Painting
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98 free Painting trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
50 free painting trivia questions with answers. Are you passionate about art and painting? Our painting trivia quiz is the perfect way to test your knowledge of famous artists, iconic masterpieces, and significant art movements throughout history. Whether you're an art enthusiast or casual admirer, discover how much you really know about the world of painting.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Cézanne, Gauguin and Seurat are the leading names of which movement in French painting?
Post-Impressionism
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.
Q 02Who is credited with painting the famous portrait known as the Mona Lisa?
Leonardo da Vinci
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.
Q 03What painting technique applies pigment to wet lime plaster so the colour sets into the wall as it dries?
Fresco
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.
Q 04From which semi-precious stone was the costly Renaissance blue pigment ultramarine derived?
Lapis Lazuli
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.
Q 05Which court painter to Philip IV put himself at the easel inside his 1656 masterpiece Las Meninas?
Diego Velázquez
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.
Q 06Which artist is famous for painting 'The Starry Night'?
Vincent van Gogh
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.
Q 07Who painted American Gothic (1930), the farmer with a pitchfork in Eldon, Iowa?
Grant Wood
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.
Q 08Who painted 'Girl with a Pearl Earring', the girl in a blue and yellow turban glancing over her shoulder?
Johannes Vermeer
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.
Q 09What painting technique builds an image from small distinct dots of pure colour that the eye blends optically?
Pointillism
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.
Q 10Which painter joined Orozco and Siqueiros as 'Los Tres Grandes', the big three of Mexican muralism?
Diego Rivera
Diego Rivera's most notorious commission ended as rubble: his Rockefeller Center mural was destroyed after he refused to remove a portrait of Lenin.
Q 11Which Spanish artist painted the anti-war mural "Guernica"?
Pablo Picasso
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.
Q 12Jan van Eyck's 'The Arnolfini Portrait' is a renowned example of which art historical period?
Early Netherlandish
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'.
Q 13Which art movement glorifying speed and technology began in Italy in the early 20th century?
Futurism
Q 21Which French Romantic painted Liberty Leading the People, commemorating the July Revolution of 1830?
Eugène Delacroix
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.
Q 22Which art movement emphasized emotion, intense color, and often distorted forms?
Expressionism
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.
Q 23What type of paint commonly uses egg yolk as its binder?
Tempera
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.
Q 14Which American painter's Nighthawks (1942) shows four people in a late-night diner?
Edward Hopper
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'.
Q 15Who painted the fantastical triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights around 1500?
Hieronymus Bosch
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.
Q 16What art movement uses geometric shapes and multiple perspectives in a single picture plane?
Cubism
Cubism soon went beyond paint: in 1912 Georges Braque pasted strips of imitation wood-grain paper into a drawing, the first papier collé.
Q 17Which artist is known for his series of 'Water Lilies' paintings?
Claude Monet
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.
Q 18The Sistine Chapel stands inside the Apostolic Palace in which of these places?
Vatican City
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.
Q 19Which Dutch artist is famous for dramatic light and shadow in works like "The Night Watch"?
Rembrandt van Rijn
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.
Q 20What primary binding agent is used in traditional oil paint?
Linseed oil
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.
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.
Q 24Guernica moved in 1992 from an annex of the Prado to which other Madrid museum?
Museo Reina Sofía
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.
Q 25Which American painter made his name in the late 1940s with 'drip paintings' poured onto canvas?
Jackson Pollock
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.
Q 26Dutch still lifes crowded with skulls and other reminders that life is short are known by which name?
Vanitas
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.
Q 27Which Renaissance master sculpted 'David' and painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling?
Michelangelo
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.
Q 28Which Italian city, home of the Medici, is widely considered the birthplace of the Renaissance?
Florence
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.
Q 29What is a painting done entirely in shades of gray, often to mimic sculpture, called?
Grisaille
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.
Q 30Who painted Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940)?
Frida Kahlo
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.