For nearly twenty years, Bodega Bay Heritage Gallery's Newsletter have has been sharing stories about amazing special exhibitions at the de Young, the Legion of Honor, and the Crocker Art Museums. Over the last two months, we spotlighted the exhibitions at the Legion of Honor and the Crocker Museum. This month, we’re taking a look back at incredible long list of exhibitions at San Francisco's de Young Museum.

The work that goes into these exhibitions is nothing short of incredible. Bringing world-class art — and the stories behind it — to Northern California takes vision, persistence, and a lot of creative problem-solving. Without these shows, most of us would never get the chance to stand in front of such masterpieces.

Behind the scenes, it’s a whirlwind: researching, arranging loans, safely transporting priceless paintings, and designing displays that draw us in and invite us to pause, ponder, and enjoy.

Looking back, it’s amazing how many of the world’s great artworks have made their way to our local museums. We’re lucky to have seen them without leaving home, and we owe a huge thanks to the people who make it all happen.

The Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay featured almost 100 works from the Musée d’Orsay, including some of their most famous works. The show offered a front-row ticket to the birth of Impressionism, charting how painters broke away from traditional art to capture light, movement, and everyday scenes with bold color and visible brushwork. The de Young was the only museum in the world to host both this exhibition and its sequel, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and Beyond, all while back in Paris, the Musée d’Orsay was undergoing renovations.

Monet’s The Gare Saint‑Lazare plunges you into the huge iron-and-glass train shed, where steam, smoke, and fleeting light dissolve everything into vivid color and motion. Created as part of a 12‑piece series—his first full-on theme series—Monet captured this modern, chaotic energy with loose brushwork and shifting viewpoints, working fast on site and refining things in his studio. He finished the series in early 1877 and even showed most of them at the Third Impressionist Exhibition. It’s a stunning snapshot of Impressionism meeting the industrial age, with trains, schedules, and steam turning into poetry on canvas.

Renoir’s The Swing is a snapshot of a Montmartre garden, showing model on a swing, flanked by two young men and a curious little girl rendered with those flurries of light and color that dissolve solid forms into shimmering atmosphere. The Swing Painted around the same time as Renoir's famous Bal du Moulin de la Galette.Critics were split -- some loved the relaxed charm and dappled sunlight, while others mocked the slashes of color as “grease stains” It debuted at the Third Impressionist Exhibition in 1877 and was quickly bought by collector Gustave Caillebotte, and later became part of the Musée d’Orsay’s permanent collection 

Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and Beyond included over 100 Post‑Impressionist masterpieces—including Van Gogh’s Starry Night over the Rhône, Gauguin’s Yellow Christ, Cézanne’s Still Life with Onions, plus works by Monet, Renoir, Seurat, Signac, the Nabis, Rousseau, and more—from the Musée d’Orsay. With the museum in the middle of a remodel ahead of its 25th anniversary, it graciously lent out these works, making it possible to share them abroad.

Starry Night Over the Rhone was painted in Arles, just a two minute walk from the Yellow House where Van Gogh rented a room. The yellow light of the stars and the city lights reflected on the Rhone's surface is contrasted against the deep aquamarine darkness of the sky and water.

Van Gogh painted this scene shortly after painting Cafe Terrace at Night. The painting was first exhibited with the Société des Artistes Indépendants in 1889. At the de Young, this painting was a center of attention. I noticed that as visitors were about to exit the exhibition, some would turn around and walk back through the exhibition, stopping and taking a second lingering look Starry Night.

A Dance in the Country shows a joyful couple spinning happily on a café terrace. The woman, in a lively red hat, beams at us while her partner focuses entirely on her, losing his hat in the excitement. Renoir’s vibrant colors and expressive brushwork make the couple pop against a softer background, capturing the warmth and sociability of a summer evening. Painted in 1883 after Renoir’s Italian travels, the scene blends the spontaneity of Impressionism with more defined figures, making it a perfect celebration of love, fun, and the pleasures of life.

Tahitian Women captures two Tahitian women seated together in a scene both tranquil and enigmatic. Painted during Gauguin’s first trip to Tahiti, the work forms part of his search for a paradise untouched by European culture, reflecting his longing for “ecstasy, calm, and art.” The composition shows one woman wearing a traditional pareu and the other in a conservative missionary dress—visually contrasting native culture and colonial influence. Their poses are calm and introspective, rendered with Gauguin’s strong outlines and flat, vibrant colors that embody his Cloisonnist style. The women’s expressions are quiet, almost melancholic, creating an atmosphere of mystery and contemplation rather than the idyllic joy Europeans often ascribed to Tahiti. Through this subtly symbolic painting, Gauguin not only celebrates the beauty and dignity of his subjects, but also invites viewers to reflect on deeper questions of identity, cultural encounter, and the myths of paradise.

Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris included around 150 masterpieces, paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints from every phase of Picasso’s long, groundbreaking career. The exhibition allowed you to wander from the moody Blue Period to the rosy, early years and then dive into Expressionist, Cubist, Neoclassical, and Surrealist works. This career-spanning Picasso exhibition that was not to be missed, a rare chance since the Musée Picasso itself was under renovation.

Picasso’s 1939 work, Femme couchée lisant (Reclining Woman Reading), shows his long-time lover Marie-Thérèse Walter chilling out and totally absorbed in a book. The scene is all soft curves and flowing lines—classic Picasso vibes. It’s one of those pieces that shows how much he dug the idea of reading and quiet, thoughtful moments, and how he saw the beauty in the everyday.

Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is basically the “boom, here comes Cubism” moment. Here are five nude women in a brothel, smashed together, fractured with jagged shapes and flat planes. Classical perspective and ideal beauty are gone.

The faces are all kinds of wild with some looking Iberian and others African mask‑y or Egyptian. The debut of this painting threw the art world into a spin, with critics calling it immoral, Matisse calling it a joke, and Braque eventually using it as a springboard into Cubism.

Picasso’s Portrait of Dora Maar is a vibrant, cubist depiction of his lover and fellow artist Dora Maar, showing her angular face, bold colors, and a mix of emotions that reflect both her psychological complexity and the turbulent times they lived through. Picasso painted Maar both head-on and in profile at once, merging reality with his own perception, and often highlighted her vulnerability and inner struggle, likely inspired by their passionate but stormy relationship and the political unrest of the era. This painting, filled with bright colors and symbolic touches like chair bars, stands not just as a personal portrait but as an icon of modern art and its emotional depth.

We all are familiar with the achievements of William S. Paley. He was the founder of CBS and a long-serving trustee, president, and chairman of Museum of Modern Art, New York. His personal passion for modern art led him to amass and eventually donate an extraordinary collection of masterpieces—by artists like Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, Degas, and Bacon—that significantly enriched the museum’s holdings.

In the fall of 2012, the de Young Museum in San Francisco hosted The William S. Paley Collection: A Taste for Modernism, a MoMA-organized exhibition showcasing a vibrant slice of William S. Paley’s private collection of early modern masterpieces. It featured works by titans of French modernism—Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Derain, Degas, Bonnard, Rouault, with highlights like Gauguin’s The Seed of the Areoi, Picasso’s Boy Leading a Horse, Matisse’s sensuous Woman with a Veil, Derain’s vivid Bridge over the Riou, and a striking Francis Bacon triptych that totally crashes the “traditional modern” vibe. The whole thing felt like you’d been invited into Paley’s extravagant Fifth Avenue digs, stuffed with bold, soulful art that surprised at every turn.

Francis Bacon’s Study for Three Heads is a moody little triptych. This format was borrowed from traditional triptychs, and it lends a haunting sense of isolation and modern estrangement, with thick, visceral flesh-tones (creams, pinks, blood reds) writhing against a stark black backdrop. The triptych format was traditionally associated with religious art, but Bacon repurposes this old format to convey psychological fragmentation and isolation. Baconponders the modern sense of estrangement, where each head exists in its own compartmentalized space, emphasizing the disconnection between them .

Gauguin's Seed of the Areoi stands as a hallmark of Gauguin's legacy in modernism. This Tahitian woman, believed to be Gauguin's young companion, is seated with a flowering mango in her hand, a symbolizing the mystical fertility of the vanished Areoi Society. Gauguin borrows elements from ancient Egyptian hieratic poses, while using Japanese color planes and arm positioning woven with western symbolism. Gauguin created this painting in 1892 during his first Tahitian adventure.

Henri Matisse’s Woman with a Veil 1927, presents a striking departure from his earlier, more vibrant works. In this portrait, the subject is a woman sitting with contemplative expression, her chin resting on her hand, and her eyes obscured by a black veil,

The composition is characterized by a stark frontal pose and a rich color palette that includes deep reds, greens, and yellows, contrasted against a soft violet background. This use of color and form reflects Matisse's exploration of emotional depth and introspection during this period. The painting's subdued tones and the subject's poised demeanor suggest a moment of quiet reflection, inviting viewers to engage with the subject's inner world. Woman with a Veil exemplifies Matisse's ability to convey complex emotions through simplicity and color, marking it as a significant work in his later career.

Georges Rouault’s The Clown 1907 captures the complexities of human experience through its raw portrayal of a circus performer. This painting is noted for its bold use of color and form. Rouault developed a distinctive style characterized by heavy black contours and vivid color contrasts. In The Clown, these elements converge to depict a figure that embodies both the theatricality and the underlying pathos of the circus performer. The exaggerated features and expressive lines convey a sense of melancholy and introspection, inviting viewers to look beyond the costume and makeup to the human emotions beneath.

Modern Nature: Georgia O'Keeffe and Lake George was basically a deep dive into the artist’s early years, long before she relocated to New Mexico. This earlier period was back in the day when Georgia O’Keeffe spent her summers in upstate New York (Lake George) and suddenly transformed regular things like leaves, apples, barns, and the lake itself into bold, almost abstract paintings. Over a really productive decade, she whipped up more than 200 works, and the de Young pulled together about 55 of the coolest ones—close-up flowers, tree studies, still lifes, landscapes—that all show how she took simple stuff and made it modern and powerful. Below are a few of my favorite paintings.

Lake George 1922 captures the tranquil beauty of the Adirondack Mountains with a sense of abstraction and emotional depth. This piece exemplifies O’Keeffe’s ability to transcend mere representation, transforming a natural scene into a meditative exploration of form and color.

It simplifies natural forms into flowing lines and delicate colors, focusing on the interplay between the mountains and the lake. The composition is characterized by serene symmetry, with the reflection of the mountains mirrored in the calm waters below. The palette of soft blues and greens evokes a sense of calm and introspection, inviting viewers to experience the landscape not just visually but emotionally. Lake George stands as a testament to her innovative vision and her deep connection to the landscapes she painted.

Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. 2 1930 is a standout piece from her series of six paintings depicting the jack-in-the-pulpit flower. This composition showcases a close-up view of the flower, emphasizing its deep plum-purple hues and intricate details. The flower's narrow base flares open like a trumpet at the top. The unfurled petal is streaked with wavy white and magenta-pink veins around a deep purple tube-like stalk emerging from inside the base. Surrounding the bloom are emerald-green leaves against the mauve-pink background. O’Keeffe’s transforms this flower from a simple botanical subject into a powerful visual experience. By focusing on form and color, she blends realism with abstraction.

In Petunias, O’Keeffe takes something as simple as a common garden flower and turns it epic—cropping it tight, blowing its color way up, and ditching any background distractions so you’re staring right into the bloom like under a magnifying glass. Rich purples jump off a soft backdrop, making the flower feel both intimate and monumental. She once explained that she painted flowers larger than life so busy New Yorkers would be forced to really look—mission accomplished.

J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free was a dazzling exhibition devoted to the artist’s late career from 1835 to 1850, when he pushed painting to its atmospheric limits. Organized by Tate Britain with the Getty and others, the show gathered more than 60 works — stormy seascapes like Snow Storm — Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, fiery scenes such as The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, and poetic visions of Rome, rarely seen together. Darkened galleries and careful lighting made his swirling color and light all the more immersive, reminding visitors why Turner’s bold experiments with mood and abstraction paved the way for Impressionism and even modern painting.

London Bridge is an earky painting by Turner when he was barely in his twenties. It shows the old London Bridge bridge crowded with life, boats jostling on the Thames, and smoke and haze softening the city beyond. You can see him balancing careful detail with a growing fascination for light and atmosphere — the river gleams, the sky feels alive — hinting at the bold, expressive style that would later make him famous. Even at this early date, Turner isn’t just documenting a landmark; he’s turning it into a stage for London’s energy and mood.

Painted nearly forty years after his London Bridge, Turner’s The Grand Canal, Venice done in 1835 shows how he turned a familiar landmark into pure poetry. Instead of focusing on sharp architectural detail, he bathed the canal and palaces in glowing light and soft color, so that stone, water, and sky seem to blur together. The scene feels both real and dreamlike — Venice as Turner experienced it, shimmering and atmospheric. It’s a perfect example of his late style, where mood and light mattered more than accuracy, and why later artists like the Impressionists saw him as a trailblazer.

Turner’s The Slave Ship 1840, also called Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon Coming On, is one of Turner's most powerful and unsettling works, a bold expression of his abhorrence of slavery. It’s a dazzling explosion of color, with a fiery sunset colliding with a stormy sea—visually stunning, yet deeply disturbing. A closer look reveals the evil within: chained, frantic people thrashing in the waves. This scene represents the historic Zong massacre of 1781, when a ship’s captain threw enslaved people overboard to collect insurance money. Here, the power and beauty of nature collides with a shameful human horror. Turner uses his mastery of light and atmosphere to confront viewers with the brutality of slavery and the fragility of human life. (For historical perspective, this painting was created in the same year Claude Monet was born.)

This exhibition reunited nearly 200 of the most memorable artworks from San Francisco’s massive 1915 world’s fair, the Panama–Pacific International Exposition. The exhibition blended world famous artist such as Monet, Sargent, Homer, and Cassatt with bold modernist shockers like Italian Futurism, Hungarian modernism, and Austrian Expressionism—all stuffed into galleries themed by region and style. And the California artists were represented too. De Young Curator James Ganz spent years tracking down works from as far away as Russia and Budapest. It was basically a one-time chance to relive the art extravaganza that helped stamp San Francisco as a cultural powerhouse.

Winslow Homer's Saco Bay captures a silhouetted moment charged with quiet tension and natural beauty. A local woman pauses mid-step, her gaze—and perhaps yours—drawn toward something just beyond the canvas’s edge, suggested by the upward lift of a gull.

The exact time of day or weather is deliberately unclear, inviting multiple interpretations and engaging the viewer in the scene’s unfolding narrative. Homer painted this in 1896 near his studio in Prout's Neck, Maine

James Tissot's L'ambitieuse (The Political Woman) features a beautifully dressed young woman sashaying into a salon on the arm of an older gentleman. She’s not literally running for office, but her ambition is social, and her pink flounced gown (with a black belt and feathered fan so perfectly color-matched) is her well played chesspiece in Belle-Époque society.

That’s basically what Tissot is capturing in L’Ambitieuse, part of his 15-painting “La femme à Paris” series, where he zooms in on Parisian women in all sorts of settings, from shopgirls to circus goers to grieving widows.

It’s Tissot reasserting himself back in Paris after years in London, showing he still gets the city’s fashion-first, image-driven social game. And while he meant for each piece to come with a short story by a different writer, that part never really took off, criticisms ranged from calling these women “gracious puppets” to saying they all looked like the same Englishwoman, his favorite model, muse and love interest, Kathleen Newton who had died of tuberculosis in 1882 at the young age of 28.

California painter, E. Charlton Fortune’s Summer 1914 is a soft, glowing early landscape that really shows off her feel for light and mood, earning her a silver medal when it was shown at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Painted in calm greens with dappled sunlight, the scene feels both peaceful and alive, with a white fence and walkway that naturally lead the eye to a lone figure catching the light. You can see the influence of her teacher Arthur Mathews in the painting’s harmony and restrained palette. Critics even called it a “poem in greens,” and as much as it captures her gentle, impressionistic beginnings, it also hints at the bolder, more colorful Monterey landscapes she would become known for later in her career.

Botticelli to Braque: Masterpieces from the National Galleries of Scotland was a blockbuster exhibition that brought more than 55 works spanning 400 years of European art across the Atlantic. Visitors got to see everything from early Renaissance gems by Botticelli and Titian to dramatic Baroque canvases by Velázquez and Rembrandt, all the way through to the bold experiments of Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Braque. It was a rare chance to trace the sweep of European painting in one show, and especially exciting since many of these works had never traveled to the U.S. before—offering Bay Area audiences a kind of whirlwind tour through art history without ever leaving Golden Gate Park.

Constable painted landscapes he knew best—the rolling countryside of Suffolk, England, where he grew up. In The Vale of Dedham, he captures a sweeping view from Langham Church tower, looking out over the Stour Valley toward the tiny village of Dedham. The scene feels both grand and personal: big skies full of shifting clouds, fields dotted with workers, and light glinting off the winding river. Constable once said painting was like “another word for feeling,” and you can sense that here—this isn’t just a landscape, it’s a love letter to home.

For Entrée du bois à Ville d'Avray, Corot returned again to Ville d’Avray, the quiet village outside Paris where his family owned a home. Here, a shady path leads into the trees, painted with Corot’s trademark silvery light and soft, almost dreamlike brushwork. Though rooted in close observation of nature, his landscapes often feel poetic and timeless, balancing realism with a gentle sense of mood. Works like this one helped bridge traditional landscape painting with the new, freer approaches of the Impressionists—many of whom admired Corot as a mentor and pioneer. Monet once said of Corot, "Next to Corot, we are all nothing, nothing."

One of Scotland’s most beloved paintings, Rev. Walker Skating on Duddingston shows Reverend Walker, known to friends as “Scott Skating Minister." gliding effortlessly across the frozen Duddingston Loch near Edinburgh. Raeburn captures him with a wonderful mix of elegance and humor: dressed all in black, hands folded behind his back, perfectly balanced on the ice. The composition is strikingly modern, with its strong diagonal and wide sweep of frozen landscape, yet it also feels playful and personal, as if we’ve caught the minister in a private moment of joy. Both a portrait and a slice of Scottish life, it has become an icon of national identity.

John Singer Sargent's Lady Agnew of Lochnaw is one of his most celebrated works. Commissioned by Lady Agnew's husband, the painting shows Lady Gertrude Agnew lounging with an easy grace in a silk gown, her confident gaze meeting ours with a mix of poise and playfulness. Sargent’s fluid brushwork and luminous handling of fabric make the portrait sparkle, but it’s the personality shining through that made the painting such a sensation. When first shown at the Royal Academy in London, it established Sargent as the go-to painter for the fashionable elite, and it’s still considered a masterpiece of modern portraiture.

Monet: The Late Years included nearly 60 paintings from the artist’s final decades from 1913 to 1926. These works, almost all painted in his beloved garden at Giverny, showed Monet pushing past Impressionism into bold, sometimes nearly abstract territory with sweeping canvases of water lilies, wisteria, and willows. Some were painted during World War I, with the sound of big guns echoing through Giverny. Monet's eyesight was a huge challenge, with his canvases revealing both his resilience and reinvention, his brushwork turning looser, colors brighter, and scale more ambitious, with mural-sized studies for his famed Grandes Décorations. The show reintroduced Monet not just as the master of light and atmosphere but also as a pioneer edging toward modern abstraction.

The Artist’s House at Giverny 1912–13 offers a rare glimpse of the home and flowerbeds that anchored Claude Monet's daily life. The canvas captures the façade of his pink-walled house framed by a riot of blossoms. Instead of precise architectural detail, Monet lets color and brushwork dominate—the walls dissolve into soft planes of pinks and greens, while the garden surges forward in vibrant strokes that verge on abstraction. The painting reflects both the personal intimacy of Monet’s surroundings and his late-career focus on atmosphere over form. It’s less a portrait his house, rather it is a celebration of his home and gardens, what he considered to be he greatest work of art.

Water-Lily Pond 1917–19 is a sweeping late masterpiece that shows just how far Monet had moved beyond the crisp Impressionism of his earlier years. Painted on a mural-like scale, the canvas is almost engulfed by rippling water, floating lily pads, and shifting reflections of sky and foliage—so much so that horizon and depth nearly disappear. Instead of a traditional landscape, Monet gives us an immersive field of color and motion, with loose brushwork and bold hues that anticipate modern abstraction. Bear in mind he created this painting while he as struggling with cataracts and in the midst of World War I. The painting is Monet's response to his failing eyesight, the horror's of the war.

This painting radiates vitality and beauty. Monet paints his beloved Giverny pond into a boundless, almost spiritual meditation on light and nature.

The Japanese Footbridge 1899 captures Monet's garden at Giverny—the graceful arched bridge spanning his lily pond. Painted with shimmering, quick strokes of green, blue, and violet, the work shows how Monet transformed a simple garden feature into a stage for studying light, reflection, and atmosphere. The bridge anchors the composition, but it’s the surrounding rippling water and lush foliage that steal the show, dissolving into a haze of color that feels almost dreamlike. This painting is both a portrait of Monet’s carefully cultivated sanctuary and a statement of his belief that nature, when filtered through light and season, could become pure poetry on canvas.

The de Young staged the first major U.S. retrospective of Art Deco icon Tamara de Lempicka featuring over 120–150 works. She is best known as the ultimate Art Deco painter, celebrated for her large, slick, polished portraits of glamorous aristocrats and the wealthy, plus her highly stylized, sensual nudes that capture the sleek spirit of the Jazz Age. Prior to this exhibition, I had not heard of her, but from now on, I'm a fan of Tamara de Lempicka and the Art Deco movement, an expressiveness and eloquence marking a stunning and unique period in American art.

Young Woman in Green presents a sleek, futuristic portrait of a confident modern woman: draped in a vibrant, fluttering green dress that clings like a second skin. She shades her eyes from beneath a wide-brimmed hat as she gazes forward into the future. Rendered as if sculpted by machines—with smooth geometric forms, conical breasts, and a defined navel—she embodies the optimism, sensuality, and liberation of the interwar "modern woman."

Saint-Moritz captures a poised and fashionable woman—dressed in a vivid red coat with a high white knit collar and gloves—as she stands against the snowy peaks of the Swiss resort that inspired the title. Her upward gaze brings a hint of aspiration or contemplation, while the clean, angular lines and bold color contrast exemplify Lempicka’s modernist flair. Painted in 1929, its refined stylization and wintery palette embody both elegance and the spirited energy of interwar high society.

The model for both of these paintings is Ira Perrot, a French poet and the artist’s longtime lover and muse.

Escape (Somewhere in Europe) 1940 swaps glitz for gravity: a lone woman clutching a swaddled baby against a spartan European street, her eyes cast down in shared sorrow with the countless refugees of World War II. Painted early in her American exile, this piece served as the visual spark for her 1941 exhibitions in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles—and was deployed as a gesture of solidarity with war-torn Europe, even helping raise funds for the British Red Cross. Rendered in her trademark Art Deco style but stripped of glamour, it pulls you into a moment of emotional stillness and collective longing.

Wisdom (La Sagesse) marks a significant departure from her earlier Art Deco style, embracing a more classical and introspective approach. The painting portrays a woman engrossed in a book, embodying the personification of wisdom. This painting blends elements of French Cubism, Purism, and Neo-Classicism to create a bold and cosmopolitan style. In response to the turbulence of World War II, de Lempicka portrays this young woman expressing her resilience as she pursues knowlege and enlightenment. In a way, de Lempicka is evolving artistically, responding to the turbulant crisis laden world around her.