Gallery 255 features major themes of late 19th-century French art: urban life, places beyond the city, and the people who inhabited these spaces. In contrast to Claude Monet and his luminous landscapes, artists like Edgar Degas (Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer, original model 1878–81, cast after 1921) and Pierre Bonnard (Paris Boulevard at Night, 1900) explored the realities of the modern urban experience in Paris in their work, looking at the rapidly evolving world of the city and its residents. Other artists sought an escape from the instability and expectations of urban life. Many found inspiration far from the modern boulevards of Paris, whether in the smaller towns and countryside of France, in places beyond Europe—as in works like Paul Gauguin’s Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897–98)—or in their own imaginations.

Additional works in this gallery include highlights from the European collection: Monet’s La Japonaise (1876), Paul Cézanne’s Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair (about 1877), and Edvard Munch’s Summer Night’s Dream (The Voice) (1893).