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“Idyll,” 1886

Artist: Gerhard Peter Frantz Munthe
Oil on canvas; 80 × 100 cm
Private collection

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“On the Dunes (Lady Shannon and Kitty),” 1900s

American artist James Jebusa Shannon (1862–1923)
Oil on canvas; 186.4 × 143 cm
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., USA

In this painting, Shannon portrays his wife, Florence Mary Cartwright (Lady Shannon), with their daughter Kitty. Kitty Shannon (1887–1974) later became an artist herself.

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“Feeding the Rabbits. Alice in Wonderland,” 1904

Artist: Frederick Morgan
Oil on canvas
Private collection

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“Morning in the Alps” — Ernst Adolf Meissner

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“The Age of Innocence,” 1785

Artist: Joshua Reynolds
Oil on canvas; 76.5 × 63.8 cm
Private collection

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“Mask” — Gaetano Chierici

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“Interior of Liselund Manor,” 1903

Artist: Georg Nicolai Achen
Oil on canvas
Private collection

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“Portrait of a Violinist” — Anne Vallayer-Coster
Price: $160,000

At 26, Vallayer-Coster became one of the few women admitted to France’s Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, recognized for her still lifes rather than portraits. Denis Diderot praised her talent, saying exhibitions would look very different if all new academicians matched it.

She rarely painted portraits, usually depicting those close to her. The sitter may be one of her three sisters, though it’s unknown whether any played an instrument. Despite the traditional title, the six strings and frets identify a viol, not a violin.

The broken strings and pensive expression invite debate: do they suggest interrupted music or a personal story?

In 2015, Stockholm’s Nationalmuseum bought the painting at Sotheby’s Paris for nearly €1 million, a record for Vallayer-Coster. That evening, a still life by Louise Moillon set an even higher record for a work by a woman artist.

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“Mari in the Garden,” 1895

Artist: Peder Severin Krøyer
Oil on canvas; 58.4 × 47.9 cm
Private collection

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“Phloxes,” 1889

Artist: Gaston La Touche
Oil on canvas
Municipal Museum, La Roche-sur-Yon, France

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“Madame Satan” — Georges-Achille-Fould

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“Terrace at Sainte-Adresse” — Claude Monet

Monet painted this sunlit scene in 1867, during a difficult summer in Sainte-Adresse, near Le Havre. He was staying with his father and aunt after family concerns about his finances and relationship with Camille Doncieux, who was in Paris giving birth to their first child.

His father, shown in the foreground in a Panama hat, disapproved of Monet’s choice to pursue art and of his relationship with Camille. Though he had supported Monet financially, he cut him off after learning of the pregnancy.

Monet jokingly called the work “the Chinese picture with flags”; Renoir called it “the Japanese picture.” Both names referred to its bold, flattened composition of horizontal bands, inspired by Japanese woodblock prints. Art historians later saw its decorative, compressed space as an early sign of Impressionism.

The painting was first shown publicly in 1879, at the fourth Impressionist exhibition.

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“Summer,” 1906

American artist Charles Courtney Curran (1861–1942)
Oil on canvas; 60.9 × 92 cm
Private collection

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“The Ugly Duchess” — Quentin Matsys

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“An Autumn Clearing”

Austrian artist Karl Vikas (1875–1934)
Oil on canvas; 65.5 × 83.5 cm
Private collection

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Sarah Bernhardt at Work in Her Studio, 1879

French artist Marie-Désirée Bourgoin (1839–1912)
Watercolor, gouache, and graphite on paper; 67.8 × 53.1 cm
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Bernhardt is shown working on a sculpture, revealing that her artistic interests extended well beyond the stage.

Bourgoin captures the studio’s atmosphere with skill: exotic curiosities, sumptuous furniture, and carefully observed interior details evoke a bohemian world steeped in creativity.

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“Landscape” — Lev Feliksovich Lagorio

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“Annual Menaion” — Anonymous Russian Icon Painter
Price: $21,000

The artist is unknown, as icon painters rarely signed their work. Though their names faded, the icons survive in remarkable detail, with each saint’s name in Church Slavonic.

A menaion is a calendar of the Church year, marking each month’s feasts and saints’ days in rows of figures—a prayerful calendar painted on wood and gold.

The tradition began in 11th-century Byzantium and flourished in 16th-century Russia. At Metropolitan Macarius’s initiative, saints’ accounts were gathered in the Great Menaion Reader. Painters rendered this encyclopaedia of holiness as twelve icons, one for each month.

Silver revetment covers nearly the entire panel, leaving faces and hands visible while adorning and protecting the paint.

Complete annual menaions are rare; sets were often broken up and months lost. This detailed, well-preserved work is a rare survival.

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“The Blind Girl” — John Everett Millais

This painting highlights Victorian England’s child homelessness and the begging of people with disabilities. Two girls, likely sisters and travelling musicians, rest by the roadside after rain, heading to Winchelsea. An accordion lies on the older girl’s lap; a sign reads “Pity the Blind.” Unable to see, she earns a living playing music.

Millais makes the scene an allegory of the senses: the blind girl faces the sun and feels a blade of grass, relying on touch and sound. Her sighted sister leans against her, captivated by a double rainbow. A tortoiseshell butterfly rests on the blind girl’s shoulder, echoing her stillness.

The work also reflects Millais’s scientific precision. Exhibited in 1856, it drew a note that the inner arc of a double rainbow should reverse the outer arc’s colours. Millais corrected it after learning of the error.

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“The Fatal Exit” — Mikhail Ivanovich Ignatiev

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“Buddha, Master of Medicine, and the Twelve Divine Generals” — artist unknown

This Buddhist image depicts Bhaiṣajyaguru, the Buddha of Healing, whose name means “Medicine Master.” For centuries, people across East Asia have prayed to him for relief from illness and suffering. He rules the eastern paradise of “Pure Lapis Lazuli Land” and is often shown in blue or with lapis lazuli, believed to have healing properties.

The twelve warriors are yaksha spirits who embraced Buddhism after hearing his teachings. Each vowed to protect 7,000 warriors, forming 84,000 beings ready to aid those who invoke Bhaiṣajyaguru or recite his sutra. The generals represent his twelve vows to ease suffering from illness, poverty, ignorance, and more. They later became linked to the Eastern zodiac animals and the twelve hours of the day.

Made for meditation and devotion, these scrolls were displayed in Buddhist temples as worshippers prayed for healing of body and spirit.

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“Sizha” — Yuri Klapoukh

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Cornflowers — Isaac Ilyich Levitan

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“The Boieldieu Bridge in Rouen on a Rainy Day” — Camille Pissarro
Price: $127,000

By 1896, Pissarro had nearly lost sight in one eye, making outdoor painting difficult. From a room at Rouen’s Hôtel de Paris, he painted the Seine and Boieldieu Bridge in changing weather and light.

In a letter to his son, he described the iron bridge in wet weather, crowded with carriages and pedestrians, amid dockworkers, boats, smoke and mist. He sought to capture the city’s restless energy. In his later years, industrial life increasingly replaced the meadows and gardens of his earlier work; he painted factory smoke as carefully as blossoming apple trees.

Built just ten years earlier, the bridge symbolized Rouen’s industrial progress, much like the Pont de l’Europe in Caillebotte’s work.

Versions of the series are held worldwide, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Musée d’Orsay. Collectors still debate which best captures that rainy day.

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“Hunters in the Snow” — Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Even those unfamiliar with Flemish painting may recognize this scene from cinema. A reproduction hangs in the spacecraft lounge in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, and details appear in his Mirror and Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. Nearly 500 years old, the landscape remains part of modern visual culture.

The painting is part of Bruegel’s six-work Seasons cycle, commissioned in 1565 by Antwerp collector Nicolaes Jonghelinck for his dining room. The works were likely displayed as a frieze around the walls. Only five survive. Hunters in the Snow represents December and January and is considered one of Europe’s first fully realized winter landscapes, with nature as its subject, not merely a backdrop.

On the ice, figures play a game resembling modern curling—not just skate. The painting is among the earliest known depictions of the game; a version remains popular in Austria and Germany.

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“Le Pont de l’Europe” — Gustave Caillebotte
Price: $160,000

Caillebotte returned to this subject repeatedly, sketching on the bridge before arranging the figures in his studio. A photograph even shows a man in a hat posing much like the figure in the painting.

The bridge spans the tracks at Saint-Lazare station, where six avenues named after European capitals converged. A marvel of engineering, it embodied the new industrial age.

The foreground figures’ identities remain debated. The man in the top hat may be Caillebotte; the woman beside him, his acquaintance Anne-Marie Hagen. A worker leans on the railing, looking down at the station. The wealthy flâneur and working man share a bridge, yet seem worlds apart.

Shown at the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877, when Caillebotte was 28, the painting reflects only part of his legacy. He was also the movement’s leading patron, supporting fellow Impressionists. After his death, his collection helped form France’s national Impressionist collection.

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“Girl in a Lilac Dress” — Eugène de Blaas

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“Blind Man’s Bluff” — Konstantin Makovsky

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“Pierrette Playing the Lute” — Paul de La Boulaye

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“Red Vineyard at Arles” — Vincent van Gogh

Price: $3,750,000

Van Gogh’s best-known story is that he sold only one painting in his lifetime—and this was it. The story is simplified, but largely true.

Anna Boch, a Belgian painter, collector and member of Les XX, bought the painting for 400 francs at a Brussels exhibition in March 1890, four months before Van Gogh’s death. She was the sister of Eugène Boch, Van Gogh’s friend, whose portrait he painted in Arles in 1888.

Van Gogh later sheepishly told his brother Theo that the Bochs had paid the full price, though friends should have received a discount.

Anna kept the painting until 1907, when Moscow collector Ivan Morozov acquired it for 30,000 francs—a sign of Van Gogh’s growing posthumous fame. The Morozov collection was nationalized in 1918; in 1948, “Red Vineyard” went to the Pushkin Museum, where it remains.

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