Kenton Nelson (American, b.1954): Interval - For an autodidact, Nelson is an extraordinary draftsman; his paintings meticulously crafted. He begins by photographing a model (he’s got what he calls a “morgue” file of countless pictures and images he likes), and then draws the subject before painting it in oil. Afterwards, he nimbly sands the surface, leaving absolutely no trace of brushstrokes in his quest for painterly perfection…

Florencia Chinellato and Alexandr Trusch, “Romeo and Juliet” - Hamburg Ballet, November 2013. Photograph by Marcus Renner. - Soloists Trusch and Chinellato took the spotlight in the first cast, with heartbreakingly sincere performances. Chinellato is a luminous Juliet, but very much a real girl, with hopes and fears and dreams. Her Juliet has the playfulness and innocence of a child; she’s trusting of the world because she doesn’t know any better…

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (French, 1864-1901) - Rousse dit aussi La Toilette, 1889 (Oil on cardboard. Musée d'Orsay) - The woman fills the centre of the composition and is shown close up, offering the spectator a view of a sculptural back. The wicker chairs around her suggest that the scene took place in the artist’s studio, rue Caulaincourt. The neglect of the academic pose, the accelerated perspective, the framing of the scene, and the high viewpoint bring to mind works by Degas whom Lautrec deeply admired…

Bianca Balti with sculpture for Italian label Alessandro Angelozzi Couture, 2015 bridal collection. Photograph by Fabrizio Ferri. - Balti wears a short wedding dress with a boat neck open back, a satin bow waist sash, and ivory lace sleeves. Balti impresses in dreamy fairy-tale silhouettes and more sexy and modern form-fitting shapes…

Albert Aublet (French, 1851-1938) - Reading on the garden path, 1883 (Oil on canvas) - There is a woman reading with no sense of movement. The peacefulness of the woman is paired with the vibrancy of the nature surrounding her. Perhaps the flourishing garden reflects her mind as she is indulging in her own consciousness or imagination…

Nude study with sculpture (1955-60) photograph by Zoltán Glass - By the mid-1950s, Glass was one of the most successful fashion and advertising photographers in London. One of his clients was Odhams Press who published Lilliput, a pocket-sized gentleman’s magazine that featured an assortment of titillating articles and risqué humour, together with adventurous photographic essays from such well-known talents as Bill Brandt and Brassai…

Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926) - Dans la prairie, 1876 (Oil on canvas) - In his Argenteuil days (1872-78), Monet frequently painted his first wife, Camille. Here is a perhaps lesser known work where Camille is almost submerged in the middle of a wealth of flowers as she reads her book. The painting was first shown at an exhibition in Paris in 1877. Its colour-filled canvas is built with darting brushstrokes…

Brigitte Bardot with paintings by Pablo Picasso. - Bardot was attending the Cannes Film Festival, just down the coast from Vallauris, and came to visit the artist. LIFE sent Brierre to photograph them. The pairing of the young and beautiful Bardot with the older Picasso, who was notorious for his affairs with much younger women, would make for a good story. - (Vallauris on the French Riviera, in 1956, for LIFE. Photograph by Jerome Brierre)

Edouard Manet (French, 1832-1883) - In the Garden of the Villa Bellevue, 1880 (Oil on canvas. Foundation E.G. Bührle Collection, Zürich) - In the most impressive Impressionist manner, the portrayal of the house, foliage, and the figure reading a book appears in a glittering juxtaposition of fleeting brush strokes in which everything becomes pure color. Dark shadows are only possible in pure blue tones. The house walls, which should be shaded from the overhanging roof, appear to be illuminated from below…

Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) - Dancer Adjusting Her Shoe, 1885 (Pastel on paper. Dixon Gallery & Gardens) - The dancer leans forward, her head low, a hand clasping her left foot. One looks down on her head and the bare expanse of her neck and upper back. This seated figure, knees spread, with the arms stretched toward the feet, particularly fascinated Degas, who drew it many times. It represented the extreme opposite of the weightlessness and grace of the dancer in action...

John Singer Sargent (American, 1856-1925) - An Artist in His Studio, c.1904 (Oil on canvas. MFA, Boston) - Sargent’s friend, the Italian artist Ambrogio Raffele, is deep in contemplation, working on a bucolic landscape. Raffele is using his cramped and untidy hotel room as a studio; he and his landscape painting are shifted to the left corner. Surrounded by smaller sketches presumably made outdoors, Raffele holds a palette that bears blobs of thick, bright paint and a fistful of brushes…

Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774-1840) - Cairn in Snow, 1807 (Oil on canvas. New Masters Gallery, Dresden) - Caspar David Friedrich was a romantic landscape painter, and was one of the first artists to portray winter landscapes as austere, forbidding and desolate. His winter scenes are solemn and still. They are often painted plein-air, with the artist using the thin, gray light of winter to create an appropriate atmosphere and illustrate the effect of light reflected off snow…

Peter Bruegel the Elder (Netherlandish, c. 1525-1569) - The Hunters in the Snow, 1565 (Oil on wood panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) - Winter scenes, technically more challenging than summer ones, were relatively rare in western art until the early Renaissance. One of six panels representing the seasons (though only five survive), Bruegel’s vastly detailed masterpiece marks a major shift from symbolic representation of the seasons, the previous European tradition, to an exclusively secular scene. It is a fine winter day, and townsfolk are skating and playing hockey, but the hunt has not gone well. The hounds look exhausted, and the hunters have just a single fox among them…

Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926) - The Magpie (La Pie), 1868-69 (Oil on canvas. Musée d'Orsay, Paris) - Monet was a master of the winter scene, he painted more than 100 of them, and when Edouard Manet saw the Impressionist’s snowscapes he abandoned any effort to make his own. This is Monet’s largest winter painting, depicting a single black bird on a fence in Etretat, but what’s most thrilling about the work is the shadows on the snow, done not in black but in a convention-shocking blue…

Utagawa Hiroshige (Japanese, 1797-1858) - The Drum Bridge at Yuhi Hill in Meguro, 1857 (Honolulu Museum of Art) - One of the images from One Hundred Views of Edo, his wildly popular series of ukiyo-e prints, this image depicts a rare stone bridge in the city we now call Tokyo. Captured at an oblique angle, the bridge seems dwarfed under the snow-filled sky, and the passersby, shrouded under bamboo hats, get lost in the landscape. Hiroshige’s winter scenes are perhaps his most sensitive; under snow, even the big city feels impermanent...