Rare and important works by Pablo Picasso, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Auguste Rodin, Henri Matisse, and Piet Mondrian are among the highlights of Christie’s upcoming Evening Sale of Impressionist and Modern Art on November 3. Forty exceptional works will be offered, including paintings, drawings, and sculpture. The sale is expected to achieve in excess of $68 million.

Among the most anticipated works to be offered this season is Picasso’s vibrant Tête de Femme from 1943, a wartime portrait of the artist’s muse and mistress Dora Maar (pictured page one, right). Painted in October 1943 during a period of continued hardship and deprivation in Paris, the portrait is remarkable for its bright, saturated colors and celebratory air — an effect quite different from the mostly somber-hued portraits by Picasso from the same period. Dora Maar is discernible in the simplified and disjointed face in the painting by her large staring eyes, trademark raven hair (represented here as an elongated dark blue oval), and her customary hat, dressed in this depiction with three flower-like pins and a trailing ribbon.

Of the many notable paintings that Pissarro made in and around Pontoise in the years 1872 and 1873, Le Pont de chemin de fer, Pontoise (pictured at left), remains a stand-out. Paintings of this period have been called the most purely Impressionist of Pissarro’s entire oeuvre, and here the artist used mixtures of pure color to achieve a carefully composed landscape with luxurious qualities of light.

Pissarro’s chosen view takes in the river Oise, as seen from just below the town of Pontoise, with the railway bridge visible in the near foreground. Rather than painting the modern railway as an imposition upon the quaint and verdant landscape, Pissarro has subtly integrated the iron bridge and its traffic into the surroundings, so that it becomes a landscape feature seen fully within the context of the enduring natural world