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1) Jules-Elie Delaunay

Ixion Plunged into Hades by Jules-Elie Delaunay (1828-1891) is a perfect example of the Neoclassical tradition revered by the French Academy in the nineteenth century. It follows the highest precepts the Academy espoused for painting-ancient mythological subject, heroic nude male body, and expert draftsmanship and finished style.

The scene depicts the fate of Ixion after insulting Zeus's wife Hera at an Olympian banquet-an endless succession of days in the underworld attached to an eternally revolving wheel and attacked by serpents. Delaunay first exhibited his composition at the Paris Salon of 1876, and this second version was one he likely made for a private patron who admired the Salon picture.

2) Charles Cordier

Chinese Man created in 1853 by the highly original French Orientalist sculptor Charles Cordier (1827-1905) is one of the single most important European sculptures in the AGH collection. The only example of the artist's works known to exist in Canada, the large and striking bust was recently loaned to the major international Cordier retrospective traveling to the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Musée National des Beaux-Arts in Québec City, and the Dahesh Museum of Art in New York.

A leading French sculptor of the Second Empire (1852-70), Cordier was an innovator in ethnological portraiture and a leader in the revival of polychrome sculpture. His portrait of a Chinese Man is unique in several different ways. Typically the artist portrayed peoples he encountered in the regions where he traveled-the Near East, Africa and Greece, but this was one of his rare Asian subjects, modeled after one of the members of a Chinese family visiting Paris. The composition was also the first in which the artist presented his innovations with polychromy and new industrial techniques, both of which garnered praise and condemnation from different corners. Here the highly reflective gilded electroplating of face and hands contrasts with the red-oxidized patina of the costume and the detailed enamel work of its brocading.

3) Antonio Ciseri

Antonio Ciseri (1821-1891) was an important portraitist in nineteenth-century Italy, who also helped revitalize the art of religious painting during this transformative period of European history. Born in Switzerland and trained in Florence, he received many important commissions for monumental paintings from churches in both Italy and Switzerland.

As illustrated in his handsome picture of The Entombment of Christ, Ciseri greatly admired and learned from the painting of his Italian Renaissance predecessors, such as Raphael. Here he emulated Raphael's stylistic clarity and restrained drama, including one figure at centre who connects with the viewer by looking out, a device seen in many compositions from the Renaissance.