page_title: National Gallery, London
section_title: 1800 onwards
hierarchical_section_title: National Gallery, London / Important paintings / 1800 onwards
context_page_description: The National Gallery, London is an art gallery in London, England, which has one of the finest collections of European paintings in the world.
  What makes this gallery so important is that, although there are bigger galleries, The National Gallery has many paintings of very high quality and also because it has paintings by famous artists whose works are very rare. These rare paintings include works by Duccio, Masaccio, Uccello, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo, Giorgione, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Chardin, Klimt, Rousseau and Redon.
  The National Gallery is on Trafalgar Square, which is one of the busiest tourist places in London. It is a grand building of pale grey limestone, with a central dome and a large Classical style porch like an Ancient Greek temple. To the left side, the gallery has a large new building called The Sainsbury Wing.
context_section_description: Turner, The Temeraire, 1838, London
  This is a sad painting. Its full name is The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up as scrap. This is the last journey for one of the great warships that had fought for England against the French Fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar. Her tall elegant shape makes a contrast to the dirty black tugboat with smoking funnel that is towing her away. Turner, who was expert at painting the sea, the sky and the weather, has placed the moon in the sky near the sailing ship. The moon is in its last phase. On the other side of the picture, the sun rises with a red glow like fire on the water. The waning moon is the symbol of the passing of the age of great sailing ships. The blazing sun on the water is the symbol of the new age of the steam engine.
  Constable, The Haywain, 1821, Suffolk
  Ingres, Madame Moitessier, 1856, Paris
  Courbet, Women on the Bank of the Seine, 1857, France
  Henri Fantin-Latour, Apples on a Dish, 1861, France
  This picture is a still life. In the Renaissance, carvings of still lifes were often part of the wooden decoration inside important rooms in a palace. In the 1600s and 1700s paintings of still lifes also became common and were most often seen in the dining room, where fruit, flowers and animals that had been killed for meat were fashionable decoration. In the 1800s many artists like Fantin-Latour painted small still lifes like this one to practice their skills at arranging a picture, at studying light and at studying texture. Many artists also painted still lifes because they were too poor to pay for an artist's model, or the weather was too bad to paint landscapes. Fantin-Latour did a large number of small pictures like this. He has arranged four apples of different colours and shapes and has made a study of how the light looks on their curved surfaces.
  Manet, The Waitress, 1879, Paris
  Claude Monet, The Houses of Parliament, London, French painter. See below.
  Renoir, The Umbrellas, c.1880, France
   
  Seurat, The Bathers at Asnieres, 1884, France
  Seurat was a friend of the French Impressionist painters. He had a theory that all colour was made up of lots of colours which were sorted out when light passed into the eye. He experimented with colour by painting in tiny dots. His style of painting is called Pointillism. This large painting took a long time to do. Even though it is an outdoor scene with lots of figures, it is very still, as if time has stopped. When the painting is looked at closely, it can be seen that even the parts that seem white or black are made of hundreds of tiny dots of colour.
  Edgar Degas, Combing Hair, c.1885, Paris
  Cezanne, Mountains in Provence, 1890, Provence
  Vincent van Gogh, Landscape with Cypress Pine, c.1890, France
  Vincent van Gogh had a difficult and troubled life. He was born in Holland but went to paint in France. He had very few friends and had difficulty selling his paintings. Luckily he had the support of his brother Theo and a doctor for whom he painted pictures. This landscape is a good example of his style. In the painting, everything seems to have a life of its own. The clouds are like great beasts that roll across the sky, the waving grain reaches out like hands, the mountains are rumbling and the cypress pine looks quite dangerous. Vincent used each brush stroke to help create this flame-like movement. Another important thing in this painting is contrast. The colours change from warm reddish-orange to ice-blue. The big dark tree to the right is in tonal contrast with the white clouds. The vertical direction of the tree is in contrast to the horizontal direction of the landscape. In 1890, Vincent took his own life after painting hundreds of pictures in only five years.
  Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Woman in the Garden, 1891, France
  Douanier Rousseau, Tiger frightened by a Storm, 1891, Paris
  Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Hermine Gallia, 1904, Vienna
caption: van Gogh
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