Diego Velazquez, c.1644-1648: National Gallery, London, UK
Peter Paul Rubens
1612 - 1615
Peter Paul Rubens, 1608, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, Spain
Mabuse, Northern Renaissance
Titian, 1553-4, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D>C
Pablo Picasso
Fernand Leger
1920
Berthe Morisot, 1876, Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
Joan Miró, 1938, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Estate of Karl Nierendorf, By purchase
Berthe Morisot, 1875-80,
Paul Delvaux, 1937: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976
Like his compatriot René Magritte, Paul Delvaux applied a fastidious, detailed technique to scenes deriving their impact from unsettling incongruities of subject. Influenced by Giorgio de Chirico, he frequently included classicizing details and used perspectival distortion to create rapid, plunging movement from foreground to deep background. Unique to Delvaux is the silent, introspective cast of figures he developed during the mid-1930s. His formidable, buxom, nude or seminude women pose immobile with unfocused gazes, their arms frozen in rhetorical gestures, dominating a world through which men, preoccupied and timid, unobtrusively make their way.
Although the fusion of woman and tree in the present picture invites comparison with Greek mythological subjects, the artist has insisted that no such references were intended. The motif of the mirror appears in 1936 in works such as Woman in a Grotto (Collection Thyssen-Bornemisza, Lugano) and The Mirror (formerly Collection Roland Penrose, London; destroyed during World War II). In The Break of Day a new element is introduced; the reflected figure is not present within the scene, but exists outside the canvas field. She is, therefore, in some sense, the viewer, even if that viewer should happen to be male. The irony of the circumstance in which a clothed male viewer could see himself reflected as a nude female torso would have particularly appealed to Marcel Duchamp, who appropriated the detail of the mirror in his collage of 1942 In the Manner of Delvaux (Collection Vera and Arturo Schwarz, Milan).
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 1597
Uffizi, Florence
Édouard Manet, 1876, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Thannhauser Collection, Gift, Justin K. Thannhauser, 1978
Bernardo Strozzi, c.1625, Baroque: Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia
Felicien Rops, Symbolism: Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, France
Pablo Picasso, 1906, Expressionism
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
1910
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
c.1912
Joan Miro
1919
Bellini
1515
Francisco Goya
c.1796-97
Henri Matisse
1923
Georges Braque
1945
Francisco Goya
1828
Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain
Edgar Degas
c.1877
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA, US
Salvador Dali
1974
Paul Rubens
c.1640
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
1897
Utagawa Kunisada
c.1835
Kitagawa Utamaro
Kitagawa Utamaro
1794-1805
Brooklyn Museum, New York City, NY, US
Boris Kustodiev
1920
Paul Delvaux
1939
Paul Delvaux
1937
Paul Delvaux
1945
Pablo Picasso
1932
Katsushika Hokusai, 1805
Pablo Picasso, 1932
Berthe Morisot, 1890
John William Godward, 1892
Goya, c.1796 - c.1797
Kees van Dongen, 1908
Caravaggio, 1598, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI, US
Pablo Picasso, 1906
Francisco Goya,1799, Romanticism
Antoine Watteau (1684–1721): Louvre Museum
Stradanus (1523–1605): Louvre Museum
Netherlandish, presumed copy After Jan van Eyck (circa 1390 –1441): Fogg Museum of Art
Bellini, Oil on Wood, 1504, Galleria dell Accademia, Venice
(image: Wikipedia)
detail from the Tomb of Francis II, Duke of Brittany and his wives, Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul, Nantes, France
detail of head of Prudence, from the Tomb of Francis II, Duke of Brittany and his wives, Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul, Nantes, France