Arrivals & Departures

The Artist's Canvas . 06 June 2026 . Girl with the Pearl Earring . Johannes Vermeer . c.1665 . (Dutch: Meisje met de parel)

Girl with a Pearl Earring (Dutch: Meisje met de parel) is an oil painting by Dutch Golden Age painter Johannes Vermeer, dated c. 1665. Going by various names over the centuries, it acquired its present title towards the end of the 20th century. The work has been in the collection of the Mauritshuis in The Hague since 1902 and has been the subject of various literary and cinematic treatments.

The painting is a tronie, the Dutch 17th-century description of a "head" that was not meant to be a portrait. It depicts a European girl wearing "exotic dress", an "oriental turban", and what appears to be a very large pearl as an earring. The identity of the subject is unknown. She may have been real or imagined, or she might represent a Sibyl or a biblical figure. She has also been said to be the artist's eldest daughter, Maria, though some art historians dismiss this speculation as an anachronism. The work is oil on canvas and is 44.5 cm (17.5 in) tall by 39 cm (15 in) wide. It is signed "IVMeer" but not dated. It is estimated to have been painted around 1665.

The most recent (1994) restoration of the painting brought out hidden subtleties in the colour scheme and deepened the intimacy of the girl's gaze towards the viewer. During this process, it was discovered that the dark background, today somewhat mottled, was originally a deep enamel-like green. This effect was produced by applying a thin transparent layer of paint—a glaze—over the black background seen now. However, the two organic pigments of the green glaze, indigo and weld, have faded. In 2014, Dutch astrophysicist Vincent Icke [nl] raised doubts about the material of the earring, arguing that it looks more like polished tin than pearl on the grounds of the specular reflection, the pear shape and the large size of the earring.

It has been suggested that the subject of the painting was Magdalena, the 12-year-old daughter of Vermeer's chief patron Pieter Claesz van Ruijven, who lived in a house called the Golden Eagle in the Old Town area of Delft. The family were said to have been Remonstrants, for whom the biblical Mary Magdalene was an important figure, and the portrait with its biblical style of clothing could have been painted to commemorate Magdalena's baptism into the church.

Ownership: On the advice of Victor de Stuers, who for years tried to prevent Vermeer's rare works from being sold to parties abroad, Arnoldus Andries des Tombe purchased the work at an auction in The Hague in 1881, for only two guilders plus thirty cents buyer's premium (equivalent to roughly €24 in 2015). At the time, it was in poor condition, with parts of the paint layer having become detached. Des Tombe had no heirs and by a bequest donated this and other paintings to the Mauritshuis in 1902. During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, the painting was kept hidden in a bombproof bunker located just below the Mauritshuis for two years, before removal to the St. Pietersberg caves near Maastricht until the liberation of the Netherlands in May 1945.

The Artist's Canvas . 06 June 2026 . Fresco and Study of Two Figures

Fresco Age of Gold . Pietro da Cortona . (Pietro Berrettini) Italian . 1637

In June 1637, Pietro da Cortona, the leading Italian Baroque painter of his time, arrived in Florence and immediately began a fresco cycle commissioned by the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinando II (1610-1670) and his wife Vittoria della Rovere (1622-1694), for the Camera della Stufa in the Pitti Palace. The subject was the Four Ages of the World as recounted at the beginning of Ovid's Metamorphoses, a classical literary source. This drawing is a study for the couple seated at the left in the Age of Gold. In this fresco the young woman crowns the seated youth with a laurel of victory, an allusion to the name Vittoria, while putti, laden with branches of oak (rovere), advance without disturbing a docile lion, these are references to the Medici - Della Rovere marriage symbolized by the youthful couple. Study of Two Figures for the Age of Gold, Pietro da Cortona (Pietro Berrettini) (Italian, Cortona 1596–1669 Rome), Black chalk, slightly reworked by the artist with the wet tip of the chalk stick

The Artist's Canvas . 06 June 2026 . The Siesta . ca. 1892–94 . Paul Gauguin . Oil on canvas

On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 822 The unaffected grace and communal ease of Tahitian women impressed Gauguin enormously. The artist worked on this painting over an extended period, incorporating numerous changes. The skirt of the woman in the foreground, for example, was originally bright red; there was a dog in the position now occupied by the basket at lower right; and the woman seated at the left edge of the porch was previously situated further to the left.

The Artist's Canvas . 05 June 2026 . The Gulf of Marseille Seen from L'Estaque . ca. 1885 . Paul Cézanne French

On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 826 Cézanne enthused about the fishing village of L’Estaque to Pissarro in 1876: "It is like a playing card. Red roofs over the blue sea. . . . The sun is so terrific here that it seems to me as if the objects were silhouetted not only in black and white, but in blue, red, brown, and violet." Cézanne painted some twenty views of L'Estaque over the next decade, a dozen of them facing toward or across the gulf of Marseille. In the distance of this painting, atop the hill to the right of the jetty, the towers of Notre-Dame de la Garde stand watch over the city of Marseille.

The Artist's Canvas . 04 June 2026 . The Basket of Apples . c.1893 . Paul Cezanne . (French, 1839–1906)

In many ways Paul Cezanne was the odd man out among the artists branded as “Impressionists”—those who showed their works outside of France’s state-sponsored Salon exhibitions. Early on, he painted landscapes, the typical Impressionist subject, but his arresting and complex still lifes changed the traditional nature morte (dead nature) genre and continue to puzzle and tantalize today.

At first glance, The Basket of Apples, the first of Cezanne’s works to enter the museum’s collection, appears to be a fruit-laden table setting anchored by a wine bottle. Closer looking reveals shifts in reality conveyed by the misaligned tabletop, tilted bottle, cascading apples, and the precarious tower of cookies known as langues de chat (cat tongues), which magically stop just short of falling out of the picture. Furthering the sense of what has been called the artist’s “controlled chaos” are the shifts in brushwork from the thick strokes used to model fruits within the cloth’s thick sculptural forms to the sketch-like marks used around the edges of both the table and the cloth. Cezanne rarely signed his paintings, so his signature at the bottom left suggests the importance he ascribed to this painting or to its original owner.

The Artist's Canvas . 03 June 2026 . The Bay of Marseille, Seen from L’Estaque . c.1885 . Paul Cezanne . (French, 1839–1906)

In a letter to his friend and teacher Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne compared the view of the sea from L’Estaque to a playing card, with its simple shapes and colors. The landscape’s configuration and color fascinated him. This painting is one of more than a dozen such vistas created by the artist during the 1880s. Cézanne divided the canvas into four zones—architecture, water, mountain, and sky. Although these four elements are seen repeatedly in Impressionist paintings, Cézanne’s work is very different from that of his fellow artists.

Whereas their primary purpose was to record the transient effects of light, Cézanne was interested in the underlying structure and composition of the views he painted. Filling the canvas with shapes defined by strong, contrasting colors and a complex grid of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines, he created a highly compact, dynamic pattern of water, sky, land, and village that at once refers back to traditionally structured landscape paintings and looks forward to the innovations of Cubism. Using blocklike brushstrokes to build the space, Cézanne created a composition that seems both two- and three-dimensional. Not locked tightly in place, his forms appear to touch and shift continually, creating a sense of volume and space that strengthens the composition and brings it to life.

The Artist's Canvas . 02 June 2026 . Still Life with a Ginger Jar and Eggplants . 1893-94 . Paul Cézanne . French .

On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 826

For this commanding still life, with its richly orchestrated play of overlapping shapes, patterns, colors, and textures, Cézanne relied on a stock of familiar objects. The raffia-corded ginger jar, for example, is featured in more than a dozen compositions, including three of comparable verve dating to the early 1890s. Still Life with a Ginger Jar and Eggplants, Paul Cézanne (French, Aix-en-Provence 1839–1906 Aix-en-Provence), Oil on canvas

Dustbin of Life . 02 June 2026 . Things Change

It’s in the Attic… Go Look for Yourself

Over the years we have seen many things go through transitions, most simply get older. But some have a lifespan that most often is relegated to the attic where years of dust collects and when the owner passes on, the heirs unwrap the dusty carcasses and find treasure. But others get repurposed.

The following was actually begun by Phil Oldham [Class of 1961] by commenting on a Serendipity A.I. post: “Remember when we raged against going from classic instruments to electronic.” Simply put, some things have changed our lives, while other things have fallen by the wayside. The list grows daily:

The Artist's Canvas . 01 June 2026 . At the Moulin Rouge . 1892–95 . Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (French, 1864–1901)

Café-concerts were popular venues for drinking and entertainment in late nineteenth-century Paris and attracted the interest of artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The Moulin Rouge, which opened in 1889, was the most famous of the café-concerts, and Toulouse-Lautrec was a habitué of the establishment—he even had a permanently reserved table. His painting Equestrienne (1887–88), now also in the Art Institute’s collection, was acquired by the owner of the nightclub as decoration for the lobby.

At the Moulin Rouge is a cleverly observed group portrait of the (in some cases) infamous customers and entertainers who formed part of the artist’s circle. Standing in the background, the dancer La Goulue arranges her hair. Seated at the table are dancers La Macarona and Jane Avril, as well as photographer Paul Sescau, poet Édouard Dujardin, and vintner Maurice Guibert. Singer May Milton peers out from the right edge of the painting, her face harshly lit and a shocking acid green—the Moulin Rouge was designed to have electric lighting and Toulouse-Lautrec reveled in the artistic possibilities of artificial glare. The artist himself appears in the center background of the painting, a diminutive figure accompanied by his much taller cousin, the physician Gabriel Tapié de Céleyran.

The Artist's Canvas . 31 May 2026 . Te burao . (The Hibiscus Tree) . 1892 . Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903)

Completed early in Paul Gauguin’s first Tahitian sojourn, this landscape shows the artist grappling with representing an unfamiliar environment. Rather than documenting botanical species scientifically, Gauguin focused on the artistic potential of their variegated colors, textures, and forms. The human figure in the distance and the dog roaming through fallen branches activate the landscape and establish a sense of scale.

This is one of thirty-five works that comprise the Winterbotham Collection.

Man's Impact on the Environment . 31 May 2026 . Trolltunga . Ullensvang Municipality . Vestland County . Norway . The Devil's Tongue

Trolltunga (lit. 'the troll tongue') is a rock formation situated at an elevaton of 1,126 metres (3,694 ft) above sea level in Ullensvang Municipality in Vestland county, Norway. The cliff juts horizontally out from the mountain, about 700 metres (2,300 ft) above the north side of the lake Ringedalsvatnet.

Popularity of the hike to Trolltunga and rock formation itself has exploded in recent years. The increased popularity has turned Trolltunga into a national icon and a major tourist attraction for the region. Until 2010, fewer than 800 people hiked to Trolltunga each year. In 2016, more than an estimated 80,000 people hiked the 27-kilometre (17 mi) round-trip from the village of Skjeggedal, making it one of Norway's most popular hikes.

The Artist's Canvas . 30 My 2026 . Beach at Cabasson (Baigne-Cul) . 1891–92 . Henri Edmond Cross (French, 1856–1910)

In 1891, as a result of his rheumatoid arthritis, Henri Edmond Cross moved to Cabasson, a hamlet on the Côte d’Azur in southeastern France. The move deeply affected his art: after settling on the Mediterranean coast, he embraced the divided brushwork (small dashes and dots of color) and tonal gradations of “scientific Impressionism.” This methodical technique was a departure from the Impressionists’ more intuitive quick strokes of color to capture fleeting atmospheric conditions. In this beach scene, Cross used this more systematic paint application to convey the color and heat of his adopted region.

The Artist's Canvas . 29 May 2026 . The Card Players . 1890-92 . Paul Cézanne (French, Aix-en-Provence 1839–1906 Aix-en-Provence) . Oil on canvas

On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 826

Cézanne was in his fifties when he undertook a painting campaign devoted to giving memorable form to a subject that inspired the likes of Caravaggio and Chardin. He was determined from the start—as we see in this sturdy Provençal scene—to make it his own. Cézanne carefully crafted this composition from figure studies he had made of local farmhands. Once he had puzzled-out his conception, he continued to fine-tune the poses and positions of the card players, until they—like the four pipes hanging on the wall behind them—each fell perfectly into place. Cézanne channeled the quiet authority he achieved here into a much larger variant (Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia) and punctuated the series with three works in which he pared away extraneous details to focus his gaze on a pair of players.

The Artist's Canvas . 28 May 2026 . Tahitian Landscape . 1892 . Paul Gauguin (French, Paris 1848–1903 . Atuona . Hiva Oa . Marquesas Islands) . Oil on canvas

On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 825 Although the authorship of this picture was once questioned, cleaning and reexamination have securely demonstrated that it is one of a group of landscapes that Gauguin painted during his first Tahitian sojourn, showing small figures and a hut amid tropical greenery. There are drawings related to the couple and the horse in this picture, attesting to the artist’s eye for local detail. This was the first painting by Gauguin to enter the Metropolitan’s collection, by donation in 1939.

The Artist's Canvas . 27 May 2026 . Circus Sideshow (Parade de cirque) . 1887-88 . Georges Seurat (French, Paris 1859–1891 Paris) . Oil on canvas

On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 825 At the Salon des Indépendants in 1888 Seurat demonstrated the versatility of his technique by exhibiting Circus Sideshow, a nighttime outdoor scene in artificial light, and Models, an indoor, daylight scene (Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia). This is Seurat’s first nocturnal painting and the first to depict popular entertainment. It represents the parade, or sideshow, of the Circus Corvi at the annual Gingerbread Fair, held in eastern Paris around the place de la Nation, in spring 1887. Sideshows were staged outside the circus tent, for free, to entice passersby to purchase tickets. The onlookers at the far right are queued on stairs leading to the box office.