Originality, authorship, and appropriation

Featured Artworks

The Artist's Garden at Giverny

Claude Monet (1900)

In The Artist's Garden at Giverny, Claude Monet turns his cultivated Clos Normand into a field of living color, where bands of violet irises surge toward a narrow, rose‑colored path. Broken, flickering strokes let greens, purples, and pinks mix optically so that light seems to tremble across the scene, while lilac‑toned tree trunks rhythmically guide the gaze inward [1][3].

The Large Bathers

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1884–1887)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s The Large Bathers unites modern bodies with a pastoral grove to stage an Arcadian ideal. Three monumental nudes form interlocking curves and triangles while two background figures splash and groom, fusing sensual warmth with classical order [1][2].

Sunflowers

Vincent van Gogh (1888)

Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888) is a yellow-on-yellow still life that stages a full cycle of life in fifteen blooms, from fresh buds to brittle seed heads. The thick impasto, green shocks of stem and bract, and the vase signed “Vincent” turn a humble bouquet into an emblem of endurance and fellowship [1][2].

Luncheon on the Grass

Édouard Manet (1863)

Luncheon on the Grass stages a confrontation between modern Parisian leisure and classical precedent. A nude woman meets our gaze beside two clothed men, while a distant bather and an overturned picnic puncture naturalistic illusion. Manet’s scale and flat, studio-like light convert a park picnic into a manifesto of modern painting [1][2].

Woman at Her Toilette

Berthe Morisot (1875–1880)

Woman at Her Toilette stages a private ritual of self-fashioning, not a spectacle of vanity. A woman, seen from behind, lifts her arm to adjust her hair as a black velvet choker punctuates Morisot’s silvery-violet haze; the mirror’s blurred reflection with powders, jars, and a white flower refuses a clear face. Morisot’s feathery facture turns a fleeting toilette into modern subjectivity made visible [1].

Irises

Vincent van Gogh (1889)

Painted in May 1889 at the Saint-Rémy asylum garden, Vincent van Gogh’s Irises turns close observation into an act of repair. Dark contours, a cropped, print-like vantage, and vibrating complements—violet/blue blossoms against yellow-green ground—stage a living frieze whose lone white iris punctuates the field with arresting clarity [1][2].

Camille (The Woman in the Green Dress)

Claude Monet (1866)

Monet’s Camille (The Woman in the Green Dress) turns a full-length portrait into a study of modern spectacle. The spotlit emerald-and-black skirt, set against a near-black curtain, makes fashion the engine of meaning and the vehicle of status.

Place de la Concorde

Edgar Degas (1875)

Degas’s Place de la Concorde turns a famous Paris square into a study of modern isolation and instantaneous vision. Figures stride past one another without contact, their bodies abruptly cropped and adrift in a wide, airless plaza—an urban stage where elegance masks estrangement [1][2].