Gallery A

Pierre BONNARD
France 1867-1947

This painting was probably intended as part of an ensemble for a single large room in which a visitor would have been surrounded by women and children in an overgrown garden. The private, decorative tradition of painting - often commissioned for a home or an apartment - enjoyed a considerable revival in the 1890s, and Pierre Bonnard painted decorations for private clients and even for public exhibition. Often compared to frescoes or tapestries, these decorations were usually large-scale paintings conceived to fit as panels between doors and windows.

Although the garden is often identified with that surrounding the artist's country house Le Clos in eastern France, Bonnard is known to have painted chiefly from memory and from sketches in his notebooks. For this reason identification of the figures with particular members of Bonnard's family is problematic.

Edgar DEGAS
France 1834-1917

Although by the time Edgar Degas drew Breakfast after the bath his eyesight was erratic, this pastel shows evidence of the artist's complex working procedure. It was drawn in several discrete sittings, but probably not from life. The pose of the nude at the centre of this dynamic composition can be found elsewhere in the artist's oeuvre. He seems to have derived his source from earlier works, sometimes tracing or reversing figures from paintings or pastels, and at other times using as his 'model' - a wax sculpture rather than a real woman.

Alfred SISLEY
France 1839-1899

As blank as the disk of the moon, Moon head also maintains a mysterious 'dark side'. The abstract head is actually made up of two disks placed side by side in an enigmatic pairing. Henry Moore has cut into each disk, prompting the suggestion of a mouth on one and transforming the other into a grasping hand. The combination makes for a strange image of longing.

The wan light reflected between the two bronze sections prompted Moore to name the sculpture Moon head. The lunar reference in the title supports the metaphor of change implicit in the schizophrenic crescents that form the sculpture. At a formal level, the artist plays off the interaction of two forms against the interaction between volume and void.

Edgar DEGAS
France 1834-1917

The dating of this work, which had been debated for some time, has been recently been decided: in her diary (published in 1987), Julie Manet, the daughter of Berthe Morisot and Eugène Manet, and niece of the painter Édouard Manet, records her enjoyment in seeing the 'finished' pastels in 1899.

It is likely that Edgar Degas first saw a troupe of Russian dancers at the Folies Bergère in 1895 and made a number of drawings. By transferring these first sketches onto tracing paper he was able to use the images as the basis for a number of related but varied charcoal and pastel drawings. The same image of a dancer could be reversed or overlaid to create new compositions. Here Degas has added a strip of tracing paper at the bottom of the sheet to enlarge the composition.

Edgar DEGAS
France 1834-1917

There is the appearance of spontaneity in the dynamic pose, off-centre composition and confident black and red outlines describing the dancer. Edgar Degas was a master in the use of pastel and valued the fluidity and speed with which he could make visual notes in this medium. For all its apparent freshness, this pastel is actually carefully studied and heavily worked.

Degas left little to chance. He worked up drawings like this one from the original sketches he made of a Russian dancer troupe performing in Paris. He took many liberties with his memories of the event, creating a complex series of works of art far more powerful than the sketches he make on the spot.






Moon head 1964 bronze Singapore Art Museum, Singapore Millennium Gift of Sara Lee Corporation	Apple gathering 1899 La cuilette des pommes oil on canvas Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia, USA Millennium Gift of Sara Lee Corporation	Russian dancers 1899 Les danseuses russes pastel on tracing paper mounted on board The National Gallery, London, UK Millennium Gift of Sara Lee Corporation	The Russian dancer 1898-89 La danseuse russe pastel, chalk and charcoal on tracing paper laid down on cardboard Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, USA Millennium Gift of Sara Lee Corporation	Breakfast after the bath 1895-98 Le petit déjeuner après le bain pastel on paper laid down on board The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA Millennium Gift of Sara Lee Corporation