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**The Beguiling of Merlin** — Edward Coley Burne-Jones

In Arthurian legend, Merlin falls in love with Nimue, the Lady of the Lake, and reveals his magical secrets. She uses them to imprison him forever in a hawthorn tree. Burne-Jones depicts Merlin’s freedom fading: he pleads with Nimue, unable to move.

Nimue was modelled on Maria Zambaco, a Greek artist and sculptor who was Burne-Jones’s lover in the late 1860s and early 1870s. Their affair ended in scandal. He tried to leave his wife for her; in despair, Maria once proposed they die together with opium beside a London canal. The incident brought the police. Historians see echoes of their relationship in the commanding Nimue and helpless Merlin.

Commissioned in the late 1860s by Liverpool shipowner and collector Frederick Leyland, the painting took years to complete. It was first shown in 1877 at London’s Grosvenor Gallery.

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“Sunset of Life”

English artist Walter Langley (1852–1922)
Watercolor on paper
Private collection

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“Portrait of Elisabeth Sofia Maria (Betsy) Cavallini,” 1901

Dutch artist Piet Mondrian (1872–1944)
Oil on canvas; 73 × 53 cm
Private collection

Betsy Cavallini married Cornelis (Kees) Bergman in Amsterdam on March 19, 1902. Bergman was five years older than Mondrian, worked as a stockbroker, and shared his interest in painting, taking lessons from Piet.

Cornelis is known to have owned several of Mondrian’s paintings depicting members of his family.

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“Flaming June” by Frederic Leighton

After Leighton’s death in 1896, Victorian art fell out of fashion and the painting disappeared for decades. It was rediscovered by chance in the early 1960s, nailed above a fireplace in a London house being demolished.

A popular story says young Andrew Lloyd Webber spotted it in a London shop and asked his grandmother for £50 to buy it. She refused, calling it “Victorian junk.” Puerto Rican industrialist and politician Luis Ferré later bought the painting for a modest sum. It now hangs in the museum he founded in Ponce, known as the “Mona Lisa of the Southern Hemisphere.”

In the upper-right corner, an oleander—a beautiful but deadly poisonous plant—grows behind the sleeping woman. Many scholars see it as a subtle symbol of the fragile boundary between sleep and death. Leighton’s pose was inspired by Michelangelo’s “Night” in Florence’s Medici Chapel.

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“Домовой. The Evening Before the Owners Leave.” — Pavel Nazim

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“The Ugly Duchess” by Quentin Matsys

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“Young Italian Woman at a Fruit Stall,” 1874

Austrian artist Ludwig Passini (1832–1903)
Oil on canvas; 47 × 31 cm
Private collection

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“Carelessness,” 1917

American artist William McGregor Paxton (1869–1941)
Oil on canvas; 69.2 × 55.9 cm
Private collection

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**The Yearly Menaion** — Unknown Russian icon painter
**Price: $21,000**

The artist’s name is unknown, as icons were rarely signed; makers sought no personal recognition. Yet this work preserves every saint’s name in Church Slavonic.

A menaion is a calendar of feasts and saints’ days for the year. Each row represents a month, linking saints to dates—a medieval planner for prayer.

The tradition began in 11th-century Byzantium and flourished in 16th-century Russia. At Metropolitan Macarius’s initiative, saints’ accounts were collected in the Great Menaion Reader. Painters brought this encyclopaedia of sainthood to wood and gold, creating twelve icons, one per month.

A heavy silver riza covers nearly the entire panel, leaving faces and hands visible. It also protected the painting from soot and touch during centuries of worship.

Yearly menaions were often separated, making a complete, well-preserved work like this rare.

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

Caillebotte spent hours sketching the bridge, then staged figures in his studio like a director. A man in a hat in one photograph resembles a figure in the painting.

The bridge spans the tracks at Saint-Lazare, where six avenues named for European capitals met. A 19th-century engineering marvel, it symbolized the industrial age.

The foreground figures’ identities are debated. The top-hatted man may be Caillebotte, with acquaintance Anne-Marie Hagen beside him. A worker leans over the railing, contrasting with the wealthy flâneur: they share a bridge but seem to inhabit different worlds.

First shown at the 1877 third Impressionist exhibition, when Caillebotte was 28, the painting reflects only part of his role. He was also the movement’s leading patron; after his death, his collection helped form France’s national Impressionist holdings.

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“The Night Café” — Vincent van Gogh

Van Gogh called it “one of the ugliest pictures I have ever made”—and meant it. In a letter to his brother Theo, he said he wanted to show a café as a place where one could “ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime.”

The setting was the Café de la Gare in Arles, where Van Gogh rented a room above the bar. He painted it over three nights, sleeping by day to capture a late-night refuge for people with nowhere else to go. Its colors were deliberately unrealistic: pale pink against blood-red and wine-red, green against yellow-green and harsh blue-green, evoking “a hellish furnace in pale sulphur” and “the powers of darkness in a cheap tavern.”

Short of money, Van Gogh eventually gave the painting to the café’s owner, Joseph Ginoux, in exchange for his room.

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“It’s time. Go.” — Enrique Alvim Corrêa

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“Autumn Flowers,” 1910

Swedish artist Gunnar Gunnarsson Wennerberg (1863–1914)
Oil on canvas; 130 × 70 cm
Nationalmuseum, Sweden

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“Fish in Summer and Autumn” — Maruyama Ōkyo

These paired scrolls trace the Buddhist cycle of life. Eight young ayu, or sweetfish, swim upstream past a mossy rock and spring azaleas. In the second scroll, crimson maple leaves mark the passing seasons as three mature fish head downstream to the sea, beginning the cycle anew.

An influential 18th-century Japanese artist, Ōkyo combined Chinese and Japanese traditions with Western linear perspective, which he studied as a teenager while working in a toy shop selling European stereoscopes. His distinctive style depicted nature with striking realism. Though some artists criticized his literal approach, the public embraced his work. His Kyoto studio reportedly trained around 1,000 students.

Ōkyo signed and dated the left scroll 1785, at the height of his career.

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“Alexander’s Battle at Issus” — Albrecht Altdorfer

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“Ariccia near Rome,” 1836

Russian painter Mikhail Ivanovich Lebedev (1811–1837)
Oil on canvas; 54 × 44 cm
The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Accustomed to the muted palette of the northern landscape, Lebedev was captivated by the vivid richness of the Apennine Peninsula.

A favorite theme in his Italian landscapes was a shaded avenue or winding path, with trees arching overhead to form a canopy and shelter the cool, peaceful space below.

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“Allegory of Dance,” 1903

American artist Albert Thomas De Rome (1885–1959)
Oil on canvas; 250.8 × 123.1 cm
Private collection

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Never scold your mother.

If you think she’s wrong,
or didn’t say the right thing,
be grateful she’s still here
and raised you to be who you are.

If her slippers shuffle across the floor,
if a door closes a little too loudly,
it means your mother is home and well—
let her sigh, or even groan.

If a glass slips from her hands,
don’t get upset. Go to her and say,
“It’s all right, Mom.”

CONTINUED IN THE PINNED POST.

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“Early Snow” — Vasily Polenov

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“Sizha” — Yuri Klapoukh

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“Wind God and Thunder God” by Ogata Kōrin
Price: $104,000

Kōrin didn’t invent these gods or the composition. Tawaraya Sōtatsu painted it nearly a century earlier, inspiring countless copies. Kōrin recreated it in his own hand, using gold and ink; his version is now valued as highly as the original.

The screen depicts Fūjin, god of wind, carrying a great bag of winds, and green, muscular Raijin, god of thunder, beating drums to make thunder. A vast stretch of gold separates them, suggesting the forces might unleash a storm if they meet.

Made as a gold-leaf byōbu (folding screen), it was more than decoration: such screens were believed to protect homes from misfortune.

Kōrin’s brother Ogata Kenzan and pupil Suzuki Kiitsu later revisited the subject, continuing a lineage passed down through generations.

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“An Antique Evening,” 1908

Artist: Alphonse Osbert
Oil on canvas; 174 × 158 cm
Petit Palais, France

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“Innocence,” 1899

Artist: Arthur Hacker
Oil on canvas
Private collection

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“Feeding the Ducks”

Artist: Carl von Bergen (1853–1933)
Oil on canvas; 79.5 × 58.5 cm
Private collection

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“Portrait of Nadezhda Mikhailovna Sapozhnikova” — Nikolai Fechin

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“Blind Man’s Buff” — Konstantin Yegorovich Makovsky

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“Family Member,” 1880

Artist: Frederick George Cotman
Oil on canvas
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

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The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist — Caravaggio

This is the only painting Caravaggio signed with his name, and he did so in blood: “brother Michelangelo” appears in the blood spilling from the saint’s severed neck. At the time, Caravaggio was a fugitive killer. After stabbing a man in a Rome street brawl, he was sentenced to death and fled to Malta.

The Knights of Saint John welcomed him as a knight, offering hope of a papal pardon. He painted this monumental altarpiece for Valletta’s cathedral, the largest canvas of his career. But after fighting a higher-ranking knight, he was imprisoned and escaped. In December 1608, the Order expelled him as a “rotten and foul” former brother. The ceremony stripping him of his knighthood took place before this painting.

Caravaggio never received a pardon. Two years later, he died under mysterious circumstances, never returning to Rome.

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“The Fairytale Princess” — Torsten Wasastjerna

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“Dragon” — Artist Unknown

This painting was made not by an anonymous artisan, but by an artist who deliberately followed the style of Muqi, the celebrated 13th-century monk-painter and dragon-painting pioneer. Legend says artists in this tradition worked almost in a trance. Chen Rong, a great master, was said to “make clouds by splashing ink, conjure mist with water, and, drunk, cry out, remove his hat, dip it in ink and smear the canvas” before finishing with a brush.

Unlike the evil monsters of European tradition, Chinese dragons were benevolent, powerful beings who ruled water, brought rain and were tied to the emperor. They dwelled in mysterious places, among clouds and mist or in underwater caves. Dense, dark ink makes this dragon seem to emerge from primordial haze; its piercing eyes draw the viewer out of the gloom.

The painting’s date is unknown. Historians place it broadly in the Yuan or Ming dynasty, between the 14th and 16th centuries.

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