The Impressionists at Their Peak: the Met's Crown Jewels

Degas painted the Paris Opéra ballet obsessively for decades — not, he insisted, because he was interested in dancers, but because he was interested in movement. The Dance Class shows the examination room of the old Opéra, with Jules Perrot (the famous teacher) correcting a student while others wait. The composition is radically asymmetric — a window cuts through the group, figures are cropped, space is used in ways borrowed from Japanese woodblock prints. This is one of the founding documents of modern pictorial composition.

Van Gogh painted this view from the grounds of the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy in June 1889. The cypresses twist against a swirling sky; the wheat field churns beneath them; the whole landscape is energised to the point of ecstasy. Van Gogh himself called this one of his best landscapes, and the subsequent century has agreed. He made three versions — this one came to the Met from the Havemeyer collection. The physical surface is extraordinary: paint thick enough to cast shadows.

In the 1880s, Degas began a series of paintings of women bathing, drying themselves, and having their hair dressed — observed (he claimed) "through a keyhole," without their knowledge. The effect is startling: these are not nudes displaying themselves to a painter's gaze but people going about their private lives. This pastel, with its extraordinary auburn hair becoming the compositional focus, anticipates 20th-century photography in its casual intimacy. The colour is ferocious — red-orange hair, pink flesh, blue-green robe.

Seurat spent only two years in his early thirties before dying at 31, and every major painting from that period changed Western art in a different way. This painting — the first he made under artificial gaslight, which obsessed him — shows the outdoor advertisement parade of a circus, with performers and musicians lit by the yellow glare of gas lamps against a dark night sky. The pointillist technique, fully realised, gives the light a quality that no other painter has achieved: artificial, slightly cold, modern.

This study preceded Seurat's monumental A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, now in Chicago — one of the most famous paintings in Western art. Seeing this preparatory work at the Met is a chance to understand Seurat's process: the working out of the compositional problems, the early exploration of his pointillist method, the gradual clarification of the scene that would take him two years to complete at full scale. The figures here are slightly more relaxed than in the finished painting; you can see the artist thinking.

Pissarro is the unsung hero of Impressionism — the only painter to show work in all eight Impressionist exhibitions, the mentor of both Cézanne and Gauguin, the political heart of the movement. This early painting, made in Pontoise where he would work for most of his career, shows his commitment to the actual landscape of the French countryside: no Romantic idealisation, just hills, fields, a few houses, and specific light. The roughness of the application is deliberate; this is a painting that refuses to charm.

This large-scale portrait, commissioned by the wife of a major Paris publisher, shows Renoir at the moment when he was trying to reconcile the freedom of Impressionism with the demands of bourgeois portraiture. The result is one of his most successful works: the domestic scene is rendered with warmth and precision, the children and dog are characterful, and the Japanese decorative elements in the interior signal the fashionable sophistication of the Charpentier salon. When it was shown at the Salon in 1879, it made Renoir's reputation.

Cross was one of the leading Neo-Impressionists, working in the tradition of Seurat's divisionism, but his use of colour was more purely expressive and less scientifically systematic. This nocturnal landscape, with its large, luminous stars and their reflections in water, anticipates Fauvism and the general liberation of colour that would define the early 20th century. The colours — vivid pinks, oranges, and greens — have nothing to do with the actual palette of the night sky. They are emotional facts rather than optical ones.

Renoir painted this subject multiple times — the French state commissioned the first version for the Luxembourg Museum — and each version refines the essential qualities: the warm domestic light, the absorbed concentration of the girls, the way the piano anchors a scene of upper-middle-class Parisian domesticity. This version, in the Robert Lehman Collection at the Met, has a softness and informality that suits the subject perfectly. It is a painting about the pleasures of culture, of learning, of an afternoon well spent.

Degas painted the Paris Opéra ballet obsessively for decades — not, he insisted, because he was interested in dancers, but because he was interested in movement. The Dance Class shows the examination room of the old Opéra, with Jules Perrot (the famous teacher) correcting a student while others wait. The composition is radically asymmetric — a window cuts through the group, figures are cropped, space is used in ways borrowed from Japanese woodblock prints. This is one of the founding documents of modern pictorial composition.

Van Gogh painted this view from the grounds of the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy in June 1889. The cypresses twist against a swirling sky; the wheat field churns beneath them; the whole landscape is energised to the point of ecstasy. Van Gogh himself called this one of his best landscapes, and the subsequent century has agreed. He made three versions — this one came to the Met from the Havemeyer collection. The physical surface is extraordinary: paint thick enough to cast shadows.

In the 1880s, Degas began a series of paintings of women bathing, drying themselves, and having their hair dressed — observed (he claimed) "through a keyhole," without their knowledge. The effect is startling: these are not nudes displaying themselves to a painter's gaze but people going about their private lives. This pastel, with its extraordinary auburn hair becoming the compositional focus, anticipates 20th-century photography in its casual intimacy. The colour is ferocious — red-orange hair, pink flesh, blue-green robe.

Seurat spent only two years in his early thirties before dying at 31, and every major painting from that period changed Western art in a different way. This painting — the first he made under artificial gaslight, which obsessed him — shows the outdoor advertisement parade of a circus, with performers and musicians lit by the yellow glare of gas lamps against a dark night sky. The pointillist technique, fully realised, gives the light a quality that no other painter has achieved: artificial, slightly cold, modern.

This study preceded Seurat's monumental A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, now in Chicago — one of the most famous paintings in Western art. Seeing this preparatory work at the Met is a chance to understand Seurat's process: the working out of the compositional problems, the early exploration of his pointillist method, the gradual clarification of the scene that would take him two years to complete at full scale. The figures here are slightly more relaxed than in the finished painting; you can see the artist thinking.

Pissarro is the unsung hero of Impressionism — the only painter to show work in all eight Impressionist exhibitions, the mentor of both Cézanne and Gauguin, the political heart of the movement. This early painting, made in Pontoise where he would work for most of his career, shows his commitment to the actual landscape of the French countryside: no Romantic idealisation, just hills, fields, a few houses, and specific light. The roughness of the application is deliberate; this is a painting that refuses to charm.

This large-scale portrait, commissioned by the wife of a major Paris publisher, shows Renoir at the moment when he was trying to reconcile the freedom of Impressionism with the demands of bourgeois portraiture. The result is one of his most successful works: the domestic scene is rendered with warmth and precision, the children and dog are characterful, and the Japanese decorative elements in the interior signal the fashionable sophistication of the Charpentier salon. When it was shown at the Salon in 1879, it made Renoir's reputation.

Cross was one of the leading Neo-Impressionists, working in the tradition of Seurat's divisionism, but his use of colour was more purely expressive and less scientifically systematic. This nocturnal landscape, with its large, luminous stars and their reflections in water, anticipates Fauvism and the general liberation of colour that would define the early 20th century. The colours — vivid pinks, oranges, and greens — have nothing to do with the actual palette of the night sky. They are emotional facts rather than optical ones.

Renoir painted this subject multiple times — the French state commissioned the first version for the Luxembourg Museum — and each version refines the essential qualities: the warm domestic light, the absorbed concentration of the girls, the way the piano anchors a scene of upper-middle-class Parisian domesticity. This version, in the Robert Lehman Collection at the Met, has a softness and informality that suits the subject perfectly. It is a painting about the pleasures of culture, of learning, of an afternoon well spent.