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…
Claude Monet tried to beat this painting and lost the canvas doing it. In 1865 he began a version six metres wide, meaning to exhibit it at the Salon and outdo Manet at his own subject. He never finished it in time, left it with his landlord as security for unpaid rent, and got it…
For a century and a half the second woman in this painting had no name. Manet knew it — he wrote it in a notebook: Laure, a model who lived on the rue de Vintimille. He painted her three times. Yet catalogues described her for generations only as “the servant,” and her face was routinely…
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…
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…
Whistler pawned this painting. In 1878 he sued the critic John Ruskin for libel and won — and the court awarded him one farthing, the smallest coin in circulation, with no costs. The case ruined him. He declared bankruptcy the following year and put his mother’s portrait up as security against his debts. Quick Facts…
Most people assume Van Gogh painted Starry Night Over the Rhone from memory or imagination – but he actually set up his easel outdoors, on the riverbank, working under a gas lamp with the night sky above him. What he did with that sky, however, was another matter entirely: the constellation at the centre of…
Here is a fact that stops most people cold: Georges Seurat painted A Sunday on La Grande Jatte using millions of tiny, individual dots of pure color – and he spent roughly two years placing every single one of them with deliberate, almost scientific precision. No sweeping brushstrokes. No blending on the canvas. Just dots,…
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…
Most people recognize The Scream instantly — but almost nobody knows that Edvard Munch was inspired to paint it after watching the sky turn blood-red during a real evening walk, an effect often attributed to the atmospheric fallout from the catastrophic 1883 eruption of Krakatoa. Quick Facts Artist: Edvard Munch Year: 1893 Medium: Oil, tempera,…
Most people don’t realize that when Vincent van Gogh painted The Starry Night in June 1889, he was doing so from the confines of a psychiatric asylum — and that the tranquil, swirling village below those famous heavens never actually existed. Quick Facts Artist: Vincent van Gogh Year: 1889 Medium: Oil on canvas Dimensions: 73.7…