Auction introduction: For the inaugural New York 19th-Century European Art sale at The Breuer, Sotheby's is pleased to present a live sale bringing together paintings of exceptional quality, presence, and expressive range. Rather than following a single movement, the selection reflects a century in which artists balanced ideal form and academic excellence with an increasingly nuanced attention to mood, atmosphere, and ambiguity. The sale is anchored by outstanding examples of sensual classicism and ideal beauty by William Adolphe Bouguereau, Frederic Leighton, John William Godward, and Albert Joseph Moore, whose works exemplify refinement, harmony, and control of the human figure at the highest level. Complementing them are sublime expressions of academic and Salon tradition by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Friedrich Nerly, where restraint, atmosphere, and tonal balance elevate observation into enduring form.