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Lawyers appear frequently in Daumier’s satires. Having been jailed for his political caricatures, the artist had ample opportunity to see lawyers at work. This trio’s upturned noses suggest an undeserved attitude of authority, and their theatrical poses and symmetrical arrangement underscore the artificiality of their conduct.  

Daubigny belonged to a group of artists who embraced the local environment as their primary subject. Here he explores the reflective surface of still water in the warm light of a rising or setting sun. 

A beggar becomes an almsgiver in this social critique that Courbet produced for publication after his controversial painting of the same subject. The impoverished man, who appears to have come from the city in the distance, takes pity on a gypsy family, suggesting that theirs is a world in which only the poor give to the poor.

One of eight sheets that formed part of Manet’s first portfolio of prints, this work is based on a drawing probably made from life several years earlier. The subject is the artist’s young assistant and occasional model Alexandre, who committed suicide in his studio in 1859. He is recalled here in a moment of happiness with a dog nearly his size.  

This lithograph is a reinterpretation of one of the artist’s canvases, which he based on paintings by Murillo and Velázquez known through reproductive prints. Manet’s image of a street-smart gamin attests to the artist’s immersion in Spanish art, as well as the productive exchange between painting and prints that informed his work in both media. 

In 1867, Napoleon III of France appointed Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian emperor of Mexico, which was then under French occupation. Realizing the impossibility of ruling through Maximilian, Napoleon gradually withdrew military support, leaving Maximilian unprotected. On June 19, 1867, Maximilian and two of his generals were executed by Mexican nationalists, an event that sparked a storm of controversy in France. Manet dedicated multiple canvases, as well as this lithograph, to the incident. The print was intended for wide circulation but banned from publications by the French government until after the artist’s death.

This sheet is one of very few known impressions of Manet’s gillotage of a scene in the Café Guerbois, a Parisian establishment frequented by artists and writers. Gillotage was a new photomechanical process capable of conveying painterly effects. 

This study for one of the figures in the ceiling of the Grand Théâtre in Bordeaux embodies the academic principles of proportion and finish to which Bouguereau fully subscribed. The figure of Venus accords precisely with the classical ratio of a body exactly seven times the length of its head. 

This virtuoso drawing was made from life during Degas’s Italian sojourn. The artist studied the half-length figure up close, ingeniously combining two views into a harmonious composition. The facial features and smooth skin are rendered lifelike through fine gradations of light and shadow, achieved through blended strokes of graphite and the addition of white highlights. 

Along with some notebook sketches and a nearly full-length seated study, this work led to an oil painting (unfinished) now in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The inscription “Mme Jules Bertin,” one of the many names under which the subject has been known, was added by a later hand. 

Degas made this drawing in preparation for a painting now in the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), in which a jockey falls from his horse during a steeplechase — a challenging event requiring horse and rider to leap over various obstacles. The horse’s tail and the stirrup swing backward as the animal flies through the air. 

Depicted from the vantage point of a seat in the balcony of a theater, two dancers execute rapid jumps in unison while a third kneels in a dramatic pose. To produce this monotype, Degas covered a metal plate entirely with black ink and used a cloth and his fingertips selectively to wipe ink away. He then pressed the plate onto paper and gave the unique impression to his friend Alphonse Cherfils, as indicated by the inscription. 

In this drawing, made in front of the Louvre’s terracotta Sarcophagus of the Spouses from the sixth century  b.c.e., Degas records the work in its gallery surroundings, taking careful note of the reflections of light on the glass case. In an etched composition he developed from the drawing, Degas included the American artist Mary Cassatt, standing and looking in, and her sister, Lydia, seated and consulting a book. 

This vigorously executed drawing of a woman absorbed in the intimate act of bathing, seemingly unaware of artist or viewer, is one of several of Degas’s late reprisals of the academic nudes he drew as a student. 

This signed sheet by the young Monet, then known as Oscar, is one of several caricatures he made to earn a living at the outset of his career. Employing his favored format of a large head on a tiny body, supported by even smaller legs and feet, Monet juxtaposes the giant nostrils with the snuff and the handkerchief in the man’s pocket—humorously prefiguring the enormous sneeze that will probably occur following its inhalation. 

In this drawing executed on a special textured support, Monet translated one of his paintings into graphic form for the purpose of reproducing it in print. When photomechanically transferred to the zinc plate, the dense passages of looping and zigzagging lines, in combination with the vertical striations of the paper, would achieve a tonal effect. 

Lively strokes of pastel in a multitude of colors create a transparent atmosphere that envelops figures and architecture in the flow of urban life. The high viewpoint plunges the viewer into this Parisian scene. 

Renoir’s interest in printmaking late in his career coincided with the popularization of color lithography as a fine-art medium. For this print, Renoir worked with crayons directly on the lithographic stones, replicating the soft, powdery qualities of his pastels. 

The five zincographs on bright yellow paper in this exhibition are part of Gauguin’s Volpini Suite, a series of prints based loosely on his works in other media. The suite takes its name from the owner of the café where Gauguin and other avant-garde artists staged their own exhibition in opposition to the state-sanctioned Exposition Universelle. This sheet is based almost directly on a painting made in Arles during Gauguin’s two-month stay with Vincent van Gogh. The yellow paper used throughout the suite may reflect Gauguin’s esteem for Van Gogh’s sunflowers and his famous yellow house. 

The sorrowful woman, head in hands, and the male figure with his brow clouded by shadow call to mind the fallen Adam and Eve with the Tree of Knowledge behind them. 

Gauguin’s emphasis on sinuous outline, along with the flattened space and upturned perspective, reveals his interest in Japanese prints. The image was drawn on a grained zinc plate with both crayon and tusche (a greasy liquid used in lithography) applied with a brush. This method of printmaking yields fine gradations from light to dark, as is evident here. 

In this frieze-like composition, a Javanese Buddha figure at center is flanked at left by two Tahitian gods: Hina, goddess of the moon, and her son Fatu, god of the earth. Above the central figure, the artist’s deep gouging into the woodblock creates an aura of pulsating light. 

The warm tones in this image of a figure in a lush landscape — a Polynesian Eve — are an exception to the prevalence of black throughout the series.  

In this highly experimental lithograph, the sequential movement of Loïe Fuller’s famous stage performance in a voluminous transparent garment manipulated by long poles is captured in a swelling form that approaches abstraction. The addition of gold and silver dust to the print enhances the ethereal effect.  

A monument in modern printmaking, Toulouse-Lautrec’s Elles portfolio has been interpreted as a chronicle of the daily lives of lesbians involved in the worlds of prostitution and entertainment. The evocative image of a woman in nightdress letting down her hair, seen from behind, in combination with the presence of a man’s top hat introduces one of the themes.

This sheet features the contortionist dancer Miss Cha-U-Kao (a phonetic play on chahut-chaos or chaotic can-can). She is shown at rest, her outlandish costume, provocative pose, and brazen stare conveying her strong personality. Sharp outlines are set off against soft atmospheric effects achieved through a technique of blowing fine dots of ink on a lithographic stone. 

In this print, another example of the artist’s blurring of portrait and genre scene, the plush red balustrade of a theater box frames two well-known demimondaines attending a performance. 

This circus scene, along with At the Circus: Acrobats, belongs to a large group of drawings that Toulouse-Lautrec made from memory while he was recuperating in a medical clinic from alcoholism and a mental breakdown. The attenuated bodies and expressive gestures of the figures reveal the artist’s undiminished mastery of line.