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In this work painted by Velázquez when he was only eighteen or nineteen years old and living in his native Seville, the figures and household objects stand out forcefully from the dark ground. The slightly disconnected gazes and suspended gestures of the old woman and the boy infuse tension into the scene. The artist showcases his remarkable technical skill through his differentiation of the textures of a wide variety of materials — from the wooden table and spoon and gleaming brass containers to the glazed earthenware and the eggs congealing in oil. The realism that Velázquez achieved in this painting and other early kitchen scenes (known as bodegones) was new in Spanish art at this time and earned him renown. By 1623, at the age of twenty-four, he was invited to the court of Madrid, where he spent his career in the service of King Philip IV.

This early work by Gainsborough presents a carefully composed scene stretched across a wide canvas, possibly intended to hang over a mantelpiece. Beneath an expanse of pale blue sky, a river winds through a valley toward a sunlit village. A path mirrors the river’s curves, and the rings of clouds echo the rise of the small hill at left. Gainsborough animates the scene with an encounter — possibly amorous — between traveler and milkmaid, along with a barking dog and other rustic figures and animals. Although the view is drawn largely from the imagination and informed by examples of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape, Gainsborough’s rendering of the soft earth of the riverbank, the dense foliage and crumbling bark of the trees, and the reflective surface of the water reveals his dedication to the direct study of nature.

This large-scale informal group portrait, or conversation piece, depicts the Waldegrave sisters, the grandnieces of the author and antiquarian Horace Walpole, who commissioned the work for his celebrated country house, Strawberry Hill. Reynolds’s gift for creating sophisticated compositions and rendering graceful gestures — at its height here — helped to establish him as one of the foremost English portraitists of the eighteenth century. The eldest sister, Laura, seated at center, winds a card with silk thread from a skein held by her sister Maria, at left, while Horatia, the youngest, embroiders netting stretched in a tambour frame. An admirer (like Walpole) of the ancient past, Reynolds endows his sitters with a classical elegance emphasized by their pale muslin gowns and columned enclosure.

A definitive treatment by Constable of his home territory and lifelong source of inspiration, this sweeping view of the Stour Valley combines compositional elements from a long-admired work by Claude Lorrain (Hagar and the Angel; National Gallery, London) with specific features of the area: the fertile farmland along the winding river, the Stratford toll bridge, the tower of the village church of Dedham, and the estuary at the horizon. In the foreground, a woman cradling her child by a fire next to a temporary shelter humanizes the landscape. With deft touches of his brush and palette knife, and even his fingers, Constable conveys the luminosity of the scene. Patterns of light and dark sweep over the glistening ground, reflecting the movement of billowing clouds that fill the upper half of the canvas.