Why Is the Mona Lisa So Famous?
A theft, a two-year manhunt and a century of parody turned a small poplar panel into the most looked-at object on earth.
Latest
How High to Hang Art Above a Sofa
The measurements that make art look deliberate rather than accidental — plus what to do when the standard rule doesn't fit your room.
What Does The Scream Actually Mean?
Munch wrote down exactly what he saw, and it explains everything — including why the figure in the painting is not the one screaming.
What Size Art to Hang Above a Bed
The sizing chart, the height rule that replaces the 57-inch line, and the fixings that matter when the art hangs over a pillow.
Edgar Degas’s Ten Most Famous Paintings
Ballet rehearsals, racecourses, and women caught unaware: the ten works that made Degas the great observer of modern life.
Gustav Klimt’s Ten Most Famous Paintings
From The Kiss to the golden portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer: the ten paintings that made Klimt the shimmering face of Vienna’s Art Nouveau.
The Story Behind Van Gogh's Starry Night
Painted in an asylum, indoors, by daylight, from memory — and Van Gogh thought it had failed.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Ten Most Famous Paintings
Boating parties, dance halls, and girls at the piano: the ten paintings that made Renoir the most joyful of the Impressionists.
Gallery Wall Layouts That Actually Work
Six layouts, the wall each one suits, and the two rules — one gap, one rectangle — that separate a gallery wall from a pile of frames.
Edvard Munch’s Ten Most Famous Paintings
The Scream, Madonna, The Sick Child and more: the ten works that made Munch the painter of modern anxiety and desire.
What Is Happening in Nighthawks?
Four people, one counter, no conversation and no way in. What Hopper actually put in the painting, and what viewers have added since.
Paul Cézanne’s Ten Most Famous Paintings
Apples, bathers, and one Provençal mountain painted over and over: the ten works that made Cézanne the father of modern art.
Room & Placement
Hanging Art in Hallways, Stairwells and Entryways
The stairwell rule that keeps a climbing group straight, why hallway art belongs on one wall only, and how to beat the glare that ruins both.
Famous Paintings
Édouard Manet’s Ten Most Famous Paintings
Scandals, barmaids, and picnics that outraged Paris: the ten works that made Manet the reluctant father of modern painting.
Meaning & Story
The Gold in Klimt's The Kiss
Real metal leaf, a gold engraver's son, and a set of Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna — how the most famous gold surface in painting was made.
Famous Paintings
Wassily Kandinsky’s Ten Most Famous Paintings
From fairy-tale riders to floating circles: ten works that trace how Kandinsky talked himself out of painting things and into painting feeling.
Room & Placement
Art for Small Rooms and Awkward Walls
Why one large piece beats three small ones, how to measure a wall that has a door or a thermostat in the way, and what to do with slots, slopes and corners.
Famous Paintings
Paul Klee’s Ten Most Famous Paintings
Angels, fish, floating balloons and grids of color: ten works by the twentieth century’s most inventive and least pompous modernist.
Famous Paintings
J.M.W. Turner’s Ten Most Famous Paintings
Fire, shipwreck, moonlight and Venetian haze: the ten pictures that made Turner the greatest painter of weather in Western art.
Movements
What Is Impressionism?
The movement that made painting a record of light rather than of subject — who started it, when, and the five things to look for.
Formats
Canvas vs Framed Prints: Which Should You Choose?
Canvas suits painterly images and relaxed rooms; a frame suits photography, detail and formal walls. The differences that actually decide it.
Famous Paintings
John Singer Sargent’s Ten Most Famous Paintings
Scandalous society portraits, a lantern-lit garden, a flamenco dancer and a war memorial: the ten works that define Sargent.
Famous Paintings
Eugène Delacroix’s Ten Most Famous Paintings
Revolution, shipwreck, lion hunts and Moroccan horsemen: the ten paintings that made Delacroix the leader of French Romanticism.
Comparisons
Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Friendship That Exploded
Nine weeks in a small yellow house in Arles, and the night it ended — plus how two painters who worked side by side made such completely different pictures.