Although little known in Britain, Winslow Homer is one of America’s most celebrated and admired painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Charged with emotional and historical significance, his art tackles the complex social and geopolitical issues of his era, notably race, slavery, class and conflict, as well as broader environmental concerns such as our relationship with nature and the fragility of human life.

Between 1884 and 1909, Homer travelled to the Bahamas, Cuba and Bermuda, where he created a number of dazzling watercolours of island life. Among them is Flower Garden and Bungalow from 1899, featuring still turquoise waters, tropical sunlight and lush vegetation. Seemingly innocent at first glance, a closer look reveals a lone figure in frantic motion, surely symbolic of human isolation in remote nature.

Languish in the last of the summer sun with this jubilant landscape by André Derain. Painted in 1905 when the artist was in the South of France with Henri Matisse, it is typical of Derain’s Fauvist style, with its vertical brushstrokes, simplified forms and rich palette of vibrant colours. Like Matisse, Derain played with perspective through flattened forms and separated colour from its representational purpose, using it instead to express emotion and create pictoral structure. In Mountains at Collioure, the trees are painted with long dashes of aquamarine, while the mountains are formed from planes of bright orange and blue. A riot of jewel-toned hues, pattern and texture, it sends your eyes dancing in delight across the canvas.

Since its first outdoor festival in 1966 — which was established by community activist Rhaune Laslett to ease inter-cultural tensions in the area — the Notting Hill carnival has expanded into a dazzling showcase of music, dance and Caribbean culture. Think of the carnival today and you’ll likely conjure scenes of bold, brilliant colour, whirling movement and thumping beats. Or maybe past performances by Beyoncé, Stormzy or Lil’Kim? Which is exactly why we love Charlie Gillett’s black-and-white image from 1972. Despite its monochrome palette, it vibrantly captures the fun, energy and community spirit at the heart of the carnival celebrations — a testament to the power of documentary photography.

Georgia O’Keeffe believed that art, like music, could express emotional states and sensations independent of representational subject matter. ‘I found that I could say things with colour and shapes,’ she once wrote, ‘that I couldn’t say in other way — things I had no words for.’ In her early abstract works, O’Keeffe experimented with close crops, smooth surfaces, swelling forms and gradual colour transitions to evoke the experience of sound and the rhythms she perceived in nature. Characterised by its undulating forms and vibrant palette of colours, Music, Pink and Blue No. 2 (1918) is one such brilliant example.

Currently installed in an old-growth beech grove in Jupiter Artland’s informal woodland is Tracey Emin’s I Lay Here For You (2022). The six-metre bronze depicts a nude woman, face burrowed into the ground, posterior raised. She avoids eye contact and is wholly content in her own company. This monumental celebration of sexual intimacy is part of an exhibition of new works made in the wake of Emin’s recovery from bladder cancer that reflect on the possibility of love after hardship. As with much of the artist’s work, it explores the tension between fragility, hope, sexuality and vulnerability, prompting the viewer to reconsider woman’s place in nature.

The femme fatale dominates the art of Gustav Klimt, the fin-de-siècle Viennese painter also known for his use of gold, brilliant colour and decorative patterns. This painting, however, depicts a young virgin sleeping peacefully under a blanket with pretty flowers and spirals. At first glance, it’s a picture of innocence. But a closer look will reveal Klimt’s frank eroticism: the girl is in fact dreaming about her sexual awakening, which involves six naked women. Executed in 1913, at the height of Klimt’s fame, it celebrates female sexuality, desire and pleasure in a bold embrace of la vie moderne.

Rising to prominence in the 1950s, Slim Aarons famously described his photographs as ‘attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places’ — and this glorious snapshot is no exception. A window into a bygone era of Hollywood glamour and charisma, it shows film producer Kevin McClory and his family taking a sea drive in an Amphicar across the harbour at Nassau in the Bahamas in 1967. It has all the hallmarks of a signature Aarons: striking location, jet-setting celebrities and a certain nonchalant quality that transports you in time and place. What could be more escapist?

American painter Amy Sherald’s bold portraits are visually arresting and culturally significant in equal parts. Not only is the Georgia-born, Baltimore-based artist the first woman and first African-American to ever receive the grand prize in the 2016 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C, but in 2018 she was selected by First Lady Michelle Obama to paint her portrait for the official commission from that same gallery. While her warm, startling portrait of the First Lady may have shot Sherald to fame, her colourful portraits of anonymous African American figures are equally intriguing.

In each of Sherald’s portraits, a contemporary African American figure fixes their gaze on the viewer, posed against a different wash of colour — a cornflower yellow, crimson red or, as in this case, a textured green. It’s realism through Sherald’s lens, and the simplicity of the canvas at first look belies the subtle nuances that you uncover once you spend more time studying the portrait. Sherald invites the viewer to invest in that viewing time, and in the process, discover hints of the individual’s personality, mood and character in the details of their expression. The portraits in themselves are a radical act, creating a way for African American subjects to occupy space in a format that has traditionally been preserved for the White and privileged.

Milton Avery’s luminous paintings are characterised by bold colours and flat shapes. ‘I do not use linear perspective,’ he once said, ‘but achieve depth by color.’ Born in Upstate New York in 1885, Avery straddled American Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism — though he identified with neither movement — and drew inspiration from European Modernism, particularly Matisse and Cézanne, who prioritised colour in their compositions.

Over the course of his prolific career, he painted everything from landscapes and seascapes to the city, domestic life and portraits. In his late work, he favoured non-associative colours in his compositions and a pared-back subject matter. Two Figures on Beach is one such brilliant example. Executed in 1950, it shows the modernist flattening, colour sensibility and simplified forms, for which he became celebrated.