Famous Artists
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Famous Artists trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Great art comes with great stories: thefts, feuds, scandals, lucky accidents and the occasional prank. The painters and sculptors behind the world's most recognisable images led lives every bit as vivid as their work. This quiz asks you to name the artist behind a famous picture or statue, match the masters to their best-known works, and recall where the big museum pieces ended up. It runs from the Renaissance and the Dutch Golden Age through the Impressionists to pop art and street art. It is written for gallery-goers, art students, pub quiz teams and anyone who has stood in front of a masterpiece and wondered who made it. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will pick up a story or two along the way.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which painter cut off part of his own left ear with a razor in the French town of Arles?
Vincent van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh wrapped the severed ear in paper and delivered it to a woman at a local brothel after a row with Paul Gauguin. He later painted himself with the bandage on.
Q 02Which portrait did Louvre worker Vincenzo Peruggia steal in 1911 and hide in his apartment for two years?
Mona Lisa
The Mona Lisa owes much of its worldwide fame to the theft. Peruggia, an Italian patriot who thought it belonged in Italy, was caught when he tried to sell it to a gallery director there.
Q 03Which artist's 'Girl with Balloon' began shredding itself moments after selling at a Sotheby's auction in 2018?
Banksy
Banksy had hidden a shredder in the bottom of the frame, and it stopped about halfway through the canvas, which the artist says was unplanned. The piece was renamed 'Love Is in the Bin'.
Q 04Which pop artist painted 32 Campbell's soup cans, one for each variety, for a Los Angeles gallery show?
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol said he had eaten the same lunch every day for twenty years. The gallery showed the canvases in a single row on narrow ledges, like grocery items on a shelf.
Q 05Which objects droop and melt across the landscape of Salvador Dalí's painting 'The Persistence of Memory'?
Pocket watches
Pocket watches gone soft became his best-known image. Dalí said they were inspired by a Camembert cheese melting in the sun, not by the theory of relativity.
Q 06Which artist began to paint at 18 while confined to bed for three months after a bus accident?
Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo worked lying down at an easel her mother had specially made, with a mirror fixed above it so she could paint herself. About a third of her paintings are self-portraits.
Q 07Which sculpture is the only work Michelangelo ever signed, after hearing it credited to another sculptor?
Pietà
The Pietà carries his name on the sash that runs across Mary's chest. By Giorgio Vasari's account, Michelangelo added it after overhearing the statue attributed to Cristoforo Solari.
Q 08Which Edvard Munch painting was stolen from an Oslo gallery on the opening day of the 1994 Winter Olympics?
The Scream
The Scream was taken by two men who left a note reading 'Thanks for the poor security'. Police recovered it undamaged within three months in a sting operation.
Q 09Which animals sit around a card table in Cassius Marcellus Coolidge's paintings commissioned to advertise cigars?
Dogs
Dogs play poker in the best-known pictures, from a 1903 set of sixteen oil paintings made for the firm Brown & Bigelow. They became a byword for kitsch home decoration in America.
Q 10Which French painter's hazy harbour scene 'Impression, Sunrise' gave the Impressionist movement its name?
Claude Monet
Claude Monet said the picture could not really pass for a view of Le Havre, his hometown, so he told the catalogue to 'put Impression'. Critic Louis Leroy then used the word for the whole show.
Q 11Which Renaissance artist wrote most of his notes in mirror-image script and painted 'The Last Supper' in Milan?
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci painted the mural in tempera rather than true fresco so that he could keep revising it. The method failed: the paint was already starting to flake by 1517.
Q 12Which Pablo Picasso painting did he ask New York's Museum of Modern Art to keep until democracy returned to Spain?
Guernica
Guernica answered the 1937 bombing of a Basque town by Nazi Germany's Condor Legion. The huge canvas stayed in New York until 1981, when it reached Madrid in time for the centenary of his birth.
Q 13Which Dutch painter of 'Girl with a Pearl Earring' worked so slowly that fewer than forty paintings are firmly his?
Q 21Which American painter laid his canvases flat on the floor and dripped household paint over them from all sides?
Jackson Pollock
Jackson Pollock was dubbed 'Jack the Dripper' by Time magazine in 1956. He began working this way after moving to Springs, New York, and it let him get at a picture from every angle.
Q 22Which Austrian painter added real gold leaf to 'The Kiss' during what scholars call his Golden Period?
Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt also worked silver and platinum into the canvas, painted in 1907 and 1908. It hangs in the Upper Belvedere palace in Vienna.
Q 23Which movement did Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque pioneer, showing a subject from several viewpoints at once?
Cubism
Johannes Vermeer
Johannes Vermeer earned his living mainly as an art dealer in Delft. The girl is nobody in particular: the picture is a tronie, a Dutch study of a head that was never meant as a portrait.
Q 14Which Japanese artist's print 'The Great Wave off Kanagawa' opens a series of thirty-six views of Mount Fuji?
Hokusai
Hokusai went by at least thirty names in his lifetime, more than any other major Japanese artist. The deep Prussian blue he used in the series changed Japanese printmaking.
Q 15Which sculptor first made 'The Thinker' as a figure called 'The Poet' for a doorway named 'The Gates of Hell'?
Auguste Rodin
Auguste Rodin built the doorway around Dante's 'Divine Comedy' and sat the brooding figure at its centre, above the doors. The first of the familiar large bronze casts was made in 1904.
Q 16Which painter posed his sister and the family dentist as the stern farm pair in 'American Gothic'?
Grant Wood
Grant Wood spotted a small white house in Eldon, Iowa, and painted 'the kind of people' he fancied should live in it. His sister insisted the pair were father and daughter, not husband and wife.
Q 17Which city has kept Michelangelo's marble 'David' indoors at its Galleria dell'Accademia since 1873?
Florence
Florence first stood the statue outdoors, in the square in front of its seat of government, where it was unveiled in 1504. It had been commissioned for the roofline of the cathedral.
Q 18Which Pacific island did former stockbroker Paul Gauguin sail for in 1891 to escape European civilisation?
Tahiti
Tahiti was then a French colony, and Gauguin set off promising to return a rich man. He ended his days even farther out in the Pacific, in the Marquesas Islands.
Q 19Which performers appear in more than half of the works of the French artist Edgar Degas?
Ballet dancers
Ballet dancers let him study movement, and he took the theme into sculpture too. His wax 'Little Dancer' was shown in 1881 dressed in a real tutu, slippers and a wig of human hair.
Q 20Which fruit hovers in front of the bowler-hatted man's face in René Magritte's painting 'The Son of Man'?
Apple
Apple, and a green one: Magritte painted the picture as a self-portrait, and the man's eyes can just be seen peeking over the edge of the fruit.
Cubism owes its name to the critic Louis Vauxcelles, who wrote in 1908 that Braque reduced places, figures and houses 'to geometric schemas, to cubes'.
Q 24Which American painter's 'Nighthawks' shows four people in a brightly lit downtown diner on a dark, deserted street?
Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper sold the picture within months of finishing it, for $3,000. The scene is said to be based on a since-demolished diner in Greenwich Village, his Manhattan neighbourhood.
Q 25Which US state became Georgia O'Keeffe's home in 1949, after years of painting its landscapes and animal skulls?
New Mexico
New Mexico was her home for the rest of her life, at a house in Abiquiú and a summer home at Ghost Ranch. She had been spending part of each year in the Southwest since 1929.
Q 26Which plumbing fixture, signed 'R. Mutt', is 'Fountain', the 1917 readymade credited to Marcel Duchamp?
Urinal
Urinal: a porcelain one, entered under a pseudonym for a New York show whose rules accepted every artist who paid the fee. The board hid it from view all the same.
Q 27Which Italian painter showed a goddess arriving on a giant scallop shell in 'The Birth of Venus'?
Botticelli
Botticelli painted the scene in tempera on canvas, a cheaper support than the wooden panels he normally used. The goddess stands newly born yet fully grown, as tradition had it.
Q 28Which Rembrandt painting of a militia company was trimmed on all four sides in 1715 for a move to Amsterdam Town Hall?
The Night Watch
The Night Watch lost a strip of its left side, the top of its arch and the edge of a step to the trimming. The missing pieces have never been found.
Q 29Which French painter built 'A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte' from countless tiny dots of colour?
Georges Seurat
Georges Seurat worked on it from 1884 to 1886 and preferred to call his method Divisionism. The picture later inspired Stephen Sondheim's Broadway musical 'Sunday in the Park with George'.
Q 30Which French artist, left reliant on a wheelchair by cancer surgery in 1941, developed a new art of paper cut-outs?
Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse worked out the method with paper and scissors during three months spent bedridden. His first major cut-out project was the artist's book 'Jazz', made in the hill town of Vence.