Meaning & Story
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.
Art History
Meaning & Story
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.
Famous Paintings
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.
Famous Paintings
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.
Meaning & Story
The Story Behind Van Gogh's Starry Night
Painted in an asylum, indoors, by daylight, from memory — and Van Gogh thought it had failed.
Famous Paintings
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.
Famous Paintings
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.
Meaning & Story
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.
Famous Paintings
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.
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.