The anonymous artist of this screen has chosen to beautiful effect the path of simplicity, emphasizing unadorned expression akin to the mingei (folk art) ideal over technical bravura. The two large zelkova burl panels are mounted Chinese-style in footed frames with metal hinges. The panels are inlaid with ivory to form orchid flowers, with wood for the leaves and the dead tree trunk on which the plants grow.

The motif of phoenixes (symbol of the empress) and sixteen-petal-chrysanthemum silver mounts on this box suggest that it was an imperial presentation piece. The silver rim has an incised seal, reading "made by Hattori [company]," but the skilled craftsman remains unidentified.

White and Red Painting exemplifies Daniel Buren's signature style of white and colored vertical stripes that he initiated in the 1960s. Moving away from a traditional understanding of painting, he put these stripes on many kinds of supports: on canvas, on museum walls, and even on city streets and other public spaces, perhaps most famously at the Palais Royal in Paris. Buren focuses on the positioning of his paintings rather than on the exploration of their formal qualities, and while the form of his works remains consistent, each piece is distinct because it responds to its particular context. The artist asked that White and Red Painting be placed in the very center of the wall at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The result is a piece that responds to the scale of the architectural space around it and questions the place of art both literally and metaphorically.

This large dish is part of an important group made in England between about 1633 and 1697. Derived from sixteenth-century French dishes of a similar design, the group is decorated with a representation of fecundity (fertility) in the form of a reclining Venus and cavorting putti (cherubs).

Between April 1950 and February 1951, Dubuffet created over thirty-five paintings on the subject of Corps de dames, or "Ladies' Bodies." After a select group of these works were exhibited at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, in January 1951, a critic described the crude, primitive, graffiti-like representations of the female form as having been "flattened out by a steam roller and allowed to dry in the sun for quite some time."

When James Peale's eyesight declined around 1810, he abandoned miniature painting for larger oil compositions such as this still life. In this work, a lavish display of peaches, pears, and grapes spill out of a Chinese export porcelain basket and a bowl. The attention to detail and dramatic use of shadows are reminiscent of seventeenth-century Dutch still life painting. The fruit is portrayed at the height of its ripeness, though the pears are beginning to show spots of age. Completed when Peale was seventy-four, this image may represent the artist's heightened awareness of the transience of time near the end of his life.

Thomas Eakins, famous for the brutal honesty of his portraits, made an exception for Lucy Lewis, who stands as an exemplar of late nineteenth-century feminine beauty. Despite this anomaly, Lewis is typical of Eakins's sitters in other ways. She was well educated, middle class, and active as a teacher and a social advocate. When Eakins painted her portrait in 1896, Lewis was teaching at the Girls' Normal School in Philadelphia. She later served on the Board of Directors of the Starr Centre Association of Philadelphia, a social agency that provided services to Philadelphia's poorest communities.

One of the leading American marine and landscape painters of the early nineteenth century, Thomas Birch moved from England to Philadelphia in 1794. He took up marine painting during the War of 1812 and made a series of popular works chronicling the major naval battles. In addition, he produced views along the Fairmount and Jersey shores, and harbor scenes of Philadelphia and New York. This painting shows the vital commercial activity of the Delaware River, with Philadelphia's old Navy Yard in the background.

This card table and a similar side chair in the Museum's collection were made to suit each other, intended for the less formal of John and Elizabeth Cadwalader's parlors. Compared to the more formal furnishings created for the Cadwalader home, this suite of furniture conforms to the typical Philadelphia style. Nevertheless, both table and chair are distinguished as extraordinary by their hairy paw feet, a feature not commonly found on Philadelphia pieces.

A Philadelphia native, Thomas Doughty was among the pioneers of American landscape painting. This work is the largest of three known depictions of the Delaware Water Gap viewed from the west that the artist painted at the height of his career in 1826-27. With compelling realism--guided by direct observation of the site--Doughty balances his grand portrait of an iconic American landscape in the distance with the foreground scene of everyday leisure.

The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign), one of Nauman’s first neons, is a founding work in his career. Hijacking a medium generally associated with the tawdry (cheap motels, shop windows, and bars), Nauman's sign advertises a metaphysical and deeply personal message as if it were for sale. Throughout his long and illustrious career, Nauman has examined the role and responsibilities of the artist. The title statement of this poetic spiral is neither entirely facetious nor completely serious, and the contradictions embodied in the piece yield an ambiguity that is both playful and profound.

Frederick William MacMonnies excelled in allegorical figures based on classical themes, such as the joyfully secular and pagan Bacchante and this whimsical little cupid.

Filleul and her husband were on friendly terms with Benjamin Franklin, who may have sat for this portrait as a personal favor. In 1779 Louis Jacques Cathelin (1738-1804) made an engraving after the painting that was published the same year by Filleul's father, Blaise Bocquet. The map on the table is labeled PHILADELPHIA.