The simple truth - still-lifes by Félix Vallotton

Poivrons rouges sur table ronde, laquée blanc, 1915.

Dame-Jeanne et caisse, 1925.

Chrysanthèmes et feuillage d'automne, 1922.

Le Jambon, 1918.

Soucis et mandarines, 1924.

Nature morte avec cruche en terre cuite, 1923.

La Bibliotheque, 1921.

Tulipes et statuette de Maillol, 1913.

La viande et les œufs, 1918.

Cruche et hortensia, 1921.

Le Panier des cerises, 1921.

Nature morte avec des fleurs, 1925.

Nature morte aux pommes, 1910.

Corbeille de mandarines et bananes, 1923.

 Nature morte avec un journal, 1923.

Nature morte à l'assiette bleue, 1922.

Entrecôte, 1914.

Fleurs blanches dans un vase décoré, 1906.

Oignons et soupière, 1925.

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Félix Edouard Vallotton (December 28, 1865, Lausanne - December 29, 1925, Neuilly-sur-Seine), Swiss-born French painter and printmaker. He first gained recognition for his woodcuts, but was predominantly active as a painter after the turn of the century. He produced portraits, landscapes, nudes, still-lifes, and other subjects, all painted with a detached realism.

He was associated with Les Nabis, a group of young French artists that was active during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Its members included Bonnard, Vuillard, and Maurice Denis, and the group is seen as an important link between Impressionism and the early movements of modernism.

Wikipedia has quite an extensive entry on the artist and his work, so I'll leave the detail to them this time.

Three portraits of Strigi-La-Sapa "Joe Black Fox" by Gertrude Käsebier, circa 1898-1900

Strigi-La-Sapa, known as Joe Black Fox or, simply, Black Fox (circa 1844 (that early of a date seems highly unlikely) - circa 1928), was an Oglala Lakota, a nephew to Sitting Bull and a cousin of Crazy Horse. Little is known about his life beyond the fact that he was recruited in 1889, along with other members of his extended family, to be performers in William "Buffalo Bill" Cody's traveling Wild West shows. Joe Black Fox left Cody's show in 1907 and is said sadly to have died blind and destitute at Pine Ridge circa 1928.

 Photographs credited to John F. Byrnes & Co., 1901. (Three images.)

With Siŋté Máza "Iron Tail."

With Samuel Lone Bear, carte de visite, unknown photographer and date.
The note on the reverse reads: "Samuel Lone Bear Joseph Black Fox are good Friend Till the die for ever.  From your Friend Luke L. Hawk." 

Cody's circus-like attraction was founded in 1883 and toured the United States and Europe for more than three decades, even performing for Queen Victoria. Over the years, hundreds of Native Americans would perform with Buffalo Bill's Wild West, later billed as Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World. They were contracted, hired and paid by the season, the best known performers being treated as celebrities by the public and in the press. Cody primarily employed members of the Lakota Nation from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, and with the great fame of the shows, both nationally and internationally, the culture of the Lakota came to be seen by many as representative of that of Native Americans in general. The performers participated in equestrian acts, demonstrations of skill with bow and arrow, dance, and historical reenactment. The most memorable performances - and those most perplexing to a modern consciousness - were those in which participants recreated events from the very recent past. They included mock attacks on settler cabins, stagecoaches and wagon trains. And with Buffalo Bill's show, between 1885 and 1898, they even re-enacted the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the death of Custer. 

Unknown photographer and date.

Almost from the beginning, though, government reformers, intent on Native assimilation, had begun trying to restrict the participation of "Show Indians" in Wild West shows such as Cody's. (Native performers referred to themselves as oskate wicasa, or "show man.") But it doesn't appear that it had anything to do with the content of the shows or concern that the performers were being ill-treated, but only that they were being allowed to "act like Indians" rather than being forced to assimilate. By all accounts, Cody had great respect for his Native American performers and their culture. And in 1890 Joe Black Fox was one of several who testified before the United States Commissioner of Indian Affairs, strongly defending Cody's treatment of his performers. Vine Deloria, Jr. has written that the first generation of "Show Indians" spent their time performing "cowboys and Indian" as a form of refusal to abandon their culture, a way to continue participation in cultural practices deemed illegal on the reservations: "Perhaps they realized in the deepest sense, that even a caricature of their youth was preferable to a complete surrender to the homogenization that was overtaking American society." It was also a way for performers and their families to escape their degrading internment on reservations for six months of the year, to be paid and fed, their accommodation and expenses provided for, to be allowed to wear their now forbidden traditional clothing, and to be free of the harassment of  missionaries, teachers, politicians, and others determined on their "improvement."

Vintage print with Kasëbier's monogram.

Beginning in 1898, many of the Native Americans who performed in Cody's Wild West shows were photographed by Gertrude Kasëbier. The celebrated photographer had developed a lifelong affection for Native American culture during her youth in the Colorado Territory, and from her studio in Manhattan, she created hundreds of portraits as Cody's performers traveled through New York. Käsebier's project was meant to be a purely artistic endeavor, not intended for commercial purposes, and her photographs were never used in Buffalo Bill's Wild West program booklets or promotional posters.

Working the show - circus scenes by Victor Coleman Anderson

Circus Performers.
(I've been able to find the dates for only three of the paintings here, but I think most come from late in Anderson's career, circa 1920s-30s.)

Elephant Girl.

Wet Night at the Circus.

Under the Big Top.

 Arabian Scene, magazine cover art.

Trick Rider (sketch).

Riders in the Spectacle, 1936.

Circus Nights.

Pageant, Exit Camel, circa 1930.

Life Magazine cover, 1913.

The Circus Pageant.

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Victor Coleman Anderson (1882 - 1937), American painter and illustrator, primarily known for his scenes of rural life and for landscapes, and whose work was featured in Life and other magazines of the early twentieth century. His father, Frank Anderson, was a well-known painter of the Hudson River School, and the son drew and painted from an early age, eventually entering the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He produced a wide range of illustrations for books as well as oil paintings, and he exhibited at the National Academy. For many years, he lived and had his studio in White Plains, New York, where he died at the age of fifty-four or -five.

His daughter, Joan Howe (1915 - 2005), was a well-known watercolor artist who lived and worked in both New York and Florida.

The most beautiful rest - The Tomb of Maria Christina of Austria by Antonio Canova, by Charles Swagers, circa 1820s

This painting by the little-known French artist Charles Swagers depicts the cenotaph that Prince Albert of Saxony, Duke of Teschen commissioned from Antonio Canova as a memorial to his wife, born Archduchess Maria Christina of Austria, who died in 1798. The monument, which stands in the Augustinian Church - part of the Hofburg Palace complex in Vienna - was completed in 1805 and was a strikingly modern interpretation of a figural tomb. The deceased appears only in a portrait medallion, and Christian imagery has been eliminated. It seems the Duke had envisioned a traditional homage to the deceased, but Canova created a new kind of monument, in which the theme of death itself was emphasized: the angel of death, the mourning lion, the cortège of figures - young and old, male and female - entering the doorway of the royal tomb, which has become a portal into the afterlife.

The painting, thought to have been completed in the 1820s but only submitted to the Paris Salon in 1833, differs in one significant way from the actual monument: the inscription on the lintel reads MARIAE CHRISTINAE AVSTRIACAE/ ALBERTI SAXONIAE PRINCIPIS CONIVCI (To Maria Christina of Austria/ Wife of Albert, Prince of Saxony), while in Canova's composition it reads simply VXORI OPTIMAE /ALBERTVS (To the Best Wife/Albert). 

Drawing by Domenico del Frate, engraved by Pietro Bonato, 1805.

Watercolor by an unknown artist, French School, circa first quarter of the nineteenth century.

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Maria Christina, Duchess of Teschen (Maria Christina Johanna Josepha Antonia; 13 May 1742 - 24 June 1798), the fifth and favorite child of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. Married in 1766 to Prince Albert of Saxony - a rare love match - the couple received the Duchy of Teschen. Jointly with her husband, she was appointed Governor of the Austrian Netherlands from 1781 to 1789 and from 1791 to 1792. After expulsions from the Netherlands in 1789 and 1792, during unrest spurred on by the revolution in France, she and her husband eventually returned Vienna where, not long after, she would die at the age of fifty-six. Her bereaved husband commissioned an impressive monument to his wife in the Augustinian Church, the work of the famous neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova. The Duchess is actually buried in the in the Tuscan Vault of the Imperial Crypt in Vienna. When Prince Albert died in 1822 he was buried next to his wife and their daughter, their only child, who had been born fifty-five years before, and only lived for a day.

 Attributed to Martin van Meytens, circa 1765.

By Johan Zoffany, 1776.

By Alexandre Roslin, 1778.

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Charles Swagers (1792-after 1849), French painter, primarily of historical subjects, active in the early nineteenth century. He studied under his father, Franz Swagers, a landscape and marine painter from Utrecht who had settled in Paris. His mother, Elisa, née Méri, was a miniature painter and the professor of drawing at Écouen. His best known work is the painting of Canova's Tomb of Maria Christina of Austria which he exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1833. In 1840 he was appointed professor of drawing and composition in Dieppe. His sister, Caroline, also a student of their father's, practiced in Paris and frequently exhibited at the Salon. Swagers' son, Édouard, was a painter and lithographer who also practiced in Paris.