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Corot's sunlit view of the Castel Sant'Angelo (Hadrian's Tomb) is based on a plein-air sketch that he made in Rome around 1826–27. The gleaming dome of Saint Peter's Basilica, placed just slightly off center, finds a pictorial counterpart in the arches of the bridge across the Tiber.
Sterling Clark originally bought this picture in 1914 for his elder brother, Edward, who left it to Stephen in 1933. Thirteen years later, after Stephen traded it in to a dealer to buy a Cézanne, Sterling secretly managed to buy it back. Flush with satisfaction at having outwitted his brother, Sterling wryly remarked that he wouldn't part with this Corot "for all the Cézannes in existence."
Manet's painting of a dark-haired woman seductively posed in a male torero's costume on a tufted chaise longue was doubtless inspired by Francisco de Goya's famous Clothed Maja (ca. 1800–5; Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid). Prior to his 1865 trip to Spain, Manet would have known the Goya only in reproduction and may well have relied on a photograph of the subject by Nadar, to whom he dedicated this work.
Stephen Clark acquired his only Manet in 1951. He bequeathed the painting to the Yale University Art Gallery in 1960, ensuring that it would be reunited with the artist's preparatory watercolor study.
The elongated format that Degas adapted for several ballet scenes beginning in the late 1870s afforded him a wide expanse of space in which to place a battery of dancers—preparing for class, striking a pose, or practicing at the barre—combed from his ample stock of figure studies.
Sterling Clark bought a number of works from Degas's estate sale in 1919, but it was not until the 1920s that he acquired several dance subjects, including this 1924 purchase.
Shown to "very poor advantage" at the Salon of 1880, Renoir's painting of a young woman dozing on an overstuffed armchair, cradling her cat, went virtually unnoticed. It fared much better at the 1882 Impressionist exhibition and has since captivated viewers as much for its vivid colors and the sitter's fetching attire as for its sentiment. Ironically, Renoir's model seems to have been a street-smart and foul-mouthed gamine from Montmartre named Angèle.
Sterling Clark struck a deal to buy this "marvelous picture" on a visit to the Durand-Ruel gallery in New York in 1926. The collector was offered the chance to acquire it from the dealer's private stock while negotiating the purchase of Renoir's Blond Bather. In the event, Clark bought both the nude (also on view in the exhibition) and this "magnificent piece of painting, color & art."
Six years after painting The Loge (Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London), Renoir returned to the subject anew. His fashionable models have been identified as the wife and daughter of Monsieur Turquet, the undersecretary of state for the fine arts. Originally the composition included a man standing to their right, quite possibly Monsieur Turquet—who seems to have had little appreciation for the "new painting."
"The woman is lovely, the coloring, facture & composition great," Sterling Clark noted in his diary apropos of this "expensive" 1928 acquisition.
This sprightly arrangement of garlic and onions, which appear nearly opalescent against the embroidered white tablecloth, was painted during Renoir's stay in Naples in late 1881.
"The other dealers have pictures but no one the quality of Durand-Ruel's," remarked Sterling Clark, who eventually bought twenty-eight of his thirty-nine Renoirs from the venerable firm, beginning with this acquisition from the Paris branch in 1922.
Shown at the 1886 Impressionist exhibition, this painting was admired for its daring sketchiness and "marvelous color" by reviewers who also spied Morisot's debt to the Rococo masters Fragonard and Boucher.
Morisot kept this work until her death, as did its subsequent owners—Claude Monet, who left it to his son, and Sterling Clark, who bought it late in life, in 1949.
Monet visited the Netherlands in April 1886 at the invitation of a French diplomat who admired his work and wanted to show him, as a critic reported, "bulb cultivation, the enormous fields in full flower." The paintings of tulip fields in bloom that Monet brought back from the trip included another view of the same vivid vista and farmhouse north of Leiden.
Acquired in 1933, this was the first of six paintings by Monet that Sterling Clark eventually owned.
Seurat's finely tuned pointillist approach imparts a sense of timelessness and mystery to this scene of sideshow performers at the entrance to the Cirque Corvi in Paris. On a balustraded stage under the misty glow of nine twinkling gaslights, a ringleader (at right) and musicians (at left) play to a crowd of potential ticket buyers, whose assorted hats add a wry and rhythmic note to the foreground.
Director Alfred Barr had regarded this work as "one of the most important paintings" featured in the Museum of Modern Art's inaugural show of 1929. It was proposed as a museum acquisition, but trustees demurred at the dealer's asking price of $100,000. At this sum, Barr had no better luck when he then suggested the purchase to Stephen Clark. Eventually Clark reconsidered: after months of negotiation, he secured Circus Sideshow for less than half its original price, ensuring that it remained in New York.
Just before Van Gogh moved into the Yellow House in Arles, in September 1888, he stayed up for three nights running to paint this evening view, by gaslight, of the Café de la Gare, where he had taken room and board since the spring. In it, he "tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of the red and green."
Stephen Clark had briefly owned a Van Gogh still life of zinnias in 1928–29. He acquired this painting in 1933, along with three other great works that had belonged to the Museum of Modern Western Art in Moscow—by Cézanne, Degas, and Renoir—all of which he left to the Metropolitan Museum.
This scene of peasants playing cards is one of five versions of the subject that Cézanne undertook in the early 1890s. He pared away extraneous details in each successive rendition. The largest and most complex of the five is in the Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania; the present picture—at half the size, and with one fewer figure—came next. In the last three, two card players starkly confront each other across the table.
Stephen Clark purchased this painting in 1931, six years after Albert C. Barnes acquired the artist's initial version.
Cézanne once proclaimed, "With an apple I wish to astonish Paris," and he did so, even in his most deceptively simple still lifes. In this work, he depicts objects from multiple viewpoints (straight on, from above, and sideways) and then relies on canny juxtapositions to bridge his idiosyncratic space: the jutting corner of the table relates to the turn in the wall and the bulbous pieces of fruit to the rounded andiron finial glimpsed at the far right.
In 1929 Stephen Clark inaugurated his Cézanne holdings with this classic tabletop still life; nearly two decades later, in 1948, he completed the choice group, with another, more dynamic, composition (also on view in the exhibition).
Jane Avril (born Jeanne Beudon), a headliner at the Moulin Rouge in the 1890s, earned the stage name "La Mélinite" (melinite was a military explosive in common use at the time) for her electrifying dance style as well as the admiration of a circle of artists and writers that extended from Lautrec and Pierre Bonnard to Stéphane Mallarmé and Oscar Wilde.
Sterling Clark had admired this "excellent" work on visits to the Wildenstein gallery in 1939 and 1940 but blanched at the asking price. On a third visit—in the company of his wife, Francine, a former actress, whom he had never seen "more enthusiastic about a picture"—Sterling acquired this "chef d'oeuvre" and resolved: "Expensive yes, but a fancy picture . . . and probably worth it today!"
Eakins's portrait highlights Rowland's invention of a ruling machine for creating diffraction gratings—grooved plates that simulate the effect of a prism—which greatly advanced the field of spectrum analysis. The physicist and Johns Hopkins University professor is shown seated in his laboratory, holding a diffraction grating, as the twin wheels of the ruling machine whirl behind him. Eakins's hand-carved frame is ornamented with Rowland's notes on spectroscopy.
Presented to the Addison Gallery of American Art on the eve of its opening in 1931, this portrait was the first of fourteen gifts Stephen Clark made to the museum. A year earlier, Clark had advised the artist's widow that, as a "great admirer of Mr. Eakins's work," he hoped "to add to [his] own collection of pictures" and "to leave to some public institution a very fine example of Mr Eakins' work" so as to promote his "fame for posterity."
Describing this view, looking over Saco Bay toward Old Orchard Beach in Maine, Homer emphasized that it was painted precisely "fifteen minutes after sunset—not one minute before—as up to that minute the clouds over the sun would have their edges lighted a brilliant glow of color—but now (in this picture) the sun has got beyond their immediate range and they are in shadow."
Sterling Clark's interest in Homer flagged during the 1930s but was reawakened in the 1940s. He seized the opportunity to buy this "marvel of marvels" in 1941, regarding the work, priced at $37,500, as "[m]agnificent in the same class as the best in the Metropolitan."
This is one of the earliest and most evocative of the nocturnes Remington painted late in his life. The Indian scout who surveys the vast, icy expanse, his gaze fixed on the flickering lights of a distant prairie encampment, is probably a member of the Blackfoot tribe of the northern plains. In 1887–90 Remington visited the reservation in Alberta, Canada, to prepare illustrations for a piece in Harper's Weekly.
Sterling Clark wrote to a friend of his 1951 acquisition, "[N]ever have I seen a more perfect moonlight with far away stretches of snow, together with a perfect pony & an Indian scout examining the landscape."
Sargent brought some twenty paintings back from his two trips to Venice in 1880 and 1882, most of which were devoted to scenes of daily life. This is one of three related interior views of a once-beautiful palazzo on the Grand Canal that was now inhabited by the down-and-out or used for glassworks—hence the women stringing beads.
Sterling Clark bought this picture—his first by an American artist—in 1913, when he was living in Paris. He was later "surprised" to find that of the some dozen Sargents he came to own, Stephen liked this one "best . . . for it is the least showy & is with the [Carolus-Duran] portrait the best in quality."
Beneath the abstract play of geometric shapes evocative of a pitcher, a bowl, and eggs poised on a tabletop, a shaggy black dog wags its pink tongue near the head of a tantalizing rooster. Picasso's Synthetic Cubist work of 1921 has been seen as a novel interpretation of traditional genre scenes, notably Chardin's Buffet (1728) in the Louvre, in which a dog sniffs at the appetizing fare piled high on a sideboard.
By 1930 Stephen Clark had begun collecting works by Picasso, and he had acquired at least ten by 1949, when the Museum of Modern Art deaccessioned and sold him this painting in order to buy the artist's well-known Three Musicians. A decade earlier, Clark, a longtime trustee, had donated two Picassos to the museum, and a decade later, in 1958, he donated two—including Dog and Cock—to the Yale University Art Gallery. The rest of his Picasso holdings were dispersed by sale.
Inspired by a rescue he had witnessed three years earlier, Homer developed his epic composition in a sequence of exacting figure studies before setting out to impart monumental form to an incident from modern life. Two men struggle against an unrelenting tide to save women felled by an undertow in this 1886 seascape, frothing with the tactile vigor of a Courbet.
Sterling Clark's interest in Homer burgeoned from 1923 to 1924, when he spent nearly $140,000 on works by the artist, extending his holdings with such major paintings as Undertow.
One of the most enduring images in American art, Hopper's Victorian house, half-shrouded in shadow, sits at the edge of railroad tracks in a stark setting, like a relic of time gone by tied to a muffled present.
Stephen Clark closely followed Hopper's career for three decades, typically buying key pictures shortly after they were made and placing them in museums, beginning with this $600 purchase in 1926. Four years later, House by the Railroad, given anonymously to the Museum of Modern Art, became the first painting to enter its permanent collection. Writing to his longtime patron in 1957, Hopper acknowledged: "I have always appreciated your having acquired my work in the past, and from the very first when few others were interested."
Interested in showing "what one sees on first entering a room," Bonnard framed this picture so that the "eye takes in at one glance" three subjects: a tabletop still life, a colorful interior, and a lush garden view. The setting is the dining room of the Villa Castellamare, in the spa town of Arcachon, near Bordeaux, where Bonnard and his wife, Marthe (seen at left), spent six months in 1930–31.
A founding trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, Clark became the first chairman of its board of trustees in 1941. The same year, he anonymously donated a group of paintings to the museum, including this Bonnard and two other works on view in the exhibition: Matisse's Coffee and Rouault's Old Wall.