One of the men at the back of this terrace helped write À la recherche du temps perdu — indirectly. The figure in the top hat, standing in the background, is Charles Ephrussi, art historian, collector and one of the models Proust drew on for Charles Swann. Renoir put him in the painting in formal…
This painting was owned by another Impressionist. Gustave Caillebotte – painter, sailor and the man who quietly bankrolled the movement – bought it and left it to the French state in his will. The state hesitated. The bequest of sixty-seven canvases caused a public row, and officials accepted only part of it. This one got…
This painting has a date on it. Jeong Seon inscribed the intercalary fifth month of the year sinmi — July 1751 — which is unusual for a painter who rarely dated anything. That same month his closest friend, the poet Yi Byeong-yeon, lay dying. They had known each other for over fifty years and had…
This view does not exist. There is no point anywhere in the Geumgang range from which you could see what Jeong Seon painted — he combined several vantage points into one image, as though hovering above the whole massif. And yet every peak in it is identifiable and can be matched to a map. It…
Mondrian could not stand the colour green. When he dined with friends he asked to sit with his back to the window so he would not have to look at trees. In the courtyard of his studio he had the trunks painted white. Green was the colour of nature, and nature was what he believed…
Many scholars consider this the better of the two paintings. Goya made it several years after the nude, and it shows in every stroke — the paint is laid on faster, broader, with far more freedom. The nude is smooth and worked up; the clothed maja is painted with bravura. If you only look at…
Direct eye contact was not the scandal here. Titian’s Venus of Urbino had done that 250 years earlier, and Goya knew it. The break was something else: this is the first known painting in Western art to show a woman’s pubic hair, with no mythological cover and no gesture of modesty. For the Inquisition that…
In Proust, the writer Bergotte dies in front of this painting, staring at “a little patch of yellow wall.” The trouble is that nobody knows which patch he meant. Scholars have proposed a roof, a stretch of masonry by the gate, a band of sand. Some argue that no such wall exists on the canvas…
Most people walk past small paintings in museums without a second glance — but The Milkmaid, measuring just 45.5 by 41 centimetres, has stopped visitors dead in their tracks for over three and a half centuries. This modest canvas holds more visual intelligence per square inch than almost any other work in Western art history….
A painting about birth and hope was the last thing Van Gogh made before the worst collapse of his time at Saint-Rémy. He finished it in February 1890. Within days he went into a crisis that lasted close to two months, during which he could neither paint nor write letters. When he recovered in April,…
Here is a striking fact that stops most visitors cold: when Vincent van Gogh painted The Bedroom, he was so exhausted from work and illness that he intended the painting to rest the mind — yet the result is one of the most psychologically charged rooms in all of Western art. Quick Facts Artist: Vincent…
Most people assume Van Gogh painted his famous starry skies from imagination – but Café Terrace at Night was made on the spot, on the cobblestones of Arles, with a gas lantern blazing over the terrace and the real September sky overhead. Astronomers have since matched the stars in it to a specific night: around…