“Love, Peace, Unity & Hope” was an exhibition that featured more than 60 Artists.
It was presented January 25 – April 25, 2025

This page presents Art by Artists from Art History
on the theme of Love, Peace, Unity & Hope. 

Visit Page 1 of this exhibition to view art by Contemporary Artists.

Mary Cassatt

Mother Combing Her Child’s Hair, pastel painting. Photo: Public Domain.

I have touched with a sense of art some people — they felt the love and the life. Can you offer me anything to compare to that joy for an artist?

Eugene Delacroix

Eugene Delacroix, “Sketch for Peace Descends to Earth”, oil on canvas, 77.7 x 55.1 cm, created in 1852. Location: Petit Palais, Paris, France. Photo: Public Domain. Delacroix’s painting, depicts a divine figure amidst an ethereal setting of clouds and light, symbolizing the descent of peace from the heavens. The heavenly being is seemingly in motion, a focal point from which energy emanates and affects the surrounding forms. The dynamism in the composition is further accentuated by the use of swirling clouds and the fluid postures of the figures. The celestial atmosphere evokes a visceral response that is characteristic of Delacroix’s Romantic vision.

How infinitely happy, then, is the man who reflects nature like a mirror without being aware of it, who does the thing for love of it and not from any pretensions to take first place. This noble unself-consciousness is what we find in all truly great men, in the founders of the arts. Always, at the back of your soul, there is something that says to you, ‘Mortal, drawn from eternal life for a short time, think how precious these moments are.’ ~ Eugene Delacroix

Henri Matisse

The Joy of Life, Le Bonheur de Vivre, oil on canvas, 69″ x 95″. Created 1905 – 1906. Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, PA. Photo: Public Domain.

Love wants to rise, not to be held down by anything base… He who loves flies, runs, and rejoices; he is free and nothing holds him back. Derive happiness from yourself, from a good day’s work, from the clearing that it makes in the fog that surrounds us. Nothing can be accomplished without love.

Paul Gauguin

Tahitian: Mahana no Atua (Day of the God), oil on canvas, 25.9″ x 34.2″, Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection. Photo: Public domain.

I have come to an unalterable decision — to go and live forever in Polynesia. Then I can end my days in peace and freedom, without thoughts of tomorrow and this eternal struggle against idiots. Let everything about you breathe the calm and peace of the soul.

Piet Mondrian

Tableau I, oil on canvas, 40.5″ x 39.3″, 1921. Photo: Public domain.

Observing sea, sky and stars, I sought to indicate their plastic function through a multiplicity of crossing verticals and horizontals. Impressed by the vastness of Nature, I was trying to express its expansion, rest and unity.

Berthe Morisot

Berthe Morisot, The Cradle, In French: “Mme Pontillon et sa fille Blanche”, oil on canvas, 46″ x 56″. Photo: Public Domain.

In love there is sentiment and passion I know only sentiment through myself, passion through others. I hear certain voices I know say: sentiment = love of the intellect; I can answer: passion = the love of the body.

Vincent van Gogh

The Starry Night, oil on canvas, 29″ x 36.25″, 1889. In the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA, New York, NY. Photo: Public domain.

“I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart.  It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much. I make more arbitrary use of colour to express myself more forcefully … To express the love of two lovers by the marriage of two complementary colours … To express hope by some star.”

Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall, L’Anniversaire Huile sur Toile, 32″ x 40″. Photo: Public Domain in the U.S.

Despite all the troubles of our world, in my heart I have never given up on the love in which I was brought up or on man’s hope in love. In life, just as on the artist’s palette, there is but one single colour that gives meaning to life and art – the colour of love.

Claude Monet

Water Lilies, oil on canvas, 32″ diameter. Created in 1908. In the collection of Dallas Museum of Art. Photo: Public Domain in the U.S.

Eventually, my eyes were opened, and I really understood nature. I learned to love at the same time. Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love. My only desire is an intimate infusion with nature, and the only fate I wish is to have worked and lived in harmony with her laws.

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso. Motherhood, oil on canvas, 1901. Style: Post-Impressionism. Blue Period. Photo: Public Domain.

Love must be proven by facts and not by reasons. Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don’t start measuring her limbs.

Vincent van Gogh

Irises, oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Adele R. Levy, in  1958. Photo: Pubic domain.

Love always brings difficulties, that is true, but the good side of it is that it gives energy.

Gustav Klimt

Hope II, oil, gold, and platinum on canvas on canvas, 43.5″ x 43.5″. Created 1907 – 1908. Photo: Public domain in the U.S.

There is always hope, as long as the canvases are empty.

Joan Miró

The Smile of the Flamboyant Wings. Original title “El somriure de les ales flamejants”, oil painting, 51″ x 35″. Created in 1953. Photo: Fair use.

Poetry and painting are done in the same way you make love; it’s an exchange of blood, a total embrace – without caution, without any thought of protecting yourself.

Ansel Adams

Evening, McDonald Lake, Glacier National Park, photograph. Photo: Public Domain, via commons.wikimedia.org

You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.

Visit Page 1 of This Exhibition.

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Also View “The Kiss in Art: An Expression of Love and Romance”