Marc Chagall's America Windows, 1977

The America Windows are a stunning display of the iconic style of one of the world’s most prolific and expressive artists.

They capture Marc Chagall’s unique vision as he reflected, late in his career, on the resilience and freedom of the creative spirit.

At eight feet high and thirty feet across, these stained glass windows are a vast arrangement of colors of the highest intensity - bright reds, oranges, yellows, and greens - placed against brilliant shades of blue. Representations of people, animals, and items such as writing implements, musical instruments, and artists’ tools float above a skyline of buildings and trees.

Georges Seurat | A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884

"Bedlam", "scandal", and “hilarity” were among the epithets used to describe what is now considered Georges Seurat’s greatest work, and one of the most remarkable paintings of the nineteenth century, when it was first exhibited in Paris.

Seurat labored extensively over A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884, reworking the original as well as completing numerous preliminary drawings and oil sketches (the Art Institute has one such sketch and two drawings).

Georges Seurat | A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (detail) | Art Institute of Chicago

Gustave Caillebotte | Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877

This complex intersection, just minutes away from the Saint-Lazare train station, represents in microcosm the changing urban milieu of late nineteenth-century Paris.

Gustave Caillebotte grew up near this district when it was a relatively unsettled hill with narrow, crooked streets.

As part of a new city plan designed by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, these streets were relaid and their buildings razed during the artist’s lifetime.

In this monumental urban view, which measures almost seven by ten feet and is considered the artist’s masterpiece, Caillebotte strikingly captured a vast, stark modernity, complete with life-size figures strolling in the foreground and wearing the latest fashions.

Lorado Taft | The Solitude of the Soul, 1914

The Solitude of the Soul is a masterpiece by American sculptor Lorado Taft (1860-1936).

It is widely considered one of his most significant "ideal" works, reflecting his transition toward a style influenced by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin.

In stone, four life-sized figures, two male and two female, posed around and halfway emerging from, or captured by, an indistinct central volume.

In the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.