The Saint-Lazare Station, Claude Monet's painting depicted here, shows trains pulling into a major train station in Paris. Fitting with his prominent role in the Impressionist movement, Claude Monet often chose to paint every day scenes like agricultural fields and cityscapes. This stood in stark contrast to previous generations of artists who preferred historical, mythical, or religious subjects when including human figures and large-scale landscapes when painting outdoor scenes.

Image is in the public domain, accessed through Wikipedia Media Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Claude_Monet_004.jpg

Although romantic in sweep and not fully representational in form, JMW Turner's painting portrays a ship throwing over a number of dead bodies to lose weight during a storm. Titled The Slave Ship, the painting was a deliberate political statement by Turner, who was an ardent abolitionist, an opponent of slavery. Although painted after the British Empire had banned slave trading, Turner hoped that displaying the work in front of Prince Albert, Consort to Queen Victoria, would make the Royal Couple promote abolitionism worldwide when it was first exhibited in 1840.

Image is in the public domain, accessed through Wikipedia Media Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Slave-ship.jpg

The Coiffure by Mary Cassatt shows a woman fixing her hair in front of a mirror, an everyday scene which is captured by the artist in a candid moment. This subject is highly similar to the conventions of "genre painting," which is a European tradition of depicting small moments from everyday life that originated in the sixteenth century. "Genre painting" was seen as the lowest subject matter for art until the Impressionists upended the hierarchy of subjects in the late nineteenth century, a fact hugely influential on Mary Cassatt.

Image is in the public domain, accessed through Wikipedia Media Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mary_Cassatt_-_The_Coiffure_-_NGC_29882.jpg

Cezanne's series of portraits of his wife, brought together in a recent Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit called "Madame Cezanne," ranged in medium from watercolor to graphite to oil. Several of the portraits feature Madame Cezanne in red or blue dresses, sitting in an armchair.

Cassatt and Degas were close friends who shared sensibilities, techniques, and subjects (Cassatt did a series of paintings depicting the world of theatre). Though Matisse painted the well-known "Dance," neither he nor the others are associated with ballet the way Degas is.

The painting is Las Meninas by Velasquez, and was painted in 1656 during the Spanish Golden Age during King Philip's reign. It depicts his the young Infanta Margaret Theresa, several ladies in waiting, dwarfs, and Velasquez himself.

Image is in the public domain, accessed through WikiArt: http://www.wikiart.org/en/diego-velazquez/las-meninas-detail-of-the-lower-half-depicting-the-family-of-philip-iv-of-spain-1656

We are looking at the scene from the perspective of an outsider, and a famous detail of the painting is the reflection of the King and Queen in the mirror at the back of the room. Thus, our view is actually that of the King's, taking in the way Velasquez is painting his family.

Image is in the public domain, accessed through WikiArt: http://www.wikiart.org/en/diego-velazquez/las-meninas-detail-of-the-lower-half-depicting-the-family-of-philip-iv-of-spain-1656

The sculpture is a reflection of Gaugin's uneasy relationship with Van Gogh. The two became friends when Van Gogh and his brother purchased several of Gaugin's paintings. They went on to work together for nine weeks at Vincent's Yellow House, during which time their friendship cooled. The night Van Gogh cut his ear off, the artist had earlier confronted Gaugin with a razor blade. The sculpture shows Gaugin's ear cut off as a reference to his former friend.

Thomas Cole and other Hudson River School artists desired to show the way that God's creation of nature was a sublime gift that should be held in awe, a sense shared by transcendentalist authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. In The Oxbow (View From Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm), Cole presents a thunderstorm coming over a picturesque scene of a New England town, enhancing nature's awesome power over humanity.

Artwork from Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cole_Thomas_The_Oxbow_(The_Connecticut_River_near_Northampton_1836).jpg

Thomas Cole and his followers in the Hudson River School were keen adherents to the ideals of Romanticism, which valued individual liberty, nature, and emotionalism. In The Oxbow (View From Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm), a wild landscape is presented with an oncoming storm hitting the small glimpse of civilization shown in the painting, echoing key themes of Romanticism.

Artwork from Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cole_Thomas_The_Oxbow_(The_Connecticut_River_near_Northampton_1836).jpg