The Milwaukee Art Museum's collection of 19th-century European painting and sculpture contains outstanding examples from almost every period and movement.

The nucleus of the collection was created with the establishment of the Layton Art Gallery in 1888. Included in Layton's original gift are such favorites as Bouguereau's Homer and His Guide and Bastien-Lepage's The Wood Gatherer. The English-born Layton wished to give the public a representative range of contemporary European and American art, avoiding what he viewed as the more extravagant and controversial examples of Impressionism. To broaden the focus of the original collection, important works by Gustave Courbet and Impressionists Claude Monet, Gustave Caillebotte, and the sculptor Auguste Rodin were added to the Collection in the late 1950s and 1960s. The 2001 donation of a seminal early landscape by

Pierre-Auguste Renoir further expands the scope and importance of the Museum's Impressionist holdings.

In 1976 René von Schleinitz significantly expanded the overall range of the 19th-century collection with his donation of over 100 paintings by such artists as Eduard von Grützner, Carl Spitzweg and Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, making Milwaukee a world center for 19th-century German genre painting. The René von Schleinitz Collection has recently been expanded to include works by Joseph-Anton Koch and several exceptional pieces of Biedermeier furniture. The Milwaukee Art Museum is well on its way to becoming a world center for all movements of 19th- and early 20th-century German art.

Andreas Achenbach (German, 1815-1910) Fish Market at Ostend, 1886	Salvatore Florenti Albano (Italian, 1841-1893) Portrait Bust of Frederick Layton, 1889
Lawrence Alma-Tadema (English, b. Dutch, 1836-1912) A Roman Amateur (also known as A Roman Art Lover), 1870	Heinrich von Angeli (Austrian, 1840-1925) Portrait of Mrs. Christian Wahl, 1873
Thomas Annan (Scottish, 1829-1887) Close, No. 46 Saltmarket, 1868/77	Vienna, Austria Chair, 1830/35
Vienna, Austria Writing Cabinet, ca. 1810-15	Edouard-Denis Baldus (French, b. Prussia, 1813-1889) Aigues-Mortes, 1853/61
Jules Bastien-Lepage (French, 1848-1884) Le Père Jacques (Woodgatherer), 1881	Felice Beato (British, b. Italy ca. 1825-ca. 1908, active in Japan, Constantinople, the Mediteranean, and Asia) Nakashima, Japan, ca. 1860