Romanticism dominated European art in the early 19th century, exalting emotion, imagination and the sublime power of nature over Enlightenment reason. From Caspar David Friedrich’s misty solitudes to Eugène Delacroix’s revolutionary fervour, it taught painting to feel.
There is a hare in this painting, and today almost nobody can see it. Turner painted it on the track, ahead of the locomotive, in the last touches before the 1844 exhibition — and the thin paint has since become almost transparent, sinking into the colour of the rails. According to the painter George Dunlop…
This ship could not have looked like this. Before the Temeraire was sold for breaking, everything had been stripped from her: masts, rigging, guns, even part of the planking. What went up the Thames was a bare hull. Turner gave her masts back — and set her sailing towards the sunset, though in reality she…
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 1938, during the Spanish Civil War, a lorry carrying the Prado’s two great Goya canvases of 1808 crashed at Benicarló, on the Mediterranean coast. The Second of May, travelling on its stretcher, was torn into several pieces. It was patched together provisionally, but some fragments could not be put back, and for seventy years…
For the first forty years, nobody saw this painting. Commissioned in 1814, it went into storage and the first firm record of it hanging in the Prado dates from 1872. The reason was simple: Ferdinand VII, who paid for it, was building his legitimacy on the return of a rightful monarch — not on a…
This is not quite what Goya painted. Before the mural was transferred from wall to canvas in 1874, the photographer Jean Laurent recorded it — and the photograph shows something else. The image was wider, and elements on the right no longer exist. The restorer removed them during the transfer. What hangs in the Prado…
Most people assume Liberty Leading the People depicts the French Revolution of 1789 — but it doesn’t. Eugène Delacroix painted this electrifying masterpiece in 1830, just weeks after a different uprising shook Paris and toppled King Charles X from his throne. That single misconception tells you everything about how powerfully this image has burned itself…
England did not want this painting. Shown at the Royal Academy in 1821, it failed to find a buyer and sat in the studio for three years. It took the Paris Salon of 1824 to change that — a gold medal from Charles X, and a generation of French painters who took what they saw…
One cast of this sculpture has had its legs blown apart, and the museum decided to leave it that way. In March 1970 someone planted explosives beneath the cast outside the Cleveland Museum of Art. After consulting the Musée Rodin, Cleveland concluded that restoring it would be a forgery. It stands by the entrance today,…
This landscape does not exist. Every peak in it is real and identifiable — Friedrich sketched them across the Elbe Sandstone Mountains over years — but no vantage point in Saxony shows them arranged this way. He assembled the view in his studio from drawings, then painted it in a room he had deliberately stripped…