10 Paintings You Should See at the Met in New York City

Georges de La Tour secured an important patron, the duc de Lorraine and, in the late 1630s, came to the notice of King Louis XIII. The king was so impressed that it was said he insisted a painting by La Tour be the only one to be hung in his bedchamber, reputedly having all previous paintings removed. In 1639 the painter was ordered to Paris, where the king paid him 1,000 francs and gave him the title of “Sir Georges de La Tour, painter to the King.” Although many of La Tour’s works have been lost, it seems that his religious works tend to contain fewer and more detailed figures (usually just one or two people), whereas his morality pictures, such as The Fortune Teller, tend to be more crowded. In this painting, a fashionably dressed young man adopts an arrogant stance, paying so much attention to the fortune teller that he fails to notice his pockets being picked by her three assistants. The fortune teller is almost a caricature in her ugliness and her client has an expression of compelled revulsion on his face, leading him to be blind to the young thieves around him. La Tour painted several similar cautionary tales of young men being cheated, often at cards. (Ann Kay)

In 1917, the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired the unsigned Portrait of Mademoiselle Charlotte du Val d’Ognes, believing that it was painted by Jacques-Louis David. The sitter’s classical white tunic, Grecian curls, and Spartan setting all reinforced this attribution, but in 1951 Charles Sterling, then director of the museum, concluded that it had actually been painted by one of David’s students, a woman named Constance Marie Charpentier. Since then, whether the painting, one of the Met’s most popular, is the work of Charpentier or another woman painter of the era, Marie-Denise Villers, has been actively debated among art historians and critics, though the Met now attributes it to Villers. This magnificent, luminous image of the subject at her drawing board can be read as a moving portrait of mutual respect between two female artists. Sterling’s reattribution caused this intimate portrait to be recognized as one of the most accomplished and well-regarded works by a female artist in Western history—but it also caused its monetary value to plummet. At the same time, critics began to ascribe “feminine attributes” to the image. French composer Francis Poulenc called the painting a “mysterious masterpiece,” and it was termed “an eighteenth-century Mona Lisa.” In his assessment, Sterling wrote: “Its poetry, literary rather than plastic, its very evident charms, and cleverly concealed weakness, its ensemble made up from thousands of subtle attitudes, all seem to reveal the feminine spirit.” (Ana Finel Honigman)

George Caleb Bingham’s paintings immortalize the vanished world of the North American frontier. Bingham’s solemn reverence for the landscape is characteristic of many mid-19th-century Realists, yet he represents its beauty with a unique sensitivity to color and light. After completing only a few months of formal training at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Bingham traveled through Europe and North America before settling in Missouri. There he dedicated himself to producing landscape scenes and representing the fishermen and trappers who had recently occupied the area. In 1856 Bingham traveled to Düsseldorf, Germany, to study, mastering the academic style of painting he then taught as the Professor of Art at the University of Missouri. His later work is often criticized for its dry formalism and pedantic political undertones, rooted in his time as a local politician. But this earlier painting—showing two trappers in the early morning, eyeing the viewer from their canoe, in which lie a dead duck and a tethered cat or bear cub—particularly appealed to urban viewers, who were fascinated by its glamorization of the violence necessary for daily survival on the American frontier. Originally titled French-Trader—Half Breed Son, it was renamed when bought by the American Art Union. Bingham elegantly employs deft brushwork, a striking, geometric composition, and clear, pure use of light to expose the hard-scrabble life of settlers and river men involved in the risky adventure of creating a new world. (Sara White Wilson)

No visitor to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art will forget seeing Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware. More than 12 feet tall and 21 feet wide, this iconic picture is truly larger than life. The painting depicts Washington and his army dramatically crossing the icy river for a surprise dawn attack on the British at Trenton, New Jersey, on December 25, 1776. Leutze uses every imaginable device to heighten the drama and elicit an emotive response in the viewer: jagged chunks of ice, whinnying horses, wounded soldiers, and a morning star speak of danger, courage, and hope. The heroic Washington stands noble and erect at the center of the scene. Strangely enough, this symbol of America was actually painted in Germany. The German-American Leutze insisted on using American art students at the famous Düsseldorf Academy as his models. At the time, the United States had recently expanded its boundaries to the Pacific Ocean through its victory in the Mexican War. Leutze, while painting the Delaware, imagined the spirit of Washington crossing western rivers, bringing the stars and stripes and thousands of American settlers with it. The original version of the painting was destroyed in the bombing of Bremen, Germany, in 1942. This surviving version was completed in 1851. (Daniel Robert Koch)

The artist Rosa Bonheur was born in Bordeaux and learned the fundamentals of art from her father, the artist Raymond Bonheur. Her style changed little throughout her career, and it remained grounded in Realism. Working at the same time as the Realists Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet, her work was based on accurate observation from nature combined with excellent technical skills. She had a great affection for animals, in particular horses, and her understanding of animals, their nature, and their anatomy is obvious in her paintings. Her enormous canvas The Horse Fair is considered the artist’s greatest work, but is also unusual within her style. Although the foundation of the painting is Realist, she approached her subject with a combination of the color and emotion of the Romantics, and in particular she was influenced at this point by the work of Théodore Géricault, himself a great admirer of the horse. Bonheur made sketching trips to a horse market near Paris twice a week for a year and a half before starting the painting, and on her trips she dressed as a man to avoid attention from passersby. Bonheur enjoyed financial success during her lifetime, yet she was never properly appreciated by the critics and the art world; it may be that her feminist views and unconventional lifestyle led to her lack of popularity within the male-dominated academic art circles. (Tamsin Pickeral)

Thomas Eakinswas one of the greatest American artists of the 19th century, instilling a powerful and sometimes shocking sense of realism into his paintings. He spent most of his life in his native city of Philadelphia, though this picture dates from the start of his career, when he had just returned from four years studying in Europe (1866 to 1870), mostly in France and Spain. It was hardly surprising after such time away that he was anxious to turn his attention to the places and the activities that he had missed while abroad, specifically rowing scenes, of which he produced several paintings between 1870 and 1874. This is probably the most famous of them. It shows a boyhood friend, Max Schmitt, turning around to face the viewer. In his usual, fastidious way, Eakins arranged the entire composition so that it included a number of references to Schmitt’s recent win of a prestigious single scull race. The autumnal setting was chosen to tally with the date of the race (October 5, 1870); the late-afternoon sky indicated the time that it took place (5 p.m.); and Schmitt’s scull was even located on the precise spot where the finishing line had been situated. As he was equally fond of rowing, Eakins decided to add his own portrait to the picture, in the guise of the rower in the middle distance. To make things doubly clear, he painted his signature and the picture’s date on the side of the boat. (Iain Zaczek)

John Singer Sargent, an American citizen largely brought up in Europe, painted this remarkable portrait near the start of his career, when he was living in Paris. He hoped that it would make his name and, indeed, it did, although not in the way he had envisaged. When it was exhibited, the picture caused a scandal, prompting the artist to leave France. He had approached Virginie Gautreau, a famous society beauty, and asked to paint her portrait. She was a fellow American and the wife of a wealthy French banker. She readily agreed to his request, but progress on the painting was slow; Virginie was a restless model, and at times Sargent found her beauty “unpaintable.” He altered the composition several times before finally settling on a pose that accentuated her distinctive profile. The painting was finally displayed at the Paris Salon of 1884, and though the sitter was not formally identified, Virginie was so famous that many people recognized her. The public were shocked by her low-cut dress, bemused by her deathly white makeup, repelled by the awkward, twisted pose of her right arm, and, above all, outraged by the fact that one of her dress-straps was hanging off her shoulder—a sure sign of sexual impropriety. Gautreau’s family were appalled and begged the artist to withdraw the painting. He wanted to repaint the shoulder-strap, but he was not allowed to do so until the exhibition was over. In the wake of the scandal, Sargent left Paris under a cloud, though he always maintained that the portrait was the finest thing he ever painted. (Iain Zaczek)

Mary Cassatt’s deceptively calm and casual paintings, which depict women in everyday situations, contain underlying layers of dramatic tension, emotional depth, and psychological insight. Cassatt, who was born in Pennsylvania but settled in Paris in 1874, was the only North American woman artist invited to exhibit with the French Impressionists. Cassatt painted Mrs. Robert Moore Riddle, her mother’s first cousin, for Lady at the Tea Table. The picture is remarkable for the subject’s air of authority and the economical yet eloquent use of line and color. Mrs. Riddle’s daughter was offended at Cassatt’s realistic representation of her mother’s nose, but the painter herself was so attached to the painting that she kept it for herself until gifting it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1923. (Ana Finel Honigman)

Receiving early acclaim for his watercolors, during the 1880s Anders Zorn traveled extensively before settling in Paris and taking up oil painting. Over the next few years he produced the work that was to make him one of the most sought-after society portraitists of the age. It was on his second visit to America that Zorn painted this portrait of Mrs. Walter Rathbone Bacon (Virginia Purdy Barker). Virginia’s cousin, George Washington Vanderbilt II, had recently had John Singer Sargent—Zorn’s great rival—paint her portrait to hang in the halls of Biltmore House, the largest home in the country. It was probably in response to this that Zorn was commissioned by her husband in early 1897. Here, although elegantly dressed and bejeweled, Virginia sits informally at home accompanied by her dog. (Richard Bell)

Here one can see the influence the Italian Renaissance exerted on the German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder. The Judgment of Paris was a favorite theme of Cranach’s (plus, the Greek myth allowed him to show the female nude from three different perspectives). His rendering of anatomy was often inexact, as can be seen here, especially in the left arm and elbow of the goddess with her back toward the viewer. Cranach is portraying a German version of the myth in which Mercury presents the goddesses Juno, Venus, and Minerva to Paris in a dream and asks him to judge who is the most beautiful of the three. Each goddess disrobed in front of him and promised him a great reward if he chose her. Paris chose Venus and presented her with a golden apple (depicted here as a glass orb). Venus’s victory is signified by the artist placing Cupid, her son, in the upper left of the painting. (Lucinda Hawksley)

Domenico di Tommaso Curradi di Doffo Bigordi, known as Domenico Ghirlandaio, hailed from a long and proud tradition of successful craftsmen, merchants, and artists. An apocryphal story propagated by Giorgio Vasari credits the origin of the name Ghirlandaio (from the word for “garland”) to Ghirlandaio’s father, who may have created a series of hair ornaments. Vasari also tells us that Ghirlandaio worked in the service of the Sassetti family. Employed in the Medici banks based in Avignon, Geneva, and Lyon, the wealthy patron Francesco Sassetti worked for both Piero de’ Medici and Lorenzo Il Magnifico. This double portrait of father and son is complicated by the fact that Sassetti had two sons, both of whom were called Teodoro. The younger son was born the year that the older one died. It is thought that the younger son is depicted here, which dates the painting to 1487, although this remains uncertain. The stern paternal image of the banker is only softened by the innocence of the son who gazes directly into the eyes of his father. Intended to be a formal portrait, the rigidity of the composition and the static, wide-shouldered man are offset by the floral patterning on the youth’s clothing and his soft hands. The face and body of Sassetti are heavily repainted, which might explain the central figure’s general blandness. In the background, Ghirlandaio has painted an oratory built by Sassetti in Geneva. The same building is included in Ghirlandaio’s frescoes, which he painted for Sassetti in Florence—a painter’s compliment to his patron. (Steven Pulimood)