Our masterpieces

This superb panel is a fine example of fifteenth-century Florentine portraiture. Artists of the time followed classical dictates: body proportions were idealised while faces left devoid of expression were expected to convey character.

The canvas, signed and dated by Carpaccio on a cartellino to the right of the figure, was attributed to Dürer until 1919. The motto Malo mori quam foedari (better to die than be defiled) placed beside a short-tailed weasel suggests that he may be a knight of the Order of the Ermine. 

Dürer was the leading representative of German Renaissance art, and a key advocate of new ideas in Northern Europe. This panel was executed in Venice, during his second visit to Italy, where he was hailed as a consummate artist.

This painting was almost certainly commissioned in Rome by Caravaggio’s first patron, Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte. Captured in a strikingly natural pose, the figure of St Catherine has been identified as Fillide Melandroni, a celebrated courtesan of the time.

Frans Hals is widely considered the most brilliant exponent of Dutch portraiture, a genre that enjoyed immense popularity in the seventeenth century. At the time, Holland was a leading centre for trade and finance, and its wealthy citizens were keen for their good fortune to be immortalised through their likenesses.

This landscape of ‘Les Vessenots,’ on the outskirts of Auvers, shows a group of old country cottages placed just below a raised horizon; further down, wheat fields stretch to the bottom of the canvas, broken only by a few swaying trees. 

This portrait of a girl from the working-class district of Friedrichstadt in Dresden is one of the finest examples of the Expressionist style of the German group Die Brücke, characterised by the simplification of form and the arbitrary use of colour.

Initially intended as a self-portrait, Harlequin with a Mirror combines three characters from the circus and the Commedia dell’arte that held a strong fascination for Picasso, and with which he identified: the two-cornered hat is a clear reference to Harlequin, the clothes are those of an acrobat, while Pierrot’s face, turned into a mask, conceals the artist’s identity.

In 1955 Otto Dix recalled how, as a young artist starting his career, the painter Max Liebermann had advised him: “Above all, paint a lot of portraits! In any case, everything we Germans paint is a portrait!” 

The loneliness of the modern city is a central theme in Hopper’s work. In this painting, a woman sits on the edge of a bed in an anonymous hotel room. It is night and she is tired. She has taken off her hat, dress and shoes, and—too exhausted to unpack—she is checking the time of her train the next day.