98 Fun Facts About Painting

Cézanne, Gauguin and Seurat are the leading names of which movement in French painting?

Post-Impressionism got its name from the critic Roger Fry, who titled a 1910 exhibition 'Manet and the Post-Impressionists'; by then Cézanne and Seurat were both dead.

Who is credited with painting the famous portrait known as the Mona Lisa?

Leonardo da Vinci never handed the portrait to the family it was painted for: he kept it, and it passed to King Francis I, who had invited him to live at his court.

What painting technique applies pigment to wet lime plaster so the colour sets into the wall as it dries?

Fresco painters race the drying plaster, so they lay only as much as they can paint in a day; each patch is called a giornata, and the seams between days can still be seen.

From which semi-precious stone was the costly Renaissance blue pigment ultramarine derived?

Lapis lazuli came from mines at Sar-i-Sang in Afghanistan, hence the pigment's name, 'beyond the sea'; it could cost as much as gold and was often kept for the Virgin Mary's robes.

Which court painter to Philip IV put himself at the easel inside his 1656 masterpiece Las Meninas?

Diego Velázquez painted himself at the easel in Las Meninas (1656), now in the Prado; the mirror on the back wall seems to reflect Philip IV and Queen Mariana standing where the viewer stands.

Which artist is famous for painting 'The Starry Night'?

Vincent van Gogh based it on the view from his asylum window at Saint-Rémy, but he worked on the canvas by day in a separate studio and added the village himself.

Who painted American Gothic (1930), the farmer with a pitchfork in Eldon, Iowa?

Grant Wood saw the little house with its Gothic window in Eldon and painted it with 'the kind of people' he fancied should live there, using his sister Nan and his dentist as models.

Who painted 'Girl with a Pearl Earring', the girl in a blue and yellow turban glancing over her shoulder?

Johannes Vermeer's picture was in poor condition when the collector A. A. des Tombe bought it at a sale in The Hague in 1881; he had no heirs and left it to the Mauritshuis.

What painting technique builds an image from small distinct dots of pure colour that the eye blends optically?

Pointillism was painting by theory: Georges Seurat had read the colour science of his day and believed unmixed dots, fused by the eye, would give more light than pigments blended on a palette.

Which painter joined Orozco and Siqueiros as 'Los Tres Grandes', the big three of Mexican muralism?

Diego Rivera's most notorious commission ended as rubble: his Rockefeller Center mural was destroyed after he refused to remove a portrait of Lenin.

Which Spanish artist painted the anti-war mural "Guernica"?

Pablo Picasso's canvas toured to raise money for Spanish refugees, then hung in New York's Museum of Modern Art until 1981, reaching Spain only after Franco's dictatorship had ended.

Jan van Eyck's 'The Arnolfini Portrait' is a renowned example of which art historical period?

Early Netherlandish painting's showpiece is signed with a flourish: on the wall above the mirror the artist wrote, in Latin, 'Jan van Eyck was here 1434'.

Which art movement glorifying speed and technology began in Italy in the early 20th century?

Futurism was launched in 1909 when the poet Marinetti published its manifesto on the front page of Le Figaro, declaring a racing car more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

Which American painter's Nighthawks (1942) shows four people in a late-night diner?

Edward Hopper said the scene was suggested by a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue in New York, and that 'unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city'.

Who painted the fantastical triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights around 1500?

Hieronymus Bosch had a keen collector in Philip II of Spain, who bought the triptych at auction and presented it to his monastery-palace of El Escorial in 1593; it moved to the Prado in 1939.

What art movement uses geometric shapes and multiple perspectives in a single picture plane?

Cubism soon went beyond paint: in 1912 Georges Braque pasted strips of imitation wood-grain paper into a drawing, the first papier collé.

Which artist is known for his series of 'Water Lilies' paintings?

Claude Monet made the lily pond himself as part of his garden at Giverny, painted it about 250 times, and in 1916 built a studio big enough for canvases over two metres high.

The Sistine Chapel stands inside the Apostolic Palace in which of these places?

Vatican City's Sistine Chapel is where cardinals gather to elect each new pope; a chimney fitted to its roof sends up white smoke when they have chosen.

Which Dutch artist is famous for dramatic light and shadow in works like "The Night Watch"?

Rembrandt van Rijn painted a daytime scene: the name The Night Watch came much later, after layers of dark varnish had dimmed his militia company.

What primary binding agent is used in traditional oil paint?

Linseed oil suits the job because it is a drying oil: instead of evaporating, it reacts with oxygen in the air and hardens into a tough film, which olive or coconut oil never do.

Which French Romantic painted Liberty Leading the People, commemorating the July Revolution of 1830?

Eugène Delacroix sold it to the state in 1831, but it was soon taken off view as too inflammatory and spent years in storage or with the artist; it reached the Louvre only in 1874.

Which art movement emphasized emotion, intense color, and often distorted forms?

Expressionism was singled out when the Nazis branded modern art 'degenerate': in 1937 they stripped German museums of thousands of works and put a selection on show in Munich to be jeered at.

What type of paint commonly uses egg yolk as its binder?

Tempera bound with egg yolk was the paint of most early Italian panel pictures; it dries so quickly that painters built up their tones with fine hatched strokes instead of blending.

Guernica moved in 1992 from an annex of the Prado to which other Madrid museum?

The Museo Reina Sofía, then newly created as Spain's national museum of modern art, took Guernica from the Casón del Buen Retiro; its keepers now say the canvas is too fragile to move again.

Which American painter made his name in the late 1940s with 'drip paintings' poured onto canvas?

Jackson Pollock laid his canvases flat on the studio floor so that he could walk around them and work from all four sides, flinging paint from sticks and hardened brushes.

Dutch still lifes crowded with skulls and other reminders that life is short are known by which name?

Vanitas is Latin for vanity, in the sense of emptiness, from the Bible's 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity'; the skull among the fine objects tells their owner that none of it lasts.

Which Renaissance master sculpted 'David' and painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling?

Michelangelo saw himself as a sculptor and took the Sistine ceiling on reluctantly; he then painted it standing on a scaffold, not lying on his back as legend has it.

Which Italian city, home of the Medici, is widely considered the birthplace of the Renaissance?

Florence was one of medieval Europe's richest cities, a centre of trade and banking whose leading family, the Medici, were bankers to the pope; that money paid for its art.

What is a painting done entirely in shades of gray, often to mimic sculpture, called?

Grisaille comes from gris, French for grey; Giotto used it in Padua's Scrovegni Chapel around 1304 to paint Virtues and Vices that look like carved stone.

Who painted Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940)?

Frida Kahlo painted it in 1940, after her divorce and the end of her long affair with the photographer Nickolas Muray, who bought the picture soon afterwards.

Which 19th-century French movement captured fleeting light with visible brushstrokes?

Impressionism began as an insult: reviewing the group's first show in 1874, the critic Louis Leroy seized on a canvas titled Impression, Sunrise to mock them all.

Which movement, led to prominence in the early 1960s by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, draws on commercial imagery?

Pop Art announced itself in 1962, when Andy Warhol showed 32 paintings of Campbell's soup cans, one for each variety, lined up on a ledge like groceries on a shelf.

Which artist painted the melting clocks of 'The Persistence of Memory'?

Salvador Dalí said the soft watches owed nothing to the theory of relativity: the idea came to him from a Camembert cheese melting in the sun.

What primer do painters brush onto raw canvas or wood panels to give paint a smooth, absorbent ground?

Gesso is Italian for gypsum, the white mineral bound with animal glue to make it; panel painters laid it on in layers and scraped it smooth enough to take gold leaf as well as paint.

Who painted Christina's World (1948), a woman in a field gazing toward a Maine farmhouse?

Andrew Wyeth's subject was his neighbour Christina Olson, 55 and unable to walk, though his wife Betsy posed for the torso; the Olson House in Cushing, Maine, became a National Historic Landmark in 2011.

Which Austrian painter's 'Golden Period' produced The Kiss (1907-08), worked in oil, gold leaf, silver and platinum?

Gustav Klimt had not even finished The Kiss when the Austrian government bought it, straight from its first public showing at an exhibition in Vienna in 1908.

What term describes the soft, hazy blending of colours or tones without abrupt lines?

Sfumato comes from the Italian sfumare, to fade out like smoke; the Renaissance treatise that taught it advised painting 'without lines', letting one tone melt into the next.

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

The Musée d'Orsay lists it under Whistler's own title, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1: he called it a study in tone and asked why the public should care who the sitter was.

What is the artistic category depicting scenes of everyday life and ordinary people at common activities called?

Genre painting took off in 17th-century Holland, where a new market of ordinary buyers wanted small pictures of taverns and peasant life instead of altarpieces.

Which painter, with André Derain, led the Fauves, the 'wild beasts' of the 1905 Paris Salon d'Automne?

Henri Matisse and his friends got the name from the critic Louis Vauxcelles, who saw a Renaissance-style statue among their blazing canvases and quipped 'Donatello among the wild beasts'.

Which art medium is pigment suspended in a polymer emulsion, drying fast and becoming water-resistant?

Acrylic paint, a mid-20th-century invention, is a chameleon: thinned with water it handles like watercolour, while laid on thick it can pass for oil.

Which female Baroque painter is famed for dramatic depictions of biblical and mythological women?

Artemisia Gentileschi painted herself as Painting itself, an allegory by tradition shown as a woman, so hers was a self-portrait no male painter could make; Charles I of England owned it.

What painting technique uses extreme light-dark contrast with darkness dominant for dramatic effect?

Tenebrism takes its name from tenebroso, Italian for dark and gloomy; Caravaggio and his followers lit faces and hands sharply and let the rest of the scene sink into shadow.

Which French painter is renowned for his many pictures of ballet dancers and also depicted horse races?

Edgar Degas gave more than half his output to dancers, mostly rehearsing or waiting backstage; the only sculpture he showed in his lifetime was a wax dancer dressed in a real tutu.

What is the painting technique of laying paint on so thickly that the brush or knife strokes stand out from the surface?

Impasto, from the Italian for dough or paste, is there to catch the light: painters pile it onto a highlight or a painted jewel so that the ridge of paint really glints.

Which 20th-century art movement aimed to unlock the unconscious mind with dreamlike imagery?

Surrealism's founder, the poet André Breton, had worked in a wartime neurological ward, using Freud's methods on shell-shocked soldiers; his 1924 manifesto made dreams an artistic programme.

Plentiful sail-cloth helped painters in which Italian maritime city lead the switch from wooden panels to canvas?

Venice, a maritime power with fine sail-canvas always to hand and timber running short, led Italy's move to canvas, which was cheaper, easier to transport and could be made far larger.

What painting technique applies thin transparent layers over a dried underpainting for luminous depth?

Glazing tints without hiding: light passes through the transparent film and bounces back off the opaque paint beneath, and painters vary its thickness to model light and shade.

From which museum did a man who had worked there steal the Mona Lisa in 1911, hiding it for two years?

The Louvre lost it to Vincenzo Peruggia, who had helped build the picture's glass case; he was caught when he tried to sell it to a gallery director in Italy.

In American Gothic, the farmer holding a pitchfork was modelled on which acquaintance of the artist?

His dentist, Byron McKeeby of Cedar Rapids, posed as the farmer, and the painter's own sister Nan stood in for the woman beside him.

The melting clocks in The Persistence of Memory were inspired by which food softening in the sun?

Camembert cheese running in the heat gave the painter the idea, by his own account; he dismissed the popular theory that the soft watches were about Einstein's relativity.

What happened to Banksy's Girl with Balloon moments after it sold at Sotheby's in 2018?

It shredded itself through a device Banksy had hidden inside the frame, and the half-cut picture was given a new name, Love Is in the Bin.

The Starry Night shows the view from the artist's bedroom window in what kind of building?

An asylum near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence took the painter in at his own request in May 1889, and he painted the view from his iron-barred window again and again, at different times of day.

The famous Revolutionary War scene Washington Crossing the Delaware was painted in which country?

Germany was where Emanuel Leutze painted it, in Düsseldorf, so the icy river behind the general's boat is modelled on the Rhine.

What made the group portrait The Night Watch look so dark that it gained its nocturnal nickname?

Darkened varnish coated the canvas for much of its existence and gave the false impression of a night scene; the layer was removed only in the 1940s.

Before hosting The Joy of Painting, Bob Ross spent twenty years in which branch of the US military?

The Air Force posted Bob Ross to Alaska as a master sergeant, and the snow and mountains he first saw there became staples of his landscapes.

In René Magritte's The Son of Man, what hovers in front of the bowler-hatted man's face?

A green apple hides most of the face, though the man's eyes can be seen peeking over its edge.

Which painter showed the goddess of love arriving on a giant scallop shell in The Birth of Venus?

Botticelli borrowed the position of the goddess's hands from ancient classical statues, yet gave her a stance that no real body could hold.

The Last Supper covers a dining-hall wall of a convent in which Italian city?

Milan's Santa Maria delle Grazie holds the mural, which came through a 1943 Allied bombing of the room because sandbags shielded it from the splinters.

Which painting of Christ holding a crystal orb sold for $450 million at Christie's in 2017?

Salvator Mundi, Latin for Saviour of the World, set a new auction record for a painting that night, though some specialists dispute how much of it the credited master painted.

A physician argued in 1990 that the shapes behind God in The Creation of Adam form which organ?

The brain, right down to the brain stem and frontal lobe, was what the physician Frank Meshberger saw in the outline; others read the red cloth as a womb.

The Mona Lisa is known in Italian by which name, a pun on the sitter's married surname?

La Gioconda means the jocund or happy one, and plays on Giocondo, the surname of the silk merchant whose wife Lisa sat for the portrait.

The Scream was stolen in 1994, on the Winter Olympics' opening day, from a gallery in which city?

Oslo's National Gallery lost it to two men who broke in on the day the Lillehammer Games opened; police got the picture back undamaged in a sting operation that May.

The Water Lilies series of about 250 canvases shows a garden pond in which village in Normandy?

Giverny was the painter's home, and its flower garden was the main focus of his final 31 years; many of the canvases were made while cataracts clouded his sight.

Which American painter is famed for huge close-up flowers and the bleached bones of New Mexico?

Georgia O'Keeffe, often called the Mother of American modernism, began spending part of each year in the Southwest in 1929 and settled in New Mexico for good in 1949.

Which Saturday Evening Post cover illustrator painted the Thanksgiving dinner scene Freedom from Want?

Norman Rockwell painted it as one of his Four Freedoms, a set of pictures inspired by President Roosevelt's 1941 State of the Union address.

Girl with a Pearl Earring hangs in the Mauritshuis, a museum in which Dutch city?

The Hague's museum received the picture in 1902 from a collector who had bought it at a local auction for just two guilders and thirty cents.

Which Renaissance painter placed Plato and Aristotle at the centre of The School of Athens?

Raphael slipped his own self-portrait into the crowd of ancient thinkers, standing beside the astronomer Ptolemy.

Which Shakespeare heroine floats singing in a stream in an 1852 painting by John Everett Millais?

Ophelia was modelled by Elizabeth Siddal lying clothed in a full bathtub; the lamps warming the water went out, she caught a severe cold, and her father billed the painter £50.

What distorted object stretches across the foreground of Hans Holbein's portrait The Ambassadors?

A human skull is rendered in a stretched perspective called anamorphosis, so it looks right only to a viewer standing off to one side of the picture.

In John Constable's The Hay Wain, what is the wain shown midstream in the River Stour?

A farm wagon is all that wain means, and the picture was first shown under an even plainer title, Landscape: Noon.

Which English painter showed a Trafalgar warship towed away for scrap in The Fighting Temeraire?

J. M. W. Turner called the picture his darling and left it to the nation, and a 2005 BBC radio poll voted it Britain's favourite painting.

Which US museum is home to American Gothic, Nighthawks and A Sunday on La Grande Jatte?

The Art Institute of Chicago bought Nighthawks for $3,000 in 1942, the year it was finished, a purchase credited with launching the picture's fame.

Which New York institution holds both The Starry Night and The Persistence of Memory?

The Museum of Modern Art was given The Persistence of Memory by an anonymous donor in 1934, two years after the canvas first sold for $250.

Arthritis made which craft too painful for Grandma Moses, turning her to painting in her seventies?

Embroidery in yarn was how Grandma Moses made pictures for friends until her sister Celestia suggested that painting would be easier on her hands.

Which flowers fill the vases in a series painted in Arles to decorate Paul Gauguin's guest room?

Sunflowers were meant to welcome and impress the visiting painter, who later claimed one of the Arles canvases in exchange for studies he had left behind.

Which cave, found in 1940 when a teenager's dog nosed into a hole, holds over 600 prehistoric paintings?

Lascaux has been closed to the public since 1963 because its painted walls were quickly deteriorating, so visitors are shown replicas instead.

Which brand's soup cans did Andy Warhol paint on 32 canvases, one for each variety?

Campbell's was the painter's own daily lunch for twenty years, by his account, and the 32 canvases were painted by hand rather than silkscreened.

Which facial feature, described in detail by the biographer Vasari, is missing from the Mona Lisa?

Eyebrows may once have been there: high-resolution scans in 2007 suggested that they and the eyelashes gradually disappeared, perhaps through overcleaning.

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte shows weekend crowds relaxing on an island in which river?

The Seine island lies at the very gates of Paris, and Georges Seurat spent two years covering the huge canvas in small dots of contrasting colour.

Napoleon Crossing the Alps shows a rearing horse, but which animal really carried him over the pass?

A mule from a convent at Martigny did the job, chosen because it was more sure-footed on narrow, slippery passes than a gentleman's steed.

Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun painted more than 30 portraits of which queen and her family?

Marie Antoinette chose to pose for her in 1783 in a simple muslin dress usually worn as an undergarment, and the informality caused a scandal.

Which Dutch museum displays The Night Watch, a militia portrait trimmed on all four sides in 1715?

The Rijksmuseum shows it as its best-known picture but does not own it: the canvas belongs to the Amsterdam Museum and is on permanent loan.

Which abstract painter limited his canvases to black lines and blocks of red, blue and yellow?

Piet Mondrian co-founded the De Stijl group and held that a picture needed only three primary colours, three values and two directions, horizontal and vertical.

Which Spanish master painted the nightmarish Saturn Devouring His Son straight onto his house wall?

Francisco Goya never titled the picture or meant the public to see it, and it was transferred from the plaster to canvas only after his death.

Which painter of The Calling of Saint Matthew fled Rome in 1606 after killing a man in a brawl?

Caravaggio killed Ranuccio Tomassoni, which brought a death sentence for murder and forced him to escape south to Naples.

Which painter showed his future wife holding a small dog in Luncheon of the Boating Party?

Auguste Renoir married the seamstress Aline Charigot in 1890; she had replaced an earlier model who annoyed him, and her dog is an affenpinscher.

Which painter of elongated figures made View of Toledo and The Burial of the Count of Orgaz?

El Greco was only a nickname: born Doménikos Theotokópoulos on Crete, he normally signed his pictures with his full birth name in Greek letters.

Thirteen artworks were stolen in 1990 from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in which US city?

Boston's museum left the empty frames hanging as placeholders for the missing works, and put up a $10 million reward for their return.

Which painter's Olympia, a nude staring boldly at the viewer, caused uproar at the 1865 Paris Salon?

Édouard Manet took the pose from Titian's Venus of Urbino but swapped the little dog, a symbol of fidelity, for an upright black cat.

Which self-taught toll collector painted The Sleeping Gypsy and jungles modelled on a Paris garden?

Henri Rousseau was nicknamed Le Douanier, the customs officer, and was ridiculed by critics during his lifetime before being recognised as a self-taught genius.

Which painter of peasant life made The Hunters in the Snow for a cycle on the months of the year?

Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted the cycle in 1565, and five of its panels survive; he had dropped the h from his surname, which his relatives went on using.

Which English portraitist painted The Blue Boy, a youth dressed in homage to Anthony van Dyck?

Thomas Gainsborough's picture was sold in 1921 to the California railroad magnate Henry Huntington, and 90,000 people came to see it in London before it left Britain the next year.

Which American painter's Portrait of Madame X scandalised Paris in 1884 with a slipped dress strap?

John Singer Sargent repainted the strap to sit securely on the shoulder, and the setback may have helped push him toward his later success in Britain and America.

Which Italian court painter built portrait heads entirely out of fruit, vegetables and fish?

Giuseppe Arcimboldo served three Holy Roman Emperors, and painted one of them, Rudolf II, as Vertumnus, the Roman god of the seasons.

Which New York painter first won notice as half of the graffiti duo SAMO before dying at 27 in 1988?

Basquiat was 21 when he became the youngest artist to have taken part in the Documenta exhibition in Kassel, and he showed at the Whitney Biennial a year later.

Which work by the van Eyck brothers, completed by 1432, has been counted the victim of seven thefts?

The Ghent Altarpiece spent part of the Second World War hidden in the Altaussee salt mines, and two of its panels were stolen from the cathedral in 1934.

Which Dutch portraitist painted the Laughing Cavalier, a title coined by the Victorian public?

Frans Hals gave his unknown sitter an enigmatic smile, not a laugh, and the man was as likely to be a wealthy civilian as a military officer.