Internationally recognized for its signature masterworks by leading artists of the era, the museum's collection of European painting and sculpture from 1800 to 1960 features over 537 objects. Highlights of 19th-century painting include major works by Jacques-Louis David, Francisco Goya, Camille Corot, and Gustave Courbet. Paintings by artists of the Barbizon School and the Realist movement are joined by an intriguing selection of works by lesser-known French academic and orientalist painters.

Impressionism and Post-Impressionism are well represented through works by Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Gustave Caillebotte, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin. J.M.W. Turner's The Burning of the Houses of Parliament highlights a rich collection of British art that also features distinguished works by John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, John Linnell, Frederic Leighton, and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Paintings by Arnold Böcklin and Giovanni Segantini are among the works by German, Austrian, Swiss, Danish, and Scandinavian artists. This collection is coupled with a fine selection of 19th-century sculptures by Antonio Canova, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, Jules Dalou, Edgar Degas, George Minne, and Medardo Rosso. The highlight of the sculpture collection is a group of more than 30 works by Auguste Rodin, including a life plaster of the artist's Heroic Head of Pierre de Weissant and life-time bronze casts of The Age of Bronze and The Large Thinker.

The collection features an equally broad range of works by avant-garde artists of the 20th century. Pablo Picasso is represented by a remarkable group of paintings, among them the artist's blue-period masterpiece La Vie. Other highlights of the collection include superb paintings by artists associated with the Nabis (Pierre Bonnard, édouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis), the Fauves (Henri Matisse, André Derain, Georges Rouault), and the School of Paris (Henri Rousseau, Amadeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine). Cubism and related movements are represented through paintings by Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Frantisek Kupka, Alexsandra Exter, and Piet Mondrian, as well as sculptures by Constantin Brancusi, Jacques Lipchitz, and Henry Moore.

Major examples of German Expressionism and Neuesachlichkeit art are found in works by Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Gabrielle Münter, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Lyonel Feininger, Otto Dix, and Ernst Barlach. Among the highlights from the Dada and Surrealist collection are paintings, sculptures, and assemblage objects by Marcel Duchamp, Jean Arp, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, and Salvador Dalí.