Inspired by ancient art he saw while in Rome, Picasso began painting heavy-set figures in a neoclassical mode. In 1918, having married the Russian dancer Olga Koklova, Picasso was drawn to images of mothers with children.

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The painting depicts a group of Renoir's friends relaxing on a balcony at the Maison Fournaise along the Seine river in Chatou, France. The painter and art patron, Gustave Caillebotte, is seated in the lower right. Renoir's future wife, Aline Charigot, is in the foreground playing with a small dog. On the table is fruit and wine. The diagonal of the railing serves to demarcate the two halves of the composition, one densely packed with figures, the other all but empty, save for the two figures of the proprietor's daughter Louise-Alphonsine Fournaise and her brother, Alphonse Fournaise, Jr, which are made prominent by this contrast. In this painting Renoir has captured a great deal of light. The main focus of light is coming from the large opening in the balcony, beside the large singleted man in the hat. The singlets of both men in the foreground and the table-cloth all work together to reflect this light and send it through the whole composition.

In 1872, Monet painted Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant) depicting a Le Havre port landscape. It hung in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 and is now displayed in the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris. From the painting's title, art critic Louis Leroy coined the term "Impressionism", which he intended as disparagement but which the Impressionists appropriated for themselves.

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In the fall of 1899 and the early months of 1900 and of 1901, Monet executed a series of views of the Thames River in London. From his room at the Savoy Hotel, he painted Waterloo Bridge to the east, and Charing Cross Bridge to the west; beginning in February 1900, he set up his easel on a terrace at Saint Thomas's Hospital across the river, reserving time in the late afternoon to depict the Houses of Parliament. While in London, Monet produced nearly a hundred canvases, reportedly moving from one to another as the light changed. He continued to work on these paintings in his studio at Giverny. In May 1904, thirty-seven were exhibited at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris, including this view of the Houses of Parliament cloaked in dense fog.

Monet left much of his late work unfinished and released few paintings for sale, reporting that he was not yet satisfied and was still working on them "with passion." This canvas is one of four water-lily pictures that, quite exceptionally, he did complete, sign, and sell in 1919.

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This painting depicts the scene from the Bible in which Jacob wrestles an angel. As if in a modern-day wrestling arena, French women watch the wrestling match from afar. This painting was created during Gaugin’s stay in Pont-Avon, France, which is where he created his other masterpieces, The Yellow Christ and The Green Christ. This painting also incorporates elements from his Christ series, which also place Breton French women alongside a Biblical scene, placing them as observers in the story. In his typical style, flat areas of color are outlined by thick black lines, and the figures are void of any shading or depth of color.

In the later part of his life, Van Gogh committed himself to an asylum in Saint Remy de Provence. The Starry Night was the view from the window in Van Gogh’s sanitarium bedroom. Although it is a night scene, it was painted during the day. The painting is often referred to as Van Gogh’s magnus opus. As he often sent his works to his brother Theo for his approval, he mailed this one to him in late 1889. He also wrote that he was not so happy about the work, which did not seem complete, as he had originally intended it to simply be a study of the night sky.

Wheatfield with Crows is a July 1890 painting by Vincent van Gogh. It is commonly but mistakenly stated that this was Van Gogh's last painting. Art historians are uncertain as to which painting was Van Gogh's last, as no clear historical records exist, but the evidence of his letters suggests that Wheatfield with Crows was completed around 10 July and predates such paintings as Auvers Town Hall on 14 July 1890 and Daubigny's Garden.

Seurat spent over two years painting A Sunday Afternoon, focusing meticulously on the landscape of the park. He reworked the original as well as completed numerous preliminary drawings and oil sketches. He would go and sit in the park and make numerous sketches of the various figures in order to perfect their form. He concentrated on the issues of colour, light, and form. Motivated by study in optical and colour theory, Seurat contrasted miniature dots of colors that, through optical unification, form a single hue in the viewer's eye. He believed that this form of painting, now known as pointillism, would make the colors more brilliant and powerful than standard brush strokes. To make the experience of the painting even more vivid, he surrounded it with a frame of painted dots, which in turn he enclosed with a pure white, wooden frame, which is how the painting is exhibited today at the Art Institute of Chicago. In creating the picture, Seurat employed the then-new pigment zinc yellow (zinc chromate), most visibly for yellow highlights on the lawn in the painting, but also in mixtures with orange and blue pigments. In the century and more since the painting's completion, the zinc yellow has darkened to brown—a colour degeneration that was already showing in the painting in Seurat's lifetime.

Mont Sainte-Victoire seen from Bellevue is a landscape painting dating from around 1885, by the French artist Paul Cézanne. The subject of the painting is the Montagne Sainte-Victoire in Provence in southern France. Cézanne spent a lot of time in Aix-en-Provence at the time, and developed a special relationship with the landscape. This particular mountain, that stood out in the surrounding landscape, he could see from his house, and he painted it in on numerous occasions. The painting shows clearly Cézanne's project of rendering order and clarity to natural scenes, without giving up the optical realism of Impressionism. Both the light and the colours of the painting give the impression of a pattern that is not imposed on nature, but is there naturally.

Christ's Entry Into Brussels in 1889 (also known as Entry of Christ into Brussels) is an 1888 painting by James Ensor. The painting is on permanent exhibition at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

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The Persistence of Memory is by far Salvador Dali’s most recognizable paintings, and there are many references to it in popular culture. Although it was conjectured that the soft melting watches were the result of Dali’s interpretation of the theory of relativity, Dali himself state that their inspiration was camembert cheese melting under the sun. The sequence of melting clocks in a disjointed landscape is the depiction of a dream that Dali had experienced, the figure in the middle of the painting being the face of the dreamer himself. The general interpretation is that the painting, which portrays many melting watches, is a rejection of time as a solid and deterministic influence.

Oath of the Horatii (French: Le Serment des Horaces), is a work by French artist Jacques-Louis David painted in 1784. It depicts a scene from a Roman legend about a dispute between two warring cities; Rome and Alba Longa, when three brothers from a Roman family, the Horatii, agree to end the war by fighting three brothers from an Alba Longa family, the Curiatii. The three brothers, all of which appear willing to sacrifice their lives for the good of Rome, are shown saluting their father who holds their swords out for them. The principal sources for the story behind David's Oath are the first book of Livy (sections 24-6) which was elaborated by Dionysius in book 3 of his Roman Antiquities. However, the moment depicted in David's painting is his own invention. It grew to be considered a paradigm of neoclassical art. The painting increased David's fame, allowing him to rear his own students.

Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket is an 1870s painting by James Abbott McNeill Whistler. It depicts a fireworks show in the night sky over Battersea Bridge in an industrial London city park. This painting was first shown at the Grosvenor Gallery in London in 1877. It is the last of the London Nocturnes and is now widely acknowledged to be the high point of Whistler's middle period.

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The Blue Rider is perhaps Kandinsky’s most important painting from the early 1900’s, before he had fully developed his abstract style of music as sound. The painting illustrates a rider cloaked in blue, speeding through a greenish meadow. The painting’s intentional abstractness had led many art theorists to project their own representations onto the figure, some seeing a child in the arms of the blue rider. Allowing viewers to participate in the representations of the art was a technique that Kandinsky would use to great fruition in his many later works, which became more and more abstract as his career wore on.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is a painting in oil on canvas long thought to be by Pieter Bruegel, although following technical examinations in 1996, that attribution is regarded as very doubtful, and it is now usually seen as a good early copy by an unknown artist of Bruegel's original, perhaps painted in the 1560s, although recent technical research has re-opened the question.

Netherlandish Proverbs (also called Flemish Proverbs, The Blue Cloak or The Topsy Turvy World) is a 1559 oil-on-oak-panel painting by the Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder that depicts a scene populated with literal depictions of Dutch language proverbs current in the Low Countries at the time. Critics have praised the composition for its ordered portrayal and integrated scene. There are approximately 112 identifiable idioms or proverbs in the scene, although Bruegel may have included others which cannot be determined.

View of Toledo, is one of the two surviving landscapes painted by El Greco. The other, called View and Plan of Toledo lies at Museo Del Greco, Toledo, Spain. Along with Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night, some landscapes by William Turner, and some works by Monet, it is among the best known depictions of the sky in Western art, and features sharp color contrast between the sky and the hills below. Painted in a Mannerist (or Baroque) style, the work takes liberties with the actual layout of Toledo (some buildings are depicted in different positions than their actual location, but truthfully depicts on the side the Castle of San Servando).