmon-pink tunic over an apricot-colored undergarment, which is striped with thin gray strokes. The loose neckline of the tunic is trimmed with black. A background is streaked with emerald green and tan.
Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of a Young Man, c. 1520/1530, oil on panel, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1961.9.21

Portrait of a Young Man

Hans Holbein the Younger · c. 1520/1530 · oil on panel ·  Accession ID  1961.9.21