The Yellow Jacket, William McGregor Paxton, oil on canvas, roughly 27 x 22 inches (56 x 69 cm).

Link is to Bonham’s, which auctioned the painting in 2016 and has a zoomable version on the auction detail page. I don’t know the current location; I would assume it’s in a private collection. There is a smaller but reasonably large image online as part of an article about the sale on Antiques and the Arts (click on small image for larger version).

William McGregor Paxton was noted for his serene, contemplative paintings of elegantly dressed women in room interiors. In this beautifully realized example, you can see his fascination with the compositions of Vermeer, an interest he shared with fellow member of the Guild of Boston Painters, Edmund Charles Tarbell.

The rendering of the woman’s face and hair is a wonderful example of Paxton’s command of soft edges, the robe a study in subtle values, and the open book a tribute to the power of suggested detail.

Near Sydenham Hill, Camille Pissarro; oil on canvas, roughy 17 x 21 inches (43 x 53 cm). Link is to zoomable version on Google Art Project; downloadable version on Wikimedia Commons; original is in the Kimbell Art Museum.

Camille Pissarro is one of my favorites among the original French Impressionist painters.

I love the sense of atmospheric distance in this painting of the countryside near London, where — following Monet’s lead — the artist moved his family to escape the violence of the Prussian siege of Paris in 1870.

The foreground trees are so roughly indicated they appear to act primarily as a framing device. My eye is immediately drawn to the row of houses in the middleground, and then to the church beyond, all of them seemingly rough smudges of color on close inspection, but resolving to a naturalistic scene from sufficient distance.

A closer look also reveals a lone figure in the left middleground. I didn’t realize until reading the museum’s description of the painting that the white plume in the right middleground is the smoke of a passing train.