National Gallery of Art audio guide,
five stops, free.

She is not bronze. Almost every other Little Dancer in the world is, at least twenty-eight of them scattered through museums, and they are all copies of the thing standing in front of you. This one is pigmented beeswax over a metal armature, with rope and paintbrushes packed inside for structure and clay laid over them, ninety-eight point nine centimetres tall without her base. About two-thirds life size. The bodice is cotton, the skirt is real tulle, the slippers are linen, and the hair is real human hair with a silk ribbon in it. Degas coated nearly all of it in wax. The hair, the ribbon and the tutu he left as they were.

The girl was Marie van Goethem, a Belgian student at the dance school of the Paris Opera. Degas showed her in Paris in 1881, at the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition, inside a glass case, and the room did not know what to do with her. Joris-Karl Huysmans called her the first truly modern attempt at sculpture he knew. The critic Paul Mantz called her the flower of precocious depravity, and wrote that her face was marked by the hateful promise of every vice.

So look at the face and decide for yourself. The chin is up, the eyes are almost shut, the nose is squat and the mouth is slightly pursed. It is not a pretty pose and it is not a proud one. It is the fourth position at rest, the position a fourteen-year-old holds while somebody older watches her hold it.

After 1881 she went back to the studio and stayed there. She was still there when Degas died in 1917. In May 1918 his heirs signed a contract with the Hébrard foundry in Paris to reproduce his sculptures in bronze, and that contract said the original wax figures would become the property of the foundry. The casting took at least thirteen years, from 1919 to 1932. So the wax spent most of the twentieth century in private hands, not in a museum. Paul Mellon bought her from a New York dealer in May 1956 and she came here as his bequest in 1999, one of forty-nine original Degas waxes the Mellons gave this museum.

Before you move on, find the second dancer in this room. Same girl, same age, same pose, and no clothes at all. It is Degas's nude study for her, and seeing the two together tells you exactly how much work the tutu was doing.

Everything in this picture is telling you a story about the last eight hours, and the clock is the proof. Find it, high on the wall behind his right shoulder. It reads thirteen minutes past four in the morning. The candle in the lamp on the desk has burned down to a stub. His cuffs are unbuttoned. His stockings have wrinkled at the ankle. His hair is out of order. Jacques-Louis David has painted an emperor who has been up all night.

Up all night doing what? That is on the rolled paper by the desk, where four capital letters are legible: CODE. The Code Napoléon, the civil law that outlasted every one of his battles. This is deliberate. In 1812 Napoleon had already been painted by David as a general crossing the Alps, and carved by Canova as a Roman god in marble. Here he is a lawmaker in a study, and the only military object in reach is a thin sword lying on a chair, put aside.

The uniform is that of a colonel of the Foot Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard, blue with white facings and red cuffs, with gold epaulettes, and his Legion of Honour and Order of the Iron Crown decorations. The gilded chair is upholstered in scarlet worked with gold bees, the emblem of the imperial dynasty, which is a quiet way of saying that this will go on after him.

Here is the surprise. This painting was never meant for France. It was a private commission from a Scot, Alexander, marquis of Douglas, later the tenth Duke of Hamilton, who admired Napoleon; he ordered it in 1811 and David delivered it in 1812. David's own list of his works, made a few years later, calls it the full-length portrait of the Emperor in his study, a picture for England. And despite all that detail, it is unlikely Napoleon ever sat for it.

David signed it in Latin, on a scroll of paper lying on the floor behind the desk to your left: LVD.CI.DAVID OPVS 1812. He also made a second version, in which the clock reads four o'clock exactly and Napoleon wears the hunter-green uniform of the mounted Chasseurs.

The painting hung at Hamilton Palace in Scotland until the great Hamilton sale of 1882, where it was bought for the fifth Earl of Rosebery. His son sold it in 1951, the dealers Wildenstein sold it in 1954 to the Kress Foundation, and the Foundation gave it to this museum in 1961. It has been about as far from the Tuileries as a painting can get.

Stand close and look at her face, because there isn't one. It is a few long strokes of white paint laid across the head, a veil caught by the wind, and under it almost nothing. Monet is not hiding his wife from you. He is telling you that at this distance, on a bright day, with the wind up, this is genuinely all you would see.

The woman is Camille, his wife. The boy on the far side of the rise, with the grass and the yellow flowers up to his waist, is their son Jean. They lived at Argenteuil from 1871 to 1877, and this is a walk on a windy summer afternoon there. It is not a portrait and nobody commissioned it. It is a family scene, painted outdoors and painted fast, probably in one sitting of a few hours.

For something done that quickly it is enormous by his standards. A hundred centimetres by eighty-one, the largest thing Monet painted in the whole of the 1870s. And look where he has put you. You are below her, on the slope, looking up, so she is standing against sky rather than landscape and the parasol nearly touches the top edge of the canvas. Her shadow runs down the grass diagonally towards your feet. That shadow is doing the work of an entire foreground.

Now the parasol. Its underside is green, and it is the same green as the meadow, so the picture is held together by a colour repeated at the top and the bottom of it. The clouds behind her are not white; they are blue and choppy, painted with the same restless stroke as the grass. Everything in the canvas is moving in the same wind.

It was shown in April 1876 at the Second Impressionist Exhibition, in Paul Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris, one of eighteen Monets in that room. John Singer Sargent saw it there and thirteen years later painted his own answer to it, Two Girls with Parasols at Fladbury. Monet himself came back to the idea in 1886, twice, at Giverny, with his second wife's daughter Suzanne holding the parasol; those two are in the Musée d'Orsay.

And he sold this one in 1876 to Doctor Georges de Bellio, his homeopath, who was regularly paid in Monet's paintings rather than in money. It passed through de Bellio's daughter, then Georges Menier, and was knocked down at the Menier sale at the Palais Galliera in Paris on the fifteenth of June 1965, where it was bought for Paul Mellon. He gave it to this museum in 1983.

One last thing. Bottom right corner, in royal blue: Claude Monet 75.