Guido Cagnacci | The Death of Cleopatra, 1645-55

Artist: Guido Cagnacci (Italian, Santarcangelo di Romagna 1601-1663 Vienna)

Date: ca. 1645-55

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 37 3/8 × 29 1/2 in. (95 × 75 cm)

Current location: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue in Gallery 637

The subject, from Plutarch's Lives (1st century A.D.), is Cleopatra's suicide by an asp bite following the defeat of her beloved Mark Antony at the battle of Actium.

Henri Fantin-Latour | Summer Flowers, 1880

The inscription in the upper-right-hand corner indicates that Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) completed this painting in September 1880 at the village of Buré in Normandy.

The dahlias, phlox, and roses in the bouquet were picked from the garden of the artist’s country house.

By this date, Fantin had established a steady clientele in Britain for his exquisite paintings of informal flower arrangements, set in modest vases and seen against a neutral ground. | Source: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Henri Fantin-Latour | Summer Flowers, 1880 | Metropolitan Museum of Art

Claude Monet | The Parc Monceau, 1878

Monet painted six views of the Parc Monceau: three in 1876 and three in 1878.

In this canvas, the disposition of light and shade in the foreground, the patterns of the leaves, and the broad contours beginning to develop in areas of strong contrast suggest that Monet had already begun to experiment with the boldly two-dimensional motifs that would characterize his work of the 1880s and 1890s. | © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Claude Monet | The Parc Monceau, 1878 | Metropolitan Museum of Art

Jean-Baptiste Greuze | Broken Eggs, 1756

Broken Eggs attracted favorable comment when exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1757.

One critic noted that the young serving girl had a noble pose worthy of a history painter.

The canvas was painted in Rome, but the principal source may have been a seventeenth-century Dutch work by Frans van Mieris the Elder (1635-1681) - State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, which Jean-Baptiste Greuze (French painter, 1725-1805) would have known from an engraving.

The broken eggs symbolize the loss of the girl's virginity. | © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

William Wetmore Story | Medea, 1865

In the ancient Greek tragedy by Euripides, Medea was the sorceress who assisted Jason in obtaining the Golden Fleece and later became his wife.

When he abandoned her, Medea murdered their two children and planned the death of his new love, Creusa.

To nineteenth-century theater audiences, Medea was a sympathetic character forced to choose between relinquishing her children and protecting them by destroying them herself. Story similarly deemphasized Medea’s revenge, leaving to the viewer’s imagination the scene of infanticide to come. | © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Victorine Meurent | Manet’s favorite model / painter

Victorine Meurent was Manet’s favorite model in the 1860s, posing for Street Singer, in the MFA’s collection, as well as for such other renowned works as Olympia and Luncheon on the Grass (both now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris).

Victorine Louise Meurent (February 18, 1844 - March 17, 1927) was a French painter and a famous model for painters.

Although she is best known as the favourite model of Édouard Manet, she was also an artist in her own right who regularly exhibited at the prestigious Paris Salon.

Victorine Meurent | Autoportrait, 1876 | Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Georges de La Tour | The penitent Magdalene, 1640

With its extreme contrasts of candlelight and shadow, pared-down geometry, and meditative mood, this painting exemplifies La Tour’s painting at its most accomplished and characteristic.

These visual qualities were a powerful countertrend to Baroque painting’s typical pomp and showiness.

A native of the duchy of Lorraine in eastern present-day France, La Tour was indebted to Caravaggesque painting, but tended toward even more simplified forms.

The quiet atmosphere of this painting perfectly fits the subject, Mary Magdalen, who renounced the pleasures of the flesh for a life of penance and contemplation.

She is shown with a mirror, symbol of vanity; a skull, emblem of mortality; and a candle that probably references her spiritual enlightenment. | © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Penitent Magdalene, 1640 | Metropolitan Museum of Art