WILLEM DE KOONING

De Kooning spent months finding the heart of an artwork. Meticulously building up thick layers of paint and then meticulously scraping them away, he worked as an excavator of beauty and truth. The title of this artwork, then, is fitting, and when it was completed it was his largest canvas to date. Inspired by an image of a woman working in a rice field from a Neo-realist Italian film, the organic forms and calligraphic lines seem to dance and flutter across the space, they’re movements revealing a hidden world of colour that lurks below. On initial viewing, the work seems wholly abstract, but as you get closer and begin to learn that language of his brushstrokes what was once a field of white becomes an orchestra of faces, objects, animals and bones. Eyes suddenly emerge out of vastness and fish swim through a squirming swathe of bodies - de Kooning forces the viewer to take on the same role as himself, and we become excavators of his vision the longer we look.

REMBRANDT VAN RIJN

For most artists of the 17th century, the oil painting was the final form of any image. Preparatory sketches, drawings, and small paintings were all standard elements of the process, used to refining the composition and formal elements of a picture before taking oil to panel or canvas. This piece, then, is unusual in the canon of art history - an oil painting with a primary purpose of preparation for an etching, a medium at the time that was just over a century old. Rembrandt’s focus here was on the facial features of his subject and the interplay of light and dark. We can see in his rendering of Ephraim Beuno’s hands and garments, composed with loose, thick brushstrokes, that this work was not intended as a finished piece fit for display. Instead, in the delicate rendering of his facial features and the subtle changes in light, we get an insight into the artist at work, working through specific details ahead of a finer, more exacting work in a different medium. Yet, despite it’s function, the work still contains some of Rembrandt’s magic, capturing emotion, dignity, and humanity in oil.

CLAUDE MONET

For a brief moment, the beauty of domesticity was greater than that of nature. Monet mostly painted outside, bringing his canvas out for long days in the fresh air, working en plein air to capture waterlilies, sunsets, rivers, and fields. The great father of modernism, and the creator of the painting for which Impressionism took its name, wanted to capture the world not as it necessarily was, but as he saw it. Here, however, he brought his easel and brushes inside, and painted this delicate, beautiful work of his wife quietly absorbed in her embroidery loom. Light remains a focus, it ebbs through the large windows and dances off her dress and her face. There is such tenderness in every brush stroke, the whole painting seems to exude a powerful, understated romance. It is not wild with passion or energy, nor is it attempting at objectivity. Instead it is a quiet ode to love and marriage, and to the beauty of co-habitation as Monet saw it.