60 Fun Facts About Arts and Literature

The Mona Lisa is painted on what surface?

King Francis I acquired it after Leonardo's death and it has hung in the Louvre since 1797.

Who stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911?

The Italian claimed patriotism; the theft made the painting world-famous.

The Starry Night depicts the view from Van Gogh's window at what kind of institution?

He admitted himself to Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in May 1889 and added the village from imagination.

Girl with a Pearl Earring is an example of a 'tronie'. What is that?

Vermeer's painting has hung in the Mauritshuis in The Hague since 1902.

Edvard Munch made how many versions of The Scream in paint and pastel?

Two are painted and two are pastel, plus a lithograph; both painted versions have been stolen and recovered.

In which year did Munch create The Scream?

He recalled a sunset walk when the clouds turned blood red.

Picasso's Guernica responded to the bombing of a town in which region of Spain?

German and Italian planes attacked on 26 April 1937; the painting hangs in the Reina Sofía in Madrid.

What image did Dalí's The Persistence of Memory introduce?

It sold for $250 in 1932 and was given to MoMA two years later.

How tall is Michelangelo's David?

It was the first colossal marble statue since antiquity and moved indoors to the Accademia in 1873.

Rodin's The Thinker was originally conceived as part of which larger work?

It was first called The Poet, representing Dante above the doorway.

Which pope commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling?

The work took from 1508 to 1512 and centres on nine scenes from Genesis.

Leonardo's Last Supper is painted on the wall of what kind of room?

It covers an end wall of the dining hall at Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan.

Frida Kahlo's family home, now her museum, is known by what name?

It stands in Coyoacán; a bus accident at 18 caused her lifelong pain.

Banksy's work grew out of the underground scene in which English city?

He started in the early 1990s with the DryBreadZ Crew and has never confirmed his identity.

Andy Warhol was born to immigrant parents in which city?

He worked as a commercial artist before the soup cans and the Factory.

Jackson Pollock is famous for what painting method?

He poured household paint onto canvases laid flat; he died in a car crash in 1956.

The term Impressionism comes from the title of a painting by whom?

Impression, Sunrise was shown at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874.

Roughly how many artworks did Van Gogh make in his decade as an artist?

About 860 were oil paintings, most from his last two years.

Which Jane Austen novel, published in 1813, follows Elizabeth Bennet?

She wrote it aged 20 to 21; it was her second novel to be printed.

Don Quixote was published in two parts in which years?

It is often called the first modern novel.

Who is Don Quixote's squire?

The farm labourer brings earthy wit to his master's chivalric fantasies.

Tolstoy's War and Peace is set during which conflict?

It was serialised from 1865, then rewritten and published whole in 1869.

What is the name of Captain Ahab's ship in Moby-Dick?

The ending was based on the real sinking of the whaleship Essex in 1820.

Melville's white whale was modelled on a real albino whale called what?

The novel's opening line, 'Call me Ishmael', is among the most famous in literature.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, what has Great Britain been renamed?

It is a province of the superstate Oceania, ruled by Big Brother.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in which year?

It was Orwell's ninth and final completed book.

To Kill a Mockingbird won which award a year after its 1960 publication?

Atticus Finch became a model of integrity for lawyers.

Who narrates The Great Gatsby?

Fitzgerald drew on his romance with Ginevra King and Long Island parties of 1922.

Which is Shakespeare's longest play?

It was written between 1599 and 1601 and set at Elsinore in Denmark.

Shakespeare's surviving works include roughly how many plays?

Plus 154 sonnets and three long narrative poems.

Joyce's Ulysses takes place over a single day, now celebrated as Bloomsday. What is the date?

The book was published in Paris by Sylvia Beach on Joyce's 40th birthday.

One Hundred Years of Solitude follows which family?

The novel has been translated into 46 languages and sold over 50 million copies.

Agatha Christie wrote how many detective novels?

She is the best-selling novelist ever, with more than two billion copies sold.

Christie's The Mousetrap, the world's longest-running play, has run in the West End since which year?

Her first novel was rejected six times before Poirot debuted in 1920.

Charles Dickens left school at 12 to work where?

His father had been sent to a debtors' prison.

Which Dickens character's arrival in the fourth instalment turned The Pickwick Papers into a phenomenon?

It spawned Pickwick merchandise and made serial fiction the Victorian norm.

The Iliad and the Odyssey are each divided into how many books?

Both are written in dactylic hexameter.

Who guides Dante through the Inferno and most of Purgatorio?

Beatrice, representing divine revelation, takes over higher up.

Dante's Divine Comedy helped establish which dialect as standard Italian?

Its three parts are Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso.

Beowulf comes to the aid of Hrothgar, king of which people?

The monster Grendel has been raiding the mead hall Heorot for twelve years.

How many alliterative lines does Beowulf contain?

The only manuscript, the Nowell Codex, dates from around 975 to 1025.

Chaucer's pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales are travelling to whose shrine?

The 24 tales are presented as a storytelling contest on the road from London.

Which English seaside town does Dracula plague after leaving Transylvania?

Solicitor Jonathan Harker opens the 1897 novel with a trip to the Count's castle.

Who won the first Booker Prize in 1969?

His novel was Something to Answer For; eligibility was opened to all English-language novels in 2014.

Which university administers the 23 annual journalism and arts prizes established in 1917?

His will also endowed its journalism school; the prizes began in 1917.

How many women had won the Nobel Prize in Literature by 2024?

The prize had been awarded 116 times to 121 people.

Warhol's studio, where he survived an assassination attempt in 1968, was called what?

After the shooting it became more of a business enterprise.

Monet spent the last 20 years of his life painting which subject at Giverny?

He bought the property in 1883 and dug the pond himself.

Who is the narrator and teenage rebel at the centre of The Catcher in the Rye?

Salinger's 1951 novel still sells about a million copies a year, with total sales past 65 million.

Which impoverished former law student murders a pawnbroker in Crime and Punishment?

Dostoevsky serialised the novel in The Russian Messenger across twelve monthly instalments in 1866.

Botticelli's The Birth of Venus hangs in which gallery?

It shares the Florence gallery with his Primavera; the two are not a pair but are always discussed together.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein carries which subtitle?

She began the story at 18 and the first edition appeared anonymously in London on 1 January 1818.

The Carpenter Gothic house behind Grant Wood's American Gothic stands in which state?

Wood modelled the pair on his sister Nan and the family dentist, Byron McKeeby.

Which outsider challenges the engineered society of Huxley's Brave New World?

Huxley revisited the book in a 1958 essay and wrote its utopian counterpart, Island, in 1962.

In which Vienna palace museum does Klimt's The Kiss hang?

Painted in 1907–08 at the height of his Golden Period, it uses gold leaf, silver and platinum alongside oils.

Which Paris museum holds Whistler's Mother, bought by the French state in 1891?

Its real title is Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, and it sits in a frame of Whistler's own design.

William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies as a realistic answer to which children's adventure novel?

He asked his wife whether he should write about children on an island 'who behave in the way children really would behave'.

How many of the roughly 150 people set adrift on the raft depicted by Géricault survived to be rescued?

They endured 13 days of starvation, dehydration and cannibalism after the frigate Méduse ran aground in 1816.

Which captain, dressed in black with a red sash, leads the militia company in Rembrandt's The Night Watch?

The title is a misnomer: the 1642 group portrait does not actually show a night scene.

Under what title was Klimt's The Kiss exhibited in 1908, according to the show's catalogue?

The German word means 'the lovers'; the robes' patterns draw on Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts movement.