These paintings originally were painted for people who just wanted to relax and escape the realities of their world, like pollution and overpopulation. And they still offer us a tremendous escape. They’re really just luscious...

They have this fantastic nugget of historical material from the Gilded Age. It’s a wonderful, small overview of American painting from about 1870 to 1915.

Many of the Americans went to Paris to study in the 1880s and absorbed the new style (impressionism) there.

Molly kept house for him when she was older. But when she was younger, she was quite a rakish young woman. She had an affair with a married man in the 1890s that was the...