Philadelphia Museum of Art — Philadelphia, PA, USA
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Interior by Edgar Degas, 1868
Nobody has ever settled what's happening in here. It's carried two titles almost from the start, one of them far uglier than the other, and people have spent a century hunting for the novel it's supposed to illustrate without ever agreeing on which one.
Erisava: The only warm thing in this room is that lamp, and it doesn't reduce any of the tension.
At the Moulin Rouge, The Dance by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1890
The cabaret had only just opened when this was painted, and he did a whole run of pictures of the place. Someone apparently found writing on the back explaining that the man is teaching a new girl the steps — the dancer went by the nickname 'the Boneless'. The crowd is said to be full of actual regulars, his own father among them.
Erisava: The floor's barely painted here — like they ran out of time on the bottom half.
Self-Portrait with Masks by James Ensor, 1937
His family ran a souvenir shop in a seaside town, selling carnival masks in among the shells and knick-knacks, and the masks kept turning up in his paintings for the rest of his life. This is a late one — supposedly he'd already painted himself in a crowd of them decades before.
Erisava: It's all sickly green except that one red slab, and it makes him look ill too.