120 000+ readers. Learn art the fun way.

This is a preview. Paid subscribers get the full story.

You’ll also get:

• 10 new stories every month

• The full archive (120+ Art stories)

• Your personal art guide. Comment, ask questions, DM me anytime

iPhone user? Subscribe at coolstoriesabout.art, not via the app. Apple adds 30% to the price.

New York, 1914.

On the top floor of a building on Washington Square, a 32 year old man is painting on a canvas nearly six feet wide.

He is six foot five. To get home, he climbs 74 steps. He heats the studio with coal, bucket after bucket, carried up one by one.

On the canvas, there is no New York.

There is a Paris cafe terrace, at night. Round tables. Lanterns. Figures under a blue sky darkening toward black.

He is painting the scene from memory. It has been four years since he last set foot in Paris.

By day, he earns his living another way. He draws advertisements for magazines. Work he hates.

At night, in the studio, he goes back to Paris.

He does not even translate the title. He writes it in French. Soir Bleu.

His name is Edward Hopper.

Paris

In Paris, he had felt like a painter. A real one.

Three stays, between 1906 and 1910. A room at 48 rue de Lille, a boarding house run by Baptists, found for him by his mother. He lived there alone.

In the morning, he set up his easel on the banks of the Seine. He painted the bridges, the staircases, the gray stone, the light sliding across it. The Louvre was steps away. He went often.

He loved Manet, Degas. Their cafes, their theaters, their city scenes.

But Paris, in those years, was looking elsewhere.

Across the Seine, in Montmartre, Picasso was about to blow painting wide open. Matisse was covering his canvases with colors that caused a scandal. At Gertrude Stein's, the avant garde gathered every week.

Hopper did not go.

I'd heard of Gertrude Stein, but I don't remember ever hearing about Picasso.

From Paris, two faces follow him back to New York.

The first was in the Louvre. A large white clown painted by Watteau. Alone, standing, facing the viewer, arms at his sides. A stage performer abandoned in the middle of the canvas.

The second, he passed one day during the mid Lent carnival, on the Grands Boulevards. A clown with a big nose, his face painted a deathly white, lost in the crowd.

He had always been drawn to people of the stage. Actors, clowns, theater figures. The ones applauded under the lights, then left alone the moment the curtain falls.

The First Sale

Late in 1910, he comes home to New York for good.

Three years pass. No one takes any interest in his painting.

Then, in February 1913, a huge exhibition opens in New York. For the first time, the city discovers European modern art. They call it the Armory Show.

The crowds pour in. People push to see Duchamp, Picasso, Matisse. They cry scandal, they marvel.

Hopper hangs a small seascape there. A sailboat, the sea. No one stops in front of it.

It sells all the same. 250 dollars, to a collector.

It is his first sale. He is 30.

It will be his last for ten years.

The Terrace

A year after the Armory Show, Hopper takes on the most ambitious canvas of his life: Soir Bleu.

He lays in the sky first. A deep end of day blue, the one that gives the painting its title.

Then the cafe. A vertical post cuts the terrace in two, like a theater curtain. Lanterns hang from it.

Then the people. Seven figures around the tables.

A heavily made up woman, in a low cut dress, stands there. A little further off, a hard faced man watches the terrace. A pimp.

An officer with epaulettes struts, chin high. To the right, a well dressed couple talks in low voices. A bohemian in a beret poses, a cigarette at his lips.

People drink, laugh, talk. The night belongs to the party.

Everyone wants to be seen. To be noticed, desired, applauded.

Everyone but one.

At the exact center of the canvas, a white clown sits. The Pierrot costume, the ruff at his neck, the face painted white. He does not perform. He does not strut. He smokes, alone.

He is the one Hopper placed at the heart of the painting.

One question remains. Who is he?

Read more

130 000+ readers. Learn art the fun way.

This is a preview. Paid subscribers get the full story.

You’ll also get:

• 10 new stories every month

• The full archive (120+ Art stories)

• Your personal art guide. Comment, ask questions, DM me anytime

iPhone user? Subscribe at coolstoriesabout.art, not via the app. Apple adds 30% to the price.

1. Paolo Veronese, The Wedding at Cana (1563)

A vast Venetian banquet, marble columns, nearly 130 guests. This is the first miracle of Christ, at Cana: water turned into wine during a wedding. Veronese painted it for the refectory of a monastery in Venice.

In the foreground, four musicians play in front of the table.

They are not extras. Tradition recognizes in them the greatest painters of Venice: Veronese in white on the viol, Titian in red on the bass, Tintoretto and Bassano beside them. Rival masters from the same city, gathered into a small orchestra, right below Christ.

2. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Massacre of the Innocents (around 1565)

A Flemish village under the snow. Soldiers in armor surround the houses, peasants on their knees beg, cling, weep. Bundles are torn from them, food, a goose, a calf.

A scene of pillage, so it seems. Except that these bundles were not always bundles.

Originally, Bruegel had painted what the title says: the massacre of the children ordered by Herod. Dozens of small bodies slaughtered in the snow, under the lances of soldiers who bore the two headed eagle of the Habsburgs.

The painting belonged to the Emperor Rudolf II. He could not bear the carnage, nor the sight of his family's arms on the killers. He had every dead child painted over into an object: a baby becomes a bundle, another a fowl, another a cheese.

Restoration has brought the ghost bodies back up beneath the paint. And one detail remains that the censorship could not erase. Look at the faces of the parents, on their knees, screaming. No one screams like that over a stolen goose.

If you enjoyed this story, you’ll also love:

• 7 Secrets in 7 Famous Paintings

• 12 Amazing Impressionist Facts to Drop at Your Next Dinner

• The Ambassadors: The Skull Hidden in Plain Sight

3. Gustav Klimt, The Sunflower (1907)

One of Klimt’s garden paintings, made in summer by Lake Attersee. Dense, golden, and at its center a tall sunflower that dominates everything, its heavy head bowed, wrapped in leaves.

You think you are looking at a flower.

You are not. And what Klimt slipped into this sunflower comes down to a love story of 27 years that he never dared to name…

Read more

130 000+ readers. Learn art the fun way.

This is a preview. Paid subscribers get the full story.

You’ll also get:

• 10 new stories every month

• The full archive (120+ Art stories)

• Your personal art guide. Comment, ask questions, DM me anytime

iPhone user? Subscribe at coolstoriesabout.art, not via the app. Apple adds 30% to the price.

Rome, 1899. In a room of the Villa Borghese, envoys of the Rothschild family stop in front of a painting. They name a figure. Four million lire, for this single canvas.

That same year, the whole villa is valued. The gardens, the walls, 557 paintings, 314 statues. Total: 3.6 million. One painting is worth more than the palace that holds it, and everything inside it.

The sale will never happen. Italy refuses to let the canvas leave. It is still there, in Room 20. In front of it, two women frame a marble fountain.

On the left, a young woman in a white dress. On the right, the same one, or almost, but nude. Between them, a winged child playing with the water.

On the label, the title the whole world knows. Sacred and Profane Love. You read it, and you sort them without thinking.

The nude woman must be the profane one. The clothed woman, the sacred. Settled in two seconds. You are wrong about both. And the title is wrong with you.

Let's go back through this painting, detail by detail. The painter is 25. His name is Titian, and in 1514 he is still just one gifted young man among many.

In Venice, lately, people paint differently: with light and color more than with line. Two men opened that path, old Giovanni Bellini and his pupil Giorgione.

But Giorgione has just been carried off by the plague, and Bellini is near the end of his life. The place of first painter of Venice is about to come free.

That is the place Titian will take, starting with this canvas, commissioned for a wedding. A wedding that hides a story no one guesses in front of the painting. Let's start on the left.

The Clothed Woman

The young woman seated at the edge of the fountain wears a white satin dress, with one red sleeve still showing. A belt drawn high on her chest, fastened with a gold buckle. Gloves.

In her hand, a small bouquet of roses. And in her hair, a wreath of myrtle. None of this is decorative. It is a code, and in Venice everyone knows how to read it.

The closed belt means fidelity. The gloves mean restraint and rank.

The roses are the flower of Venus, the goddess of love. As for the myrtle, it is both the plant of that same Venus and the wreath worn by Venetian brides. White, finally, is here a wedding color.

Put together, these signs describe neither a goddess nor an allegory. They describe a bride, on the day of her contract.

The Closed Casket

Under her hand, resting on the rim of the fountain, a small metal vessel closed with a lid. People long saw in it a courtesan's purse, and so made this woman a girl for sale. That is a mistake.

It is a silver casket. In 16th century Venice, brides receive their wedding gifts in this kind of closed casket. It seals the union, and it carries a precise hope: that of children.

Keep that hope of a child in mind. The landscape, further on, will echo it.

The Sarcophagus Turned Into a Fountain

Now the center. The bench the two women sit on is not a bench. It is a Roman sarcophagus.

An ancient marble tomb. Someone has driven a bronze spout into it, and the water flows out, down to a small rosebush growing at its foot. Look at its wide rim. Real ancient sarcophagi do not have one.

Titian turned a tomb into a fountain. A coffin with living water pouring from it. And at the center of the marble face, below the spout, a carved crest. A coat of arms.

Whose crest is it? We'll come back to it. The answer is not innocent.

The Relief

Stay on the marble. The face of the sarcophagus is carved with a brutal scene.

A naked man pulls a horse that has neither saddle nor bridle. Further off, a man beats another. A woman is dragged by the hair.

The unbridled horse has been, since antiquity, the image of passion that can no longer be controlled. Around it, figures strike, drag, punish. This is raw desire, and its punishment.

Titian copied this scene from no known ancient marble. He invented it. Beneath the two calm women, he carved savage love, the kind you must tame in order to love otherwise.

The Child Stirring the Water

Between the two women, leaning over the rim, the winged child. It is Cupid. Usually, Cupid shoots arrows. Here, he has neither bow nor arrow.

He has plunged his arm into the water of the tomb, and he stirs it, focused, like a child at a serious game.

No one, standing before the painting, can say what he is doing there, his hand in that water.

The Nude Woman

Now to the right, to the nude woman. A large red cloak slips from her shoulder and falls to her legs. A white cloth covers her lower belly.

Her left arm is raised, and at the end of that arm she holds a vessel from which a flame and dark smoke rise. Now her face. It is exactly the face of the clothed woman. Same features, same model.

Two identical women, separated by one thing only: their clothes. And she is not staring into space. She is turned toward her clothed twin, her body leaning toward her, as if to speak to her.

The same face, twice. A flame. And the nude woman, seated higher, leaning toward the one who is dressed.

The Landscape Takes Sides

Step back, and look behind them. A tree, planted just above Cupid, splits the landscape into two halves that do not tell the same story.

Behind the clothed woman, on the left, a fortified castle on a hill, a rider galloping toward the gate, two rabbits in the grass. The rabbit, to a Venetian, is the promise of a bloodline.

Behind the nude woman, on the right, things grow softer. A plain by the water, a shepherd and his flock, hunters chasing a hare. The hare, too, is an animal of Venus.

And above all, in the distance, a bell tower. A church, set on the side that was called profane. Let's take stock. A bride in white. A wedding casket and its hope of a child.

A tomb that turns into a spring. A carved crest, whose owner we do not yet know.

A Cupid stirring water, without our knowing why. A second woman, nude, with an identical face. And a church blessing the wrong side.

It is all there, before your eyes. And yet the true story has not begun. To read it, you need the bride's name, and what Venice did to her father five years earlier.

Read more

130 000+ readers. Learn art the fun way.

This is a preview. Paid subscribers get the full story.

You’ll also get:

• 10 new stories every month

• The full archive (120+ Art stories)

• Your personal art guide. Comment, ask questions, DM me anytime

iPhone user? Subscribe at coolstoriesabout.art, not via the app. Apple adds 30% to the price.

Copenhagen, June 1885. A rented apartment, too small for seven people, still cold for the season.

A man of 37 is closing a trunk in the hallway.

Three years earlier, he was a stockbroker in Paris. Tailored suits, good money, paintings on his walls like a collector who had made it.

In the next room, his wife. Mette Sophie Gad, Danish, 35. Their five children circle around her. The oldest is 11. The youngest just turned 2.

He leaves for Paris. He takes only one of the children.

No scene. No date of return. He walks down the stairs.

It is the last time this family lives under the same roof.

And this is not the last person he will abandon like this, overnight, without a word too many.

His name is Paul Gauguin.

The Man Who Wanted to Be a Savage

To understand that departure, you have to listen to the story he told himself about himself.

Gauguin did not see himself as a bourgeois, even less as a Sunday painter. He saw himself as a savage. The word is his, he claimed it.

The legend had something to stand on. Peruvian blood on his mother's side, an early childhood in Lima, a writer and activist grandmother, Flora Tristan.

He liked to repeat that he had Inca in his veins, that Western civilization made people sick, that money and comfort were chains fit for the mediocre.

The awkward detail is that he had lived eleven years off that very civilization. Eleven years selling securities on the stock exchange, stacking up commissions, buying himself paintings with his salary.

His contempt for money came to him once he no longer had any.

In January 1882, the crash of the Union Générale bank tears through the Paris market. Commissions collapse, the job turns uncertain. That is the moment Gauguin picks to drop everything and live from his painting alone.

His disgust for money had a sharp limit, though. He scorned money when it had to be earned to feed his own family. He demanded it endlessly when it came to funding his own freedom.

That freedom, someone was going to pay for it. It would never be him.

Mette

Mette did not go under. She did the opposite.

She stayed in Copenhagen, her hometown. She gives French lessons to the children of the Danish bourgeoisie. She translates books.

She raises four children alone, then five, the day Gauguin ships Clovis back to her, the son he had taken along and can no longer feed in his Paris studio.

Their letters are almost only about money now. She asks for enough to get by. He sends little, often nothing, and always with a lesson. An artist cannot let himself be chained. His duty is the work.

To make the months add up, Mette sells the canvases he left her. She even organizes shows of her husband's work in Copenhagen. Not out of tenderness. To bring a little money into a home he has deserted.

Far away, Gauguin takes up his pen to a friend back in France. About this family he left behind, he has these few words.

I slipped away without warning. Let my family fend for itself... Oh yes, I am a great criminal, so what.

He will never divorce. Staying Mette's legal husband costs him nothing and spares him any accounting. Later, on the other side of the world, he will take other women, far younger, never troubled by being already married.

If you enjoyed this story, you’ll also love:

• The Last Day of Vincent Van Gogh

• 6 women, 1 monster: Picasso

• The Woman Who Made Vincent van Gogh

The Friends Who Carried Him

The family was only the first circle.

Gauguin had a particular talent. He absorbed everything he needed from people, then left them dry.

First there is Camille Pissarro.

In the early 1880s, Pissarro is an established master, generous, at the heart of the Impressionist group. He takes this young stockbroker under his wing, teaches him the craft, brings him out to paint in the countryside, pushes him into the group's shows. Without Pissarro, Gauguin would have stayed a gifted amateur.

The day he had drawn from the old master everything he could, Gauguin turns away from him. Pissarro sees it clearly. In April 1891, he writes to his son Lucien that Gauguin "is not a visionary, he is a schemer."

Schuffenecker, for his part, had outright fed him.

A former colleague from the stock exchange turned painter, nicknamed good old Schuff, he is the devoted friend by definition. When Gauguin comes back from Martinique without a cent, in 1887, it is Schuffenecker who houses him, feeds him, buys his canvases to keep him afloat.

Two years later, Gauguin thanks him with a painting. He paints the Schuffenecker family in their studio.

At the center, the wife and the children. Off to the side, pushed into a corner of his own home, good old Schuff, tiny in his big slippers, hands clasped, without even a brush.

The man who had saved him from poverty, reduced to a meek husband stripped of his trade.

The youngest, Émile Bernard, paid the highest price.

Bernard is twenty, gifted, with boundless admiration for his elder. In Pont Aven, the two men work out together a new way of painting, in broad flat areas outlined in dark.

It is even Bernard who, in 1891, pushes the critic Albert Aurier to write, in the magazine Mercure de France, the article meant to make Gauguin known.

The article appears. It crowns Gauguin the leader of a new school. It does not mention Bernard once. Gauguin takes the movement, the name, the glory, and leaves the kid who had handed him the opening out in the cold. They will never speak again.

Even Vincent van Gogh went through it. In 1888, he had begged Gauguin to come and found a painters' studio in Arles. Nine weeks later, Van Gogh was cutting off his ear, and Gauguin was catching the first train back to Paris.

Pissarro had taught him everything. Schuffenecker had fed him. Bernard had invented at his side. None of them stayed his friend.

By the early 1890s, Gauguin had run through it all. He had taken what Europe could give him and worn out everyone who loved him.

Now he needs a place where no one will hold him to account. A new world, faces that will know nothing about him, no one to say no.

He will go looking for it eighteen thousand kilometers from Copenhagen.

And that is where he will do his worst..

Read more

130 000+ readers. Learn art the fun way.

This is a preview. Paid subscribers get the full story.

You’ll also get:

• 10 new stories every month

• The full archive (120+ Art stories)

• Your personal art guide. Comment, ask questions, DM me anytime

iPhone user? Subscribe at coolstoriesabout.art, not via the app. Apple adds 30% to the price.

Rococo started as an insult.

In the 1790s, art students coined the word to mock a style they found ridiculous.

They mixed rocaille, the shell and pebble decoration of garden grottoes, with barocco, the Italian word for Baroque.

The term sneered at the frills of a world with too much gold and not enough taste.

The insult stuck. The style it named became one of the most loved in history.

Rococo is the art of pleasure. Born in Paris around 1730, it traded the heavy power of palaces for pastel colors, soft curves, flirting lovers, and intimate scenes made to seduce rather than impress.

Less throne room, more perfumed boudoir.

WATTEAU, THE MAN WHO INVENTED ROCOCO

Antoine Watteau was a sick painter, already wasted by tuberculosis, known for small scenes of actors and lovers.

The Royal Academy admitted him on probation in 1712, on the condition that he deliver a reception piece. He took five years to do it.

In August 1717, he finally handed in his canvas. The Pilgrimage to Cythera.

Elegant couples on the island of Venus, in the golden hour, lingering, reluctant to leave. A party drawing to a close, wrapped in a faintly sad sweetness.

One problem. The Academy rulebook had its categories. History painting, portrait, landscape. Watteau's canvas fit none of them.

So the Academy did something it had never done. It created a category made to measure, for him alone. The fête galante.

This little genre, invented for a single man, set everything off.

Within a few years its pastel lightness spread to painting, to interiors, to furniture, to all of elegant France. Watteau's fête galante became an entire style. Rococo.

Watteau died in 1721, at thirty six. The style he had just opened would rule Europe for fifty years.

If you enjoyed this story, you’ll also love:

• 7 Secrets in 7 Famous Paintings

• The Old Masters Were Women Too

• 10 Women Artists You Need to Know 👀

IF ROCOCO WERE...

EMOJIS

🌸🥂🍰🕯️🎀

A CAKE

Macaron parisien: Delicate almond shells in pastel colors, filled with cream, stacked like jewels in a box, pure ornamental pleasure.

A MOVIE

Marie Antoinette (2006): Sofia Coppola literally filmed this at Versailles with a New Wave soundtrack and pastel macarons, making it the most Rococo thing ever created in the 21st century.

A NETFLIX SERIES

Emily in Paris: A plotless, pastel fantasy of Paris where reality does not exist and the biggest problem is deciding which handsome chef to date.

Pretty, light, a little naughty.

But that is only the surface. The word, the origin, the look.

Because recognizing a Rococo is not just about spotting pastel colors or flirting couples. You have to understand its codes, its ambitions, and what truly sets it apart from the styles next to it.

To get there, let’s look at a painting you have probably already seen. The Swing by Fragonard, one of the most famous paintings of the 18th century.

Rococo paintings are small because they decorated the private salons of Paris, not churches or palaces.

The whole style lives in that one idea. Art leaves power behind and chooses pleasure.

The Swing proves it, detail by detail…

Read more

130 000+ readers. Learn art the fun way.

This is a preview. Paid subscribers get the full story.

You’ll also get:

• 10 new stories every month

• The full archive (120+ Art stories)

• Your personal art guide. Comment, ask questions, DM me anytime

iPhone user? Subscribe at coolstoriesabout.art, not via the app. Apple adds 30% to the price.

Étretat, late December 1868.

Before dawn, a 28 year old man steps out of a small cottage at the edge of the village, on the road to Le Havre.

Three overcoats layered on top of each other, thick gloves, a copper foot warmer under his arm.

He walks down a country path and sets up his easel in front of a fence of hand woven hazel branches, covered with fresh snow that fell during the night.

On the central gate, perched as if by chance, a black magpie.

The foot warmer drops at his feet. The gloves come off. The brush goes to the canvas.

His name is Claude Monet.

No Paris dealer has bought from him yet, and his father, back in Le Havre, hasn't spoken to him in eighteen months.

Adolphe Monet, a prosperous merchant from Le Havre, has cut off his son's allowance.

The reason fits in one sentence. Claude refuses to leave a young woman who poses for the painters of Montmartre.

Three francs per sitting, eighteen the day they met, daughter of a Lyon commerce clerk, no dowry, no respectable family.

Her name is Camille Doncieux.

If you enjoyed this story, you’ll also love:

• Was Monet really the first Impressionist?

• Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party, Detail by Detail

• The Last Day of Vincent Van Gogh

A few months before the allowance was cut off, in an unheated apartment on impasse Saint Louis near Place Pigalle, she gives birth to a boy whom Monet names Jean.

On the official birth registry, the child is listed as having no known father. Camille signs alone.

The father, meanwhile, is in Sainte Adresse, at his aunt's, pretending he has broken things off so as not to lose the paternal allowance.

When the father realizes nothing has been broken off at all, the money stops.

Since then, Monet has been getting by thanks to his friend Frédéric Bazille, a young painter, son of wealthy vintners from the Languedoc, who sends him fifty francs a month.

The following spring, no more money for the Paris rent.

Camille, Jean and Monet drift down the Seine, vagabonds, broke, all the way to a village inn where room and board cost three francs a day. The price of a hot meal in a cheap Paris eatery.

Bennecourt, sixty kilometers downstream from Paris.

Three weeks at the inn. Not a penny paid. One morning in late June, the innkeeper throws them out.

Monet finds shelter for Camille and the child with peasants in the village, in a barn a quarter hour's walk from the inn.

The last coins from his pocket, set down on a wooden table. A kiss to Camille. One last sentence: he says he'll be back.

At dawn, he walks down to the bank of the Seine. For a long time, he watches the water flow beneath him.

And then he steps in, fully clothed.

The cold water rises to his legs, his waist, his shoulders. The current tips him over. A first gulp, then a second. He sinks without struggling.

The sky disappears behind the water closing over him.

And then Camille and Jean come back to him.

His body reacts before he does. A big, sharp intake of breath. Another. His eyes open again.

The snow. The magpie, on the gate, hasn't moved.

Since the summer, this scene comes back without warning.

Bazille alone knows something about it. A letter in which Monet, out of shame, had referred to his act of despair with a child's word: a slip up. As if it were just a clumsy mistake.

Monet gathers himself.

Pink gray on the palette. Out across the snow, the long, low Norman farmhouse stands in the distance.

The house where Camille and Jean are still sleeping this morning. The brush lays the first touches on the roof.

This house, he owes to a man.

Louis Joachim Gaudibert. A Le Havre merchant, thirty years old, already a collector.

In the spring of 1868, at the Maritime Exhibition in Le Havre, the merchant stops in front of seascapes shown by a still unknown painter.

A few months later, in the commercial circles of the port, word reaches him that those paintings are about to be seized by the creditors of one Claude Monet.

He buys everything from the bailiff. Three portraits are commissioned from the painter, including a large full length portrait of his young wife Marguerite.

And at the edge of a Norman village he knows well, the merchant rents, in his own name, a small cottage.

Étretat.

What saves Monet in the autumn of 1868 is not so much the roof Gaudibert offers him.

It's the gesture. A man who believes in his work at a moment when no one else dares to defend it.

Monet goes back to his canvas. The gaze lifts to the sky.

The sky isn't white. It's cream, streaked with pale pinks and yellows diffused by the mist.

The roof takes on, in the angled light, gray pinks and yellow touches. The snow in the foreground, which you'd take for white, is in fact a patchwork of small touches.

Creams, ivories, pale ochres, mauves, violets, blue grays.

No area of the painting is really white. No area is really gray.

Monet works the snow with small touches placed side by side, in colors so close that from a yard away you'd think it's white, and from four inches in, you'd see all the colors hidden beneath the apparent white.

In the lower left corner, a few footprints in the snow.

The only sign of a human presence. Someone walked there, or he himself walked there setting up his easel, and left the traces.

A fresh brush, dipped in pure black.

The real ivory black that Monet hasn't used all morning. The brush takes aim at the central gate, where the bird is perched.

The magpie is tiny. A black dot, isolated on a long line, like a single musical note.

The only element of the painting in true black and white.

Beneath the magpie, in the snow, he lays one last detail. Something that changes everything you thought you knew about this painting…

Read more

130 000+ readers. Learn art the fun way.

This is a preview. Paid subscribers get the full story.

You’ll also get:

• 10 new stories every month

• The full archive (120+ Art stories)

• Your personal art guide. Comment, ask questions, DM me anytime

iPhone user? Subscribe at coolstoriesabout.art, not via the app. Apple adds 30% to the price.

1 | Anna Boberg (1864 to 1935)

In the spring of 1901, Anna Boberg traveled north with her husband Ferdinand, the architect who designed half the public buildings of Sweden during the Belle Époque. They went up the Norwegian coast as far as the Lofoten Islands, the chain of cliffs where the Atlantic breaks at the edge of the Arctic Circle.

A week into the trip, Anna refused to go home.

She wrote later that she simply wanted to stay and “paint, paint, paint.” Ferdinand went back alone. He returned through Trondheim and mailed her brushes, oil paint, canvases.

She came back every summer for the next thirty three years. In 1904 Ferdinand drew her a small wooden house on Fyrön Island, right across from Svolvær. That would be her studio.

She painted the same coast in every season: northern lights in green and violet sweeps, herring boats lit by oil lamps in the polar night, icebergs you cannot tell apart from clouds.

A Paris exhibition in 1905 gave her a French audience. Sweden recognized her too, but she spent her whole life in Ferdinand’s shadow.

After her death in 1935 her canvases slipped into storage. Nationalmuseum installed her work as a permanent room in 2018. The Musée d’Orsay holds several of her oils.

2 | Per Adolfsen (born 1964)

At thirteen he would bike into the forest with a sketchbook and draw the trees.

His father wanted him to become a banker. Per Adolfsen worked in a bank for years.

Then in his thirties he left. He went through an abstract phase, then a surrealist phase, and then circled back to what he had done as a kid: trees in colored pencil, drawn from life.

Three years ago he gave up his studio for good. He works outdoors now. He walks into the Danish countryside with a pencil and paper, and draws the tree in front of him.

The build is patient. Each leaf and each shadow is laid down dot by dot, over thousands of small marks, until the eye reads the whole thing as a real tree. Cézanne is in there somewhere, with his geometry. So is Caspar David Friedrich, with his metaphysical silence.

He has had solo shows in Paris, New York and Shanghai in the past few years.

He lives in Odense, in the south of Denmark, where he was born.

If you enjoyed this story, you’ll also love:

• The Old Masters Were Women Too

• 10 Women Artists You Need to Know 👀

• 7 Secrets in 7 Famous Paintings

3 | Konstantin Korovin (1861 to 1939)

Between 1909 and 1914 in Paris, the painter everyone was talking about was not French. He was Russian, in his fifties, painting the curtain that opened every Ballets Russes season for Diaghilev.

His name was Konstantin Korovin. He had been Russia’s first Impressionist, a friend of Anton Chekhov, the chief designer for Savva Mamontov’s Private Opera in Moscow. When Diaghilev decided to bring Russian ballet to Paris, Korovin was the obvious choice.

He painted Paris itself in oil at the same time. The boulevard at night, women in fur coats blurred by the rain, café terraces under awnings. The same loose brush as Renoir, but with the wet light of a northern city.

Then the Bolsheviks took power and Korovin’s world ended. He left Russia in 1923. Paris received him as an old curiosity, not as a master.

He died in Paris on 11 September 1939, days after the war broke out. He was 78, broke, and his funeral was paid for by a former student.

The Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow holds the largest collection of his Ballets Russes designs.

4 | Carel Fabritius (1622 to 1654)

Carel Fabritius was Rembrandt’s most gifted student. He finished his apprenticeship in Amsterdam in the late 1640s, moved to Delft a few years later, and may have started teaching a young man named Johannes Vermeer.

In March 1654 he signed and dated a tiny wooden panel of a goldfinch chained to its feed box. He was 32 and probably the most promising painter of his generation.

Seven months later, on 12 October 1654, at half past ten in the morning, the gunpowder magazine on the edge of Delft exploded…

Read more

130 000+ readers. Learn art the fun way.

This is a preview. Paid subscribers get the full story.

You’ll also get:

• 10 new stories every month

• The full archive (120+ Art stories)

• Your personal art guide. Comment, ask questions, DM me anytime

iPhone user? Subscribe at coolstoriesabout.art, not via the app. Apple adds 30% to the price.

Leonardo da Vinci painted very little.

Barely fifteen paintings in the whole world are his, and only four of them are portraits of women.

This is the only one you can see in Poland, in a museum in Kraków.

In it, a young woman holds a small white animal against her body.

The panel is 54 centimeters by 40. Leonardo painted it in Milan, around 1489, when he was in his late thirties and had spent a few years working for the man who ran the city.

A pretty court portrait, at first glance. Elegant, calm, with nothing to tell.

Except that everything here was built to say something else. And the animal she is holding will turn out to be the last thing you would guess.

Let’s look at this painting, detail by detail.

Who She Is

Her name is Cecilia Gallerani.

She was born in Milan in early 1473, into a family from Siena.

By 16, she is already at the center of the richest court in Italy.

She is no ordinary girl. She speaks Latin, writes verse, gives speeches. She hosts a circle of scholars in her own rooms, one that some call the first literary salon in Europe. The writer Matteo Bandello is a guest in her house and sets one of his stories there, the one that will later give Shakespeare part of Much Ado About Nothing.

Look at what she is wearing. A mantle thrown over one shoulder. Her hair smoothed into two bands, drawn back into a long braid, a thin black ribbon across her forehead, a veil of gauze so fine you can barely see it.

And around her neck, a single strand of dark pearls. Nothing else. No ring, no jewel, no gold.

For a court portrait, that plainness is a choice. To anyone who knows how to read it, it says she was not born into the high nobility.

And yet here she is, painted by Leonardo himself, at the heart of Milanese power. Someone powerful wanted this face kept. Hold on to that.

The Four Golden Words

Lift your eyes to the upper left corner. Four words are painted there in gold capitals, on the dark background: LA BELE FERONIERE, LEONARD D’AWINCI.

Both are wrong.

They were added around 1800 by a Polish princess who had just bought the panel. She thought she recognized the mistress of a king of France, a woman known as La Belle Ferronnière. Wrong woman, wrong country, wrong century. As for D’AWINCI, that is simply da Vinci spelled the way a Polish ear heard it.

For more than a hundred years, no one knew who the young woman in the painting was. Her real name had vanished under someone else’s.

If you enjoyed this story, you’ll also love:

• The Last Supper: Leonardo’s Secret, Detail by Detail

• Was the Mona Lisa Secretly Sick? The Medical Clues

• The Arnolfini Portrait: Hidden Secrets Explained

Who Is She Looking At?

Come back to her face. She turns her head to the side, away from you, toward something outside the frame.

A court poet, soon after the painting, wrote a line about her: she seems to be listening, and not speaking.

She is not posing for you. She is turned toward someone, and you cannot see who.

The gesture looks ordinary. It is not. In those years, a woman’s portrait was painted in strict profile, motionless, almost like a medallion. Leonardo does the opposite.

He turns her body one way and her head the other, as if a movement had just crossed the room.

And here is a detail you barely notice: the animal is looking the same way she is. Its eyes are fixed on the same point, outside the frame. The woman and the animal are staring together at someone we cannot see.

The result is a woman caught mid-gesture, alive in a way no portrait of a woman of her time had ever been.

The Animal That Is Too Big

Now the animal she holds against her. White, long-bodied, its eyes alert.

Look closely: it is too big. A real ermine fits in one hand, barely larger than a weasel. This one is the size of a small cat, with a muscular front leg and the look of a predator.

Leonardo, who spent his life drawing animals from life, did not get an ermine wrong. If he paints it this way, it is because it is not there as an animal. It is there as a sign.

One meaning gives itself away at once. The Greek word for this kind of creature, galê, sounds like the first part of her name: Gallerani.

Leonardo liked to hide his sitters’ names in his paintings. A few years earlier, he had painted a young Florentine woman, Ginevra de’ Benci, against a juniper bush, ginepro in Italian, for Ginevra.

So the animal spells out her name. That is the easy part.

What is left is to find out what other sign it carries.

The Claws

Look at her hand on the animal. Leonardo paints every knuckle, every tendon, down to the way the joint of a finger hollows as it folds. The precision is such that the hand seems alive.

Now come closer, to the place where the animal meets her arm.

The claws are out. Spread, dug into the red fabric of her sleeve.

She holds it gently, and it grips her hard. Whatever this animal is, it is powerful, and it is not entirely tame.

And look at where she holds it. Not against her chest, not on her lap. Low, against her belly, clasped in both arms.

This is the key to the painting. This animal is not an animal. And what it really is changes everything you have just seen…

Read more

130 000+ readers. Learn art the fun way.

This is a preview. Paid subscribers get the full story.

You’ll also get:

• 10 new stories every month

• The full archive (120+ Art stories)

• Your personal art guide. Comment, ask questions, DM me anytime

iPhone user? Subscribe at coolstoriesabout.art, not via the app. Apple adds 30% to the price.

London, May 1972. One in the morning.

On the top floor of 17 Powis Terrace, in Notting Hill, in a large apartment turned into a studio, a man of 34 stands painting at a canvas ten feet wide and seven feet tall.

Round glasses, black frames. Hair bleached blond, a shapeless sweater. A cigarette burning down, forgotten, in an ashtray on the floor.

On the canvas, a blue pool under dry hills.

A man in a pink jacket stands at the water’s edge, his eyes lowered to the surface. Below him, a second man swims, his face broken up by the ripples.

In a few hours, the movers will come for the canvas. They will roll it, crate it, load it onto a plane for New York. It has to be on a gallery wall on 57th Street by May 13.

The canvas isn’t finished. He’s still painting the standing man’s face.

Hockney has already painted this picture once. A whole version, months of work, that he ended up throwing out.

Two Photographs on the Floor

It all began by chance, a few months earlier, on the floor of this studio.

Two forgotten photographs had come to rest side by side. In one, a boy swam underwater, a shot brought back from California. In the other, a young man stood still, his eyes lowered to the ground.

The standing boy was no one. A figure caught on another day, for another reason, left there by accident.

But chance had composed a scene. The standing man seemed to be watching the swimmer below his feet. Two bodies, two unrelated moments, brought together by the floor.

The idea seized him at once. That same evening, he was at work.

For four months, he wore himself out on it. The angle of the pool rang false, refused to be fixed, threw everything else off. He gave up, threw out the whole canvas.

When he took it up again, in early April, New York was only weeks away. He repainted it all from scratch, eighteen hours a day.

If you enjoyed this story, you’ll also love:

• 7 Secrets in 7 Famous Paintings

• 6 women, 1 monster: Picasso

• 10 Artists you need to Know 👀 #13

The Boy from Bradford

By then he had painted dozens of pools. They had become his signature. Nothing in his childhood had pointed him toward blue water.

He grew up in Bradford, a mill town in the north of England, its bricks blackened with soot, its rain eight months out of twelve. A private pool, up there, no one had ever seen one.

His father bought up old bicycles and repainted them to look new. The boy watched him do it, fascinated to see paint turn one thing into another.

In 1964, he flew to Los Angeles. The plane came down over San Bernardino, and below it appeared hundreds of little blue rectangles between the houses. Pools, everywhere.

For a man from the North, gay in a country that still sent people like him to prison, California was a liberation as much as a light. He settled there, and painted men, openly.

There, his painting found its form. Flat colors, a shadowless light, and the challenge that would never let him go: catching moving water with a few white strokes.

He didn’t paint from a single view either. He built his canvases by assembling photographs taken separately. A true image, made of pieces that weren’t.

In 1967, a white splash frozen over an empty pool. A Bigger Splash. The boy from Bradford had become one of the most watched English painters on either side of the Atlantic.

The Last Face

In the studio, it’s almost two in the morning. Hockney is on the last figure now, the man standing at the water’s edge.

On the canvas, the two men are painted in two opposite styles. The swimmer in soft, dissolved strokes, half swallowed by the water. The standing man sharp and hard, cut out like a photograph.

The anonymous boy from the old photo is gone. In his place, Hockney paints another face. The face of a man he knows better than any other in the world, a man he has painted a hundred times.

A man who has walked out of his life…

Read more

130 000+ readers. Learn art the fun way.

This is a preview. Paid subscribers get the full story.

You’ll also get:

• 10 new stories every month

• The full archive (120+ Art stories)

• Your personal art guide. Comment, ask questions, DM me anytime

iPhone user? Subscribe at coolstoriesabout.art, not via the app. Apple adds 30% to the price.

1. Edvard Munch, The Scream (1893)

No one is screaming in The Scream.

Look at the figure’s hands. They do not open around a scream. They cover his ears. He is not screaming. He is trying not to hear.

So who is screaming?

Munch wrote the scene down in his diary. One evening, he is walking home along the fjord near Kristiania, today Oslo. Two friends walk ahead of him. The sun drops, the sky turns blood red. He stops, drained, and feels “a great, infinite scream pass through nature.”

The scream does not come from the man. It comes from the sky and the water. The two friends, for their part, heard nothing and keep walking.

One last detail remains, top left, in the red of the sky. A line in pencil, tiny: “Can only have been painted by a madman.”

For a century it was blamed on a vandal. In 2021, the National Museum of Norway compared the handwriting. It is Munch’s. He wrote it after a stranger, standing in front of the canvas, publicly declared him insane.

2. Johannes Vermeer, Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (around 1658)

What is this woman reading?

For centuries, no one could say. A letter, her face lowered, absorbed. A love note? Bad news? Vermeer had left no clue.

Or rather, he had left one. And it had been painted over.

In 2017, in Dresden, a restoration strips away a layer of paint spread across the back wall, behind her. A figure reappears. A large Cupid, the god of love, hidden after Vermeer’s death by a hand other than his own.

The Cupid gives the answer the painting had kept to itself. It is a love letter.

If you enjoyed this story, you’ll also love:

• Caravaggio’s The Beheading of Saint John, Detail by Detail

• Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance, Detail by Detail

• The Ambassadors: The Skull Hidden in Plain Sight

3. Caravaggio, David with the Head of Goliath

David holds the severed head of Goliath. A thousand painters have taken on this subject. Only one gave the dead giant his own face.

It is Caravaggio. That severed head is him.

And he has a terrible reason to paint himself defeated. In 1606, in Rome, he killed a man, Ranuccio Tomassoni, in a brawl. Since then he has been on the run, a death sentence on his head. Anyone can legally kill him, anywhere.

This painting, he sends to Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the one man able to win him a pardon. On the canvas, David does not gloat. He looks at the head with a kind of pity.

Caravaggio holds out his own severed face to the man who can save him. He dies in 1610, before the pardon arrives.

4. Francisco Goya, The Third of May 1808 (1814)

Night. A wall, a firing squad, the rifles already raised. At the center, a man in a white shirt, on his knees, arms thrown toward the sky. The second before the volley.

Goya is painting what Napoleon’s troops did in Madrid in 1808. They are shooting civilians.

Everything plays out in his right hand, open, raised in the full light of a lantern.

In the hollow of the palm, there is a mark…

Read more

130 000+ readers. Learn art the fun way.

This is a preview. Paid subscribers get the full story.

You’ll also get:

• 10 new stories every month

• The full archive (120+ Art stories)

• Your personal art guide. Comment, ask questions, DM me anytime

iPhone user? Subscribe at coolstoriesabout.art, not via the app. Apple adds 30% to the price.

Paris, June 1875.

The auction rooms of the Hôtel Drouot, the heart of the Paris art market.

A young man stops in front of some drawings. He looks at them one by one. He does not move on.

Peasants in charcoal and pastel, a sower, gleaners, a man bent over his spade: ninety five sheets, put up for sale after the death of the man who made them.

He is 21. He sells reproductions at Goupil, one of the biggest art dealers of the day, and he has never painted a canvas.

That evening, he writes to his brother to say what he felt. The only words he can find are from the Bible, the ones God speaks to Moses before the burning bush: “Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.”

Holy ground. For simple peasants who sow and glean. For this young man, their labor is already a prayer.

This clerk is named Vincent van Gogh.

The man whose sheets hold him there died five months earlier, on 20 January 1875, in Barbizon. The two never met, never wrote to each other, never will. And yet, until his own death, Vincent will keep coming back to this man.

The Painter of Peasants

Jean François Millet was born on 4 October 1814 in Gruchy, a hamlet on the coast of Normandy, into a family of well off, devout farmers. The village priest taught him Latin, but for his whole life he read almost nothing but the Bible.

He trained in Cherbourg, then in Paris under the painter Paul Delaroche. In 1849, fleeing the cholera, he settled in Barbizon, on the edge of the Fontainebleau forest, with his companion Catherine. They would stay there twenty six years and raise nine children.

There, he caused a quiet scandal: he painted nothing but peasants at work. The sower. The gleaners picking up fallen grain. The couple who stop their digging to say the Angelus. No gods, no heroes, no battles. Backs bent over the soil.

Middle class critics smelled socialism in it, almost a call to revolt in his man leaning on a hoe. Millet himself was thinking of a verse from Genesis: you shall eat your bread in the sweat of your brow.

The money never came. For years he painted in a damp cellar, dodged his creditors, traded a canvas for a pair of shoes or a bed. One man kept him afloat: Alfred Sensier, a dealer and friend, who advanced him paints and money, paid his debts, and would one day write his life. Almost what Theo would soon be for Vincent.

Even one of his most famous paintings was born of a misunderstanding. An American commissioned The Angelus, then never came to collect it. Its first title had nothing holy about it: Prayer for the Potato Crop. It was for lack of a buyer that Millet added a steeple on the horizon and renamed the canvas.

He died in Barbizon in early 1875, barely out of poverty. A few years later, his paintings would be worth fortunes.

The First Gesture

Back when he wrote his letter from Drouot, Vincent wanted to be a pastor, like his father.

In December 1878, he left for the Borinage, the Belgian coal country, to bring the Gospel to the miners. He took it literally. He gave away his clothes and kept only an old soldier’s coat, left the baker’s comfortable house for a hut, and slept on straw. He stopped washing the coal dust from his face, to look like the men he visited. He went down with them, seven hundred meters underground.

The locals called him the Christ of the coal mine.

The church, for its part, grew alarmed. In the summer of 1879, his post was not renewed: he preached badly, they said, he got lost in the miners’ fast speech. The truth was that his zeal and his self chosen poverty made the church uneasy.

He stayed there a whole winter, with nothing. Twenty six years old, a failed calling, and he drew.

In 1880 he made up his mind: he would be a painter. His first act as a painter was a copy. On 20 August, from Cuesmes, he wrote to Theo that he had started large drawings after Millet, The Times of the Day and The Sower.

He did not copy just anyone. He copied the painter of the poor peasants, the very people he had just left at the bottom of the mines. The Sower above all would never let him go: he would come back to it again and again, he wrote to Theo, that figure haunts him.

The Lamp at Night

For five years, in Brussels, in The Hague, in Nuenen, Vincent copied Millet by the dozens of sheets, in pencil and charcoal, in the black and white of the prints.

In 1882, someone lent him the thick biography Sensier had just devoted to Millet. The book robbed him of sleep; he would get up at night, light the lamp, and go on reading. What a man, he wrote to Theo, this Millet was.

In his letters, he never said Millet alone. He said Father Millet. A master, a guide, almost a comforter.

In 1885, in Nuenen, all of this became his first great canvas, The Potato Eaters. Five peasants gathered around a dish, under a lamp, in a room the color of earth, their hands reaching for the potatoes they themselves had pulled from the ground. The composition is Vincent’s; the rest, the gravity, the bias toward the humble, comes from Millet.

The Sower Turns to Color

In 1886, Vincent joined Theo in Paris. There he discovered the bright color of the Impressionists and Japanese prints.

In February 1888, he left for Arles. And The Sower came back with him. But it had changed languages.

In Millet’s version, the sower strides down a gray slope at dusk, an almost black silhouette, his arm open on the seed. No color: everything is in the gesture.

On 28 June 1888, Vincent wrote to Theo that this sower was gray, lifeless, and wondered whether it was at last possible to paint him another way, yellow against violet.

His canvas keeps the stride, the arm, the curve of the back. But behind the peasant, a yellow sun devours a quarter of the sky, and the earth he walks on turns violet. The drawing is still Millet’s. The color is his alone.

For Vincent, this sower is more than field work. Millet almost never painted an angel or a saint, only peasants at their labor, and yet, Vincent wrote to his friend Émile Bernard, what he painted was “the doctrine of Christ.” His Angelus is not priests under a vault, but two peasants who stop their digging, heads bowed, in the middle of a field.

Vincent, the former preacher of the Borinage, sees the same Gospel in it.

If you enjoyed this story, you’ll also love:

• The Last Day of Vincent Van Gogh

• The Woman Who Made Van Gogh

• Arles Bedroom: Van Gogh’s Secret Detail by Detail

Saint Rémy, May 1889

Saint Rémy de Provence, 8 May 1889. A carriage stops in front of Saint Paul de Mausole, an old monastery turned mental hospital, set apart among the olive trees.

Vincent steps down with his painting gear. He is 36. Five months earlier, in Arles, he had cut off his ear. No one forced him to come: he asked to be locked up himself.

The doctor who takes him in, Théophile Peyron, is a former navy doctor. He believes Vincent is epileptic rather than mad. His whole treatment comes down to two baths a week, two hours each time, hot water then cold.

Vincent is given a narrow cell and, on the ground floor, a room to paint in, with a barred window that looks out on a wheat field closed off by a wall.

Then winter comes, and the attacks with it. In late December 1889, Vincent loses his mind for several days. He picks up filth off the floor and puts it in his mouth. He tries to poison himself by swallowing his own paints and his lamp oil, convinced that someone else is trying to poison him. Peyron saves him.

It is in this state, between two attacks, that he asks for some Millets.

Not paintings, which cannot be moved, but prints after the master’s drawings, cut by the engraver Adrien Lavieille. Theo slips them into his letters: the ten plates of The Labors of the Fields, The Four Times of the Day. Vincent lays them out on his table.

The first one he finishes is The Evening, a scene of nightfall: the woman sews, the man busies himself by the lamp, a cradle sits in the shadow. Then The Diggers. Then The Sower, again.

This work keeps him on his feet. Between two attacks, it is to this dead man that he turns, and he writes to Theo that painting after Millet comforts him.

From September 1889 to January 1890, in that room, he paints twenty one canvases after Millet. Some will count among his greatest masterpieces...

Read more

130 000+ readers. Learn art the fun way.

This is a preview. Paid subscribers get the full story.

You’ll also get:

• 10 new stories every month

• The full archive (120+ Art stories)

• Your personal art guide. Comment, ask questions, DM me anytime

iPhone user? Subscribe at coolstoriesabout.art, not via the app. Apple adds 30% to the price.

In Valletta, Caravaggio is everywhere. On hotel signs, souvenir shops, pizzerias, on posters for immersive experiences and tour operators. The Maltese capital lives off the brief stay of this man who spent only a year and three months there.

In front of the Co-Cathedral of Saint John, sunburned shoulders and necks white with sunscreen wait in line. They all come for the same thing: a painting. At the back of a side oratory, on a single wall, since 1608. 3.61 meters high by 5.20 meters wide. The largest he ever painted in his life, with life-size figures.

The Co-Cathedral is the church of the Knights of Saint John, the military order born in the Holy Land at the time of the Crusades. Their patron saint has always been John the Baptist, and it is his beheading that Caravaggio painted above the altar where his relics are displayed on feast days.

The painting dates from 1608. It tells the story of the Baptist as much as the story of the man who held the brush.

Dirty Feet

Before him, in the Renaissance, saints were painted as idealized figures: perfect faces, sumptuous drapery, golden light. With Raphael or Leonardo, everything was about elevation.

Caravaggio takes the opposite path. He paints saints as ordinary men, with dirty feet, broken nails, worn clothes. He picks his models from the street: porters, prostitutes, thieves. For The Death of the Virgin, his painting now at the Louvre, he uses the body of a prostitute as his model. The Carmelites who commissioned the painting reject it.

This approach has a precise purpose. For Caravaggio, a believer cannot be moved by a saint unless he can recognize himself in him. And a believer in Rome at the start of the 17th century does not look like a Raphael: he looks like a porter, a servant, a prisoner.

The Knife Being Drawn

Look at the executioner. His right hand plunges into his belt to pull out a short dagger with a straight blade.

The weapon is designed to slip between the armor plates of a wounded knight on a battlefield, and finish him off in one strike. It carried a name throughout military Europe, from the Latin: misericordia, mercy. The blade that shortens suffering.

The executioner is about to give his mercy to the saint.

The Finger That Falls

Look down at the body. The Baptist’s right hand, tied behind his back, palm facing up, index finger curled.

In all Christian painting, and notably in Leonardo da Vinci’s work, John the Baptist has his right index finger raised toward the sky. It is his signature gesture, the one that distinguishes him in every painting. It points to the coming of Christ.

Caravaggio painted him seven times with that finger raised. Here, for the only time, he paints it slack. The finger that announced God announces nothing anymore. The prophet’s mission is over.

The Maid With the Platter

Look to the right of the executioner. A young woman leans forward, simple clothes, no silk, no jewelry. With both hands, she holds a large golden dish that she lowers almost to the ground to receive the head.

The story comes from the Gospel of Mark, chapter 6. In the first century, in Galilee, King Herod Antipas had John the Baptist imprisoned in a fortress near the Dead Sea. The prophet had publicly denounced him for marrying Herodias, his brother’s wife who was still alive.

During the banquet for his birthday, Herod watches Herodias’s daughter, Salome, dance. Delighted, drunk, he swears to give her whatever she wants. Her mother, who has held a grudge against the prophet since his denunciation, whispers the request in her ear: the head of John on a platter. The king keeps his oath.

And Caravaggio dresses the princess as a servant. No silk, no oriental luxury, no royal hall. Just a young woman bending down to receive a head.

The Golden Basin

Now look at the dish the maid holds. Hammered gold, wide, round edge. An empty circle.

When John’s head falls into the dish later, the platter will frame it entirely. The shape that will appear is not a kitchen object. It is a halo. And it is at that precise second, at the moment of impact on the gold, that John becomes a saint.

The Lambskin

Look back at the saint’s body. Under the scarlet cloak that slips off his shoulder and spreads in the foreground, you can make out the texture of an animal skin tunic, camel or sheep. It is the classic attribute of John in the desert, who preached wearing skins and lived on locusts and wild honey.

Caravaggio goes further.

He lays the saint on the fleece, the way you lay an animal on a slab. The torn-off paws of the animal hang on the stone, in a geometry that mirrors the position of the prophet’s lifeless legs.

In the Christian tradition, John the Baptist had pointed at Christ in front of the crowd, crying: “Behold the Lamb of God.” Ecce Agnus Dei. The lamb was Christ, the one who would let himself be sacrificed to redeem the sins of men, like the lamb of Jewish sacrifice.

Caravaggio takes the image literally. The preacher who pointed at the lamb takes the lamb’s place, on the slab, emptied onto the stone.

The Rope

Look at the saint’s wrists. A thick hemp rope binds his wrists behind his back. It extends along the ground to his feet.

In classical Christian painting, John the Baptist holds a paper scroll on which are written, in Gothic letters, the three words he spoke at the Jordan: Ecce Agnus Dei.

Caravaggio removes the scroll. The rope that binds the saint draws the same curve on the ground as the unrolled scroll would.

The Ears, Not the Eyes

Look behind the young woman with the platter. An old woman, wrinkled face. Her hands rise to her face, but they do not cover her eyes: they press against her ears.

She is the only figure in the painting who reacts to what is happening. All the others are busy or indifferent. The executioner executes, the warden orders, the maid waits, the saint dies.

She is the one who suffers. An ordinary old woman, wrinkled, without grace. And it is the sound she cannot bear, not the sight: the scrape of the knife on bone, the cartilage giving way one piece at a time.

The Warden in Turkish Dress

In the middle of the scene, standing, an old bearded man dominates the composition. He extends his index finger to show the executioner where to place the head. From his belt hangs a heavy ring of keys.

These keys have a precise function in the story. John the Baptist was not killed in the street, he was imprisoned for months. The old man with the keys is the one who opened the door of his cell to bring him out to the stone.

His clothing is not that of a Roman official or a servant of Herod. It is Turkish.

For the Knights of Malta praying in the chapel, the meaning is immediate.

Forty-three years before Caravaggio painted this work, in June 1565, the Ottomans had taken Fort Saint Elmo at the entrance of Marsamxett harbor. They had beheaded the fallen knights, then Pasha Mustafa had their bodies nailed to wooden crosses and set them drifting across the bay to terrify the Grand Master Jean de Valette, the founder of the city.

When a knight looks at Caravaggio’s painting, the executioner of the Baptist is not Herod’s man. He is the image of the enemy who beheaded their brothers.

If you enjoyed this story, you’ll also love:

• The Caravaggio Code: The Secret Nobody Saw for 400 Years

• Mary, Magdalene and John the Baptist: The Secrets of Sacred Art

• The Mafia and the Missing Caravaggio

The Two Faces at the Bars

Look to the far right. In the wall of the archway in the background, two men’s faces pressed against the iron grate of a cell, in the brown tunics of the poor. They stretch their necks to miss nothing of the execution.

At first glance, they are ordinary prisoners watching the execution by chance in the courtyard where they are held. They are not. They are a quotation.

The rule book of the Order of Saint John contains an engraving illustrating the two possible fates for a knight. On the right, those who remain virtuous and free. On the left, behind prison bars, those who have broken the rules.

Caravaggio transposed this engraving into his painting. The prisoners in the oratory are not anonymous criminals. They are knights who have broken the rules.

Remember these two faces.

At 36, by delivering this painting to the Knights of Malta, Caravaggio thought his life was saved. Five months later, in this same room, in front of this same painting, it collapsed…

Read more

130 000+ readers. Learn art the fun way.

This is a preview. Paid subscribers get the full story.

You'll also get:

• 10 new stories every month

• The full archive (120+ Art stories)

• Your personal art guide. Comment, ask questions, DM me anytime

iPhone user? Subscribe at coolstoriesabout.art, not via the app. Apple adds 30% to the price.

1 | Petrus van Schendel (1806 to 1870)

In 19th century Brussels they called him Monsieur Chandelle.

Petrus van Schendel was a Dutch painter. He made his name in Brussels for one very specific thing: he painted night markets better than anyone alive.

His pictures all work the same way. Pitch black background. A single candle or a single oil lamp held by a fishmonger, a fruit seller, a peddler. The face leans into the small flame. The goods glow at the center. Everything else dissolves into darkness.

He could place ten or fifteen figures in one market square and light each of them with a different small flame. Brussels collectors fought over his canvases.

He died in Brussels in 1870. The best of his night market scenes hang today at the Rijksmuseum and at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.

Look at one on your phone in a dark room. The flame still works.

2 | James Proudfoot (1908 to 1971)

A Scottish painter from Perth who painted two things: French rooftops in full sunlight and British actors.

The rooftops first. Proudfoot spent his summers in Dieppe. In 1937 he painted Sun on a House, Dieppe there, which became his most widely reproduced canvas. Saturated yellow façade, hard shadow, flat blue sky. The late summer light frozen in oil.

Then the actors. Once based in London, he became one of the favorite portraitists for stage and screen. His list of sitters reads like a casting page. His portrait of Peter Ustinov earned him an honorable mention at the Paris Salon of 1956. He painted his wife, the actress Ellen Pollock, as Lady Macbeth in 1953.

When a director needed a believable portrait inside a film set, he was the one who delivered the canvas. He painted the portraits used in The Laughing Lady in 1946. On screen they look like real gallery paintings because that is what they are.

He died in London in 1971. Sun on a House, Dieppe hangs today in the Perth & Kinross Council collection.

3 | Elena Wuest (born 1977)

Kazakh by birth, Russian by training, German by adoption.

Elena Wuest grew up in Karaganda, in central Kazakhstan, in the Soviet academic tradition. At 24 she moved to Germany.

Today she paints at Filmstudio Babelsberg, the oldest large scale film studio in the world, the one that produced Metropolis a century ago.

Her work is contemporary impressionism. Large southern landscapes, loose brushwork over solid structure. The Russian academic tradition and German freedom show up on the same canvas without ever quite agreeing.

In 2023 she was nominated for the Luxembourg Art Prize.

Her work now sits in private collections in Russia and Germany. American collectors are starting to take notice.

4 | Linnea Strid (born 1983)

Read more

130 000+ readers. Learn art the fun way.

This is a preview. Paid subscribers get the full story. You'll also get:

• 10 new stories every month

• The full archive (120+ Art stories)

• Your personal art guide. Comment, ask questions, DM me anytime

iPhone user? Subscribe at coolstoriesabout.art, not via the app. Apple adds 30% to the price.

Paris, spring 1868. A gallery on the first floor of the Louvre.

Two sisters paint side by side, standing before a large Rubens. For weeks they have been copying one of the huge red and gold canvases of the Marie de Medici cycle. Edma, the elder, is 28. Berthe, the younger, is 27.

For young women of their world, copying at the Louvre is the only school allowed. They are not permitted to study the nude in a men’s studio. So they come here, with a chaperone, set up their easel beneath the old masters, and learn by copying them, stroke after stroke.

Their father was a prefect, a senior state official. The family keeps a salon in Passy. People come to call, play the piano, talk painting as a polite accomplishment for a well bred young lady. A girl is allowed to paint. She is not allowed to make a profession of it.

That day, a man crosses the gallery. Henri Fantin Latour, a painter, a copyist like them, a friend of the family for years. Someone is with him.

The man is 36. Fair beard, light gloves, the look of a boulevard dandy.

All of Paris knows his name, and half of Paris despises him. Five years earlier, his Luncheon on the Grass caused a scandal. Two years after that, his Olympia set off an uproar at the Salon, the official state exhibition, the one that makes and breaks painters.

His name is Édouard Manet.

Fantin Latour makes the introductions. Berthe looks up from her copy.

Manet is married. Since 1863 he has lived with Suzanne Leenhoff, a Dutch pianist who once gave the family piano lessons. Nothing in his life leaves room for another woman.

And yet, from that afternoon on, he will never stop painting her.

The First Face

The two families grow close quickly. Each has its day for receiving guests, as good society requires: Marie Cornélie, Berthe’s mother, receives on Tuesdays, Manet’s mother on Thursdays. They dine together, pay visits, talk about the paintings in progress.

Berthe begins to sit for him. Never alone. Her mother sits in a corner of the studio, or a sister, or a friend. A young woman of her standing is never left alone with a man. That is the rule, and no one breaks it.

Marie Cornélie watches her daughter. She sees her face change when Manet walks into a room. She confides it to her letters, with the worry of a mother watching her child grow attached to a married man, unable to do a thing about it.

Manet, for his part, speaks of Berthe lightly. A month after they meet, on 26 August 1868, he writes to Fantin Latour.

“The Morisot sisters are charming. A pity they are not men. As women, though, they could serve the cause of painting by each marrying an academician and sowing discord in the camp of those old dotards.”

An academician is one of those official painters who rule the Salon, the very men the young, like Manet, hold in contempt.

In the spring of 1869, Paris finally sees her face.

Manet shows her at the Salon. The painting is called The Balcony.

Three figures behind a bright green railing. At the back, standing, a violinist and a painter. In front, seated, a woman in a white dress, a fan in her hand. She looks straight ahead, her eyes very dark, her face closed.

It is Berthe. The crowd sees her for the first time.

They find her strange, magnetic, almost unsettling. The words femme fatale go around the room. Berthe herself thinks she looks “more strange than ugly.”

What no one knows is the risk she is taking. Three years earlier, the woman Manet had painted the same way was named Victorine Meurent, the nude model for Olympia, the courtesan who stared Paris in the face. To give the features of a young woman of the upper middle class to that kind of painting is to throw her reputation to the whole city.

Berthe comes back to sit for him. Again, and again.

The Studio

The visits become a habit. Berthe goes up to the studio, sits, leaves. Manet paints her in every pose.

Repose. She lies on a sofa, in a long white dress, abandoned in a way no woman of her standing shows herself before a man who is not her own. Above her head, Manet has hung a Japanese print: a raging sea, a wave rearing up. Below, the calm of a body at rest. Above, the storm.

He paints her with a fan, with a muff, in profile, her face half hidden by a black veil. Always under the eye of the chaperone.

And always the same thing: he never paints her as a painter. Never a brush in her hand, never an easel. He paints her as a woman, never as an artist.

The influence, though, does not run one way. It is Berthe who pushes him to lighten his palette and to go out and paint in the open air. The master learns from his model.

At the same time, he paints his wife too. Suzanne, seated at the piano or in an armchair, her face calm, her hands folded. Quiet, well behaved portraits, with none of the charge he brings to Berthe. What he saves for his model, he does not give to his wife.

He also takes on a pupil.

She is 20, her name is Eva Gonzalès, she is the daughter of a fashionable novelist. Manet sets her up in his studio and paints her, standing at her canvas, brush raised, hard at work. Exactly what he never grants Berthe.

Berthe cannot bear it.

She writes everything to her sister Edma, married not long before, gone to live in the provinces, and who has put away her brushes for good. From a distance, Edma has become her confidante, the one to whom she admits what she would tell no one else.

In these letters, Berthe watches Eva like a rival. She relishes the days when Manet gets nowhere with her, when he scrapes off each evening the portrait he keeps starting over. She fumes that he throws “that eternal Mademoiselle Gonzalès” in her face as a model of seriousness.

No one gets that jealous over a mere colleague.

One spring day in 1870, a scene says it all.

Berthe has just finished a large painting for the Salon, a portrait of her mother and her sister Edma, then pregnant. The evening before the works go in, unsure of herself, she asks Manet to come and take a look.

He looks. Then he takes Berthe’s brush, and her palette.

He retouches the skirt. Then the bodice. Then the head. Then the background. For four hours, in front of a frozen Berthe, he repaints the figure of the mother entirely, unable to stop.

She writes to Edma that there is no holding him back, that he moves from the petticoat to the bodice, from the bodice to the head, and that she watches without daring a word.

The painting leaves for the Salon the next day, half painted by him. Berthe says she would rather be at the bottom of the Seine than see it on the wall.

Two years later, in 1872, Manet paints the most intense portrait of them all.

Berthe in black, mourning dress and hat, her face turned to the front. Her eyes are green. He paints them deep black. And at the neckline of her bodice, almost invisible, he sets a small bunch of violets.

No one, then, gives those flowers a second look.

If you enjoyed this story, you’ll also love:

• Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party

• Who Painted the First Impressionist Painting?

• Inside Monet’s House: A Room by Room Visit

1874

The year 1874 opens with a death. In January, Berthe’s father dies.

She is 33, and still no husband. In her world, at that age, it is almost a failing. A woman who paints, who turns down matches, who will not settle down, becomes the worry at every dinner table. Her mother presses her, harder and harder.

In the spring, Berthe does the opposite of what is expected of her.

She hangs her paintings at the first Impressionist exhibition, in the former studios of the photographer Nadar, on the Boulevard des Capucines.

The only woman in the group to show under her own name. An act of independence all the sharper because Édouard Manet refuses to take part, and even tries to talk her out of it. Berthe’s old teacher, Joseph Guichard, writes to her mother, alarmed: she must break with this school that will be the ruin of her.

Everything pushes her toward a marriage that would settle her for good.

And it is that very year that Manet paints his last portrait of her.

Berthe with a Fan. She is in mourning for her father, all in black, a velvet ribbon at her throat, a fan in her hand. On that hand, an engagement ring, clearly visible.

For six years, almost every time, Berthe’s eyes had sought the painter. This time, they slide to the side. She no longer looks at him.

After this canvas, he will never paint her again.

A few weeks later, on 22 December 1874, Berthe Morisot marries.

And the name of the man she marries casts the previous six years in a sudden new light.

Read more

130 000+ readers. Learn art the fun way.

This is a preview.

Paid subscribers get the full story. You'll also get:

• 10 new stories every month

• The full archive (120+ Art stories)

• Your personal art guide. Comment, ask questions, DM me anytime

iPhone user? Subscribe at coolstoriesabout.art, not via the app. Apple adds 30% to the price.

Antwerp, around 1620.

Balthasar Geerts is arrested by the city authorities. The charge is one of the most serious of the time: counterfeiting. Geerts would melt down low-grade metal, give it the appearance of a gold or silver coin, and put it back into circulation. He barely escapes beheading.

Forty years later, in Delft, his grandson paints a young woman holding a balance between her fingers, in front of a casket overflowing with gold and pearls.

The grandson is Johannes Vermeer. The painting is known, for three centuries, as A Woman Weighing Gold.

Vermeer paints it at age 32, around 1664, in his mother in law’s house in Delft, where he lives with his wife Catharina. The painting is now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It is barely 40 by 35 centimeters.

It is probably the densest painting in Vermeer’s entire body of work.

We are going to look at it detail by detail.

The yellow curtain

The whole room is lit by a single window, in the upper left of the painting. Vermeer has drawn a heavy yellow curtain across it, blocking almost the entire opening.

The daylight no longer enters directly: it turns into a golden glow, filtered through the fabric, that brushes the back wall and catches the edge of the woman’s face.

No other known work by Vermeer has its window so completely covered. In almost all of his other paintings from the same decade, you can see the sky through the panes, or at least make out the leaded glass.

Here, no. Here, Vermeer closes off the outside world.

Something, in Delft that summer, is worth keeping at a distance.

The plague.

It has been killing family after family for two years. Burials happen after dark, without bells, to avoid panic. The city’s official physician writes that bodies rot before they even die.

The yellow curtain is not there to filter the light.

It is there to close the door to the world dying outside.

The blue cloth

Slide your gaze toward the left corner of the table. A heavy cloth of deep blue is thrown there in thick folds, spilling almost toward the viewer.

That blue is natural ultramarine, extracted from lapis lazuli, a semi precious stone imported drop by drop from Afghanistan by Italian merchants. By the gram, it is the most expensive pigment in the world. More expensive than gold.

When a painter signs a contract with a wealthy client, a clause sometimes specifies how many grams of ultramarine will go on the canvas and exactly where, because clients know that painters tend to dilute it and keep some for themselves.

And in all of European painting since the Middle Ages, ultramarine is reserved for one thing only: the Virgin’s cloak.

Vermeer uses it everywhere on his canvas. Not on a saint. Not on a cloak.

On a tablecloth, thrown casually across the corner of a middle class table.

Keep that in mind. We come back to it.

The casket and the jewels

Right next to the cloth sits a small dark wooden casket, its lid open. Inside, you can see a red velvet lining. From the casket spill two long pearl necklaces, a heavy gold chain, and a few coins scattered on the wood.

Vermeer almost certainly did not own these objects. He was too poor.

The jewels you see here were most likely borrowed from Maria de Knuijt, the wife of Vermeer’s main patron, a wealthy Delft burgher and a shareholder in the Dutch East India Company. She would lend Vermeer her caskets and her precious fabrics to give his paintings the look of a rich household.

A single well formed pearl, in the seventeenth century, is worth more than the yearly wage of a working man. On this table, there are dozens, carelessly tipped onto the wood.

Keep them in mind too. We come back to them.

The jacket and the fur

Move back up to the woman’s torso. The jacket is deep blue velvet, short sleeves, trimmed with a thick band of white fur.

That fur, for three centuries, has been taken by every visitor for ermine. Nobody in the Dutch middle class of the seventeenth century wore ermine to sit around the house.

The notarial inventories of the time are clear: the fur that lined those indoor jackets was white squirrel, sometimes cat, sometimes even mouse. It was a domestic garment you slipped on to keep from freezing in those large Dutch houses, badly heated.

The jacket belonged to Catharina, Vermeer’s wife. We find it in the list of her belongings drawn up after her death.

Vermeer puts it on other models in other paintings: you can see it in The Concert in Boston, in Young Woman with a Water Pitcher at the Metropolitan, in The Love Letter in Amsterdam. It is a studio prop that runs through his whole career, like a signature.

The belly

Look down. The jacket opens onto an ochre skirt fastened with bright red ribbons.

The belly is rounded. Heavily.

Van Gogh, in a letter to Émile Bernard in June 1888, says he is certain: the woman in the painting is pregnant.

Some historians, for a long time, refused the idea. Their argument was that pregnancy was never depicted in genre painting at the time. Even the pregnant Virgins of the Renaissance Visitations were hidden under thick, shapeless drapes. The prominent belly, they said, was simply the fashion of the day: those heavily padded skirts worn under short jackets.

But those who have spent their lives in front of this painting have ended up admitting that Van Gogh was probably right.

There is a detail visible to the naked eye that convinced them. On the ochre skirt, a bright yellow line begins high on the waist and curves down exactly along the shape of the belly. If it were just fashion artificially inflating the skirts, Vermeer would never have outlined that curve with a brush.

But he did. He painted a pregnancy, not a fold of fabric.

In 1998, two doctors in The Lancet published a clinical diagnosis just from looking at the painting: pallor, slight facial edema, prominent abdomen. Pregnancy of five or six months.

And Catharina’s biography leaves little room for doubt. Fifteen children in twenty years of marriage. In 1664, she is probably expecting her seventh or eighth.

The mirror

Turn your head to the left. Not toward the back wall. Toward the side wall, perpendicular to the window, where a small mirror hangs.

Thin black wood frame, flat, square, no ornament. It is placed exactly opposite the woman’s face. She could see herself with a single flick of her eyes.

She does not look at it.

Her eyelids are lowered toward her own hands. The mirror catches a little of the light from the yellow curtain. It reflects nothing of her.

In seventeenth century Dutch painting, a mirror placed next to a woman surrounded by jewels is almost always a warning slipped into the decor: beauty fades, possessions fade, death comes.

This woman does not see the warning. She does not see the mirror. She does not see the pearls. Her attention is elsewhere, lower down, toward the balance she holds at hip height.

A curtain that shuts the plague out. The Virgin’s blue on a table. A pregnancy. Ignored jewels.

This woman is not weighing her gold. She is weighing something else.

The answer is not in her hand. It is in the painting that hangs above her head…

Read more

130 000+ readers. Learn art the fun way.

This is a preview. Paid subscribers get the full story. You'll also get:

• 10 new stories every month

• The full archive (120+ Art stories)

• Your personal art guide. Comment, ask questions, DM me anytime

iPhone user? Subscribe at coolstoriesabout.art, not via the app. Apple adds 30% to the price.

In the former studios of the photographer Nadar, an exhibition has just opened. Thirty-one painters are showing their work together. Some of their names still mean almost nothing to the Paris public.

Monet, 33. Renoir, 33. Pissarro, 43. Degas, 39. Sisley, 34. Morisot, 33. Cézanne, 35.

They are young. They are poor. Almost all have been rejected or ignored by the official Salon, the only exhibition that opens the door to galleries, buyers, and a real career. Tired of waiting, they have decided to organize their own event. They call themselves the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors and Engravers.

Ten days after the opening, a critic named Louis Leroy publishes his review in Le Charivari, the satirical newspaper of the day. He came as a visitor. He leaves as a mocker.

Standing in front of a painting by Monet titled Impression, Sunrise, an orange sun drowning in a harbor fog, he writes these lines:

“Impression. I knew it. I told myself, since I am impressed, there must be some impression in it. And what freedom, what softness of execution. Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than this seascape.”

The word is launched as an insult.

It has just named a movement.

Impressionism.

Case closed?

Not so fast.

Before searching for the first Impressionist, we need to know what we are looking for. And that is where the trails multiply. Impressionist painting is not one single thing. It is an assembly.

To find the first Impressionist, we have to trace each thread. One trail at a time.

Let us start with the most visible one.

First trail: painting your own time

Paris, May 15, 1863. Palais de l’Industrie. Emperor Napoleon III has ordered a separate exhibition to be opened alongside the official Salon, to display the works rejected by the jury. He wants to calm the anger of the refused artists. The public nicknames this annex the Salon des Refusés.

One painting draws the crowds. Luncheon on the Grass. A naked woman, two men in modern dress, a picnic in the woods.

No mythological title. No Venus. No Diana. Just a scene that could happen next Sunday in the Bois de Boulogne.

The painter is Édouard Manet. He is 31. The public cries scandal.

Two years later, Manet does it again with Olympia. Another naked woman. Not a goddess. A Parisian prostitute who stares the viewer straight in the eyes.

Manet has just set a new rule. A painter can paint his own time. No ancient costume. No biblical mask. Just what is happening right now, outside, in the street.

Without that permission, no Gare Saint-Lazare. No Bal du moulin de la Galette. No Boulevard des Capucines. All of Impressionist painting takes its subjects from the Paris of 1870. Manet opened that door.

First trail laid down. But the subject is only the start. We still need to know how to paint it.

Second trail: painting outdoors

Before the middle of the 19th century, painting was always done in the studio. Even landscapes were assembled from sketches brought back from the field, then composed indoors.

The reason was material. Oil paint had to be ground by hand, mixed, and stored in pig bladders that dried out within hours.

That changes in 1841. An American painter living in London, John Goffe Rand, files a patent. A tin tube, sealed at one end, screw-capped at the other. Paint stays fresh inside for weeks. The same design will be used for industrial toothpaste fifty years later.

Renoir would later sum it up: “Without the tin tubes of paint, there would have been no Cézanne, no Monet, no Sisley, no Pissarro.”

The invention that freed painting was as ordinary as a toothpaste tube.

Once the equipment is available, a small group of French painters takes the leap. They settle on the edge of the Fontainebleau forest, south of Paris. The village is called Barbizon. Among them: Rousseau, Millet, Corot, Daubigny.

They paint the trees, the peasants, the skies of the French countryside. On site. Not in the studio. For the first time, a whole group turns leaving the studio into a program.

Daubigny pushes it even further. In 1857, he has a barge built. He calls it Le Botin. He turns it into a floating studio and drifts down the Oise and the Seine. He paints from the water.

Case settled?

Not quite. A careful reader might object. What about the Dutch? In the 17th century, Ruisdael, Hobbema, Van Goyen had already invented landscape as an independent genre. Wasn’t that already plein air?

Not really. The Dutch took sketches outdoors, then composed their finished oil paintings back in the studio, often blending elements from several locations. They invented landscape as a noble subject. Not the finished painting made in front of nature.

One isolated exception cuts across the centuries. Rome, 1630. The Spaniard Diego Velázquez, 31 years old, is on a diplomatic mission to the papal court. He sets up his easel in the gardens of the Villa Medici. He paints two small landscapes in oil, outdoors, with no preparatory sketches. Historians treat it as a unique case in 17th-century European painting. Velázquez never repeats the experiment.

It will take two centuries, the invention of the paint tube, and the Barbizon rebellion for that isolated intuition to become a movement.

Second trail laid down. But painting outdoors is not enough. We still need to know how to paint the light.

Third trail: light eating form

Paris, August 1824. Official Salon. An English painting is on display. The Hay Wain by John Constable, a painter from Suffolk.

The sky takes up half the canvas. Loose white touches sparkle. The rain seems suspended in the air. Constable is not describing a cart in a landscape anymore. He is describing the wet light of a summer morning, with a cart sitting inside it by chance.

Form is no longer the subject. Atmosphere is the subject.

Charles X, then King of France, personally awards Constable the gold medal. A royal seal on the crack that has just opened.

Twenty years later, in London, another Englishman pushes the idea to its limit. Joseph Mallord William Turner. In 1844, he paints Rain, Steam and Speed. A train surges out of a swirl of golden mist. You can barely make out the engine. Light has eaten everything. All that remains is colored vibration.

For the first time, a painter treats movement, speed, and weather as pure phenomena of light, with no sharp edges.

That is exactly what Monet will do thirty years later on the Rouen Cathedrals, painted at every hour of the day.

The idea that painting can give up on sharp form to capture only light was born in England. Constable opened it. Turner pushed it to its limit.

Third trail laid down. We still need to know what colors that light is painted with.

Fourth trail: color

In the early 19th century, painting a shadow meant putting down black. Ivory black, lamp black, bitumen. That is how it was taught in every European academy for three centuries.

A French painter is going to blow that dogma apart. His name is Eugène Delacroix.

In 1832, Delacroix joins a diplomatic mission to Morocco. He spends six months there. And he sees something that changes him completely. Under the intense sun, shadows are not black. They are colored. A shadow on a white wall pulls toward blue. A shadow on a red cloth pulls toward green.

Back in Paris, Delacroix changes his palette. He banishes earthy blacks. He paints shadows with real colors, in tune with the light that throws them. An orange sky calls for blue shadows. A yellow wall calls for purple shadows.

Without Delacroix, the world would have kept painting shadows in black. He is the one who opens the bright palette that the Impressionists will use fifty years later on poppies, gardens, and the banks of the Seine.

One piece is still missing. The most visible piece on any Impressionist canvas. The simplest one too. And it reaches much further back in time.

If you enjoyed this story, you'll also love:

• 10 Amazing Impressionist Facts to Tell at Dinner #2

• How Monet's cataracts changed modern art

• 12 Amazing Impressionist Facts to Drop at Your Next Dinner

Read more

130 000+ readers. Learn art the fun way.

This is a preview. Paid subscribers get the full story. You'll also get:

• 10 new stories every month

• The full archive (120+ Art stories)

• Your personal art guide. Comment, ask questions, DM me anytime

iPhone user? Subscribe at coolstoriesabout.art, not via the app. Apple adds 30% to the price.

1 | Eugène Boudin (1824 to 1898)

Summer 1857, Le Havre. A 33 year old painter walks past a framer’s window and notices the caricatures of a local kid hanging in the display. He goes in, asks to meet the kid, and tells him the most useful thing anyone has ever told him: stop the caricatures, come paint outside with me at Honfleur.

The kid is 17 and his name is Oscar Claude Monet.

The painter is Eugène Boudin. He did not wait for Monet to have a body of work. Son of a harbour pilot in Honfleur, he has been painting outside on Normandy beaches for ten years with an easel planted in the sand, which nobody else does at the time.

He invents a new motif: Trouville, Deauville, bourgeois families in crinolines taking the sea air on the Channel coast while immense clouds occupy two thirds of the canvas.

Corot nicknames him the king of skies. Baudelaire devotes a long eulogy to his pastels in his Salon of 1859, long before Monet exists as a painter.

He keeps painting his skies and beaches until his death in 1898. Today, in the Musée d’Orsay, most visitors walk past the small Boudin canvases in a hurry to reach the Monets.

2 | Guido Borelli (born 1952)

You have already seen one of his paintings without knowing his name. An Italian village at golden hour, a Tuscan alley with laundry hanging between the walls, a warm dusk. On a friend’s living room wall, in a hotel room in San Francisco, on a poster sold at an airport gift shop.

His name is Guido Borelli. Born in Caluso, at the foot of the Piedmont Alps, into a family of musicians and painters who pushed him to draw from childhood. National drawing competition won at thirteen. First solo exhibition at seventeen, in Turin, in 1969. Classical training at the Accademia Albertina.

The market falls in love. Borelli ends up exhibiting in around twenty countries, from Italy to Japan, from Kenya to California. His Italian villages become a tourism export more efficient than any travel agency.

Italian critics call him commercial. Italian collectors keep buying anyway. So does the rest of the world.

3 | John Powell (born 1930)

He is 95 years old, lives in Santa Barbara with his wife, and paints flowers every morning. Bouquets in copper jugs, garden tables with wine and bread, sun pouring through the petals of an open peony.

John Powell was born in Hollywood in 1930. Self taught. He started painting at sixteen and has never stopped. He learned by looking at Boldini, Sorolla, the Spanish still life masters who could make a piece of pottery feel heavier than a person.

He traveled a lot. Mexico, Italy, Greece, North Africa, Japan. He came home loaded with fabrics, ceramics, embroidered shawls that reappear in his still lifes like permanent set pieces.

In 1995, for the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations, the World Federation of United Nations Associations named him Artist of the Year. A set of his paintings entered the permanent collection of the Philatelic Museum at the Palais des Nations in Geneva.

The critics ignore him. The buyers who push open the door of a Carmel gallery and stop in front of one of his canvases do not.

4 | Sergiu Ciochina (born 2001)

If you enjoyed this story, you'll also love:

• 10 Artists you need to Know 👀 #1

• 10 Artists you need to Know 👀 #4

• 10 Artists you need to Know 👀 #8

Read more

130 000+ readers. Learn art the fun way.

This is a preview. Paid subscribers get the full story. You'll also get:

• 10 new stories every month

• The full archive (120+ Art stories)

• Your personal art guide. Comment, ask questions, DM me anytime

iPhone user? Subscribe at coolstoriesabout.art, not via the app. Apple adds 30% to the price.

At the center of the painting, a young woman lifts a glass to her lips.

Her gaze meets no one else’s.

It’s on her face that, in the film Amélie, an old confined painter struggles year after year, obsessively copying the same painting without ever managing to figure out what she’s thinking.

title=”YouTube video player” frameborder=”0” allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share” referrerpolicy=”strict-origin-when-cross-origin” allowfullscreen></iframe>

The painting is called Luncheon of the Boating Party.

It’s the crown jewel of the Phillips Collection in Washington.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted it between the summer of 1880 and March 1881, on the terrace of an inn at Chatou, fifteen kilometers west of Paris.

Renoir is 39 years old. He’s broke. He’s just walked out of the Impressionist group after ten years of battles.

In January 1880, six months before starting the painting, he fell off his bicycle and broke his right arm. He painted for a few weeks with his left hand, and he wrote to a friend: “I think I did well to break my arm.”

At this table, they are fourteen.

Several of them will become, in the next thirty years, names around whom part of European 20th-century culture will be built.

We’ll look at them one by one.

The Inn

A small island in the middle of the Seine, facing the village of Chatou.

At its far end, a white two-story building: the Maison Fournaise.

In 1857, a former marine carpenter named Alphonse Fournaise senior bought the building and turned it into a restaurant doubled with a boat rental service. The success was rapid.

Twenty years later, it had become the favorite spot of Parisians wanting to escape the city on a Sunday.

It all came from a train. Since 1837, France’s very first passenger railway line had connected Paris to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, passing through Chatou.

Twenty-five minutes’ journey. One franc sixty for a one-way ticket. A clerk, a civil servant, a small shopkeeper could leave Paris at ten in the morning and have lunch here at noon.

In the dining room, at this table, in the 1880s: Parisian bourgeois, artists, actresses, civil servants, journalists, single women, barons, seamstresses.

A social mix the city allowed nowhere else.

Maupassant, a regular at the place for years, called it “le phalanstère des canotiers”, a sort of small republic of boating enthusiasts.

This is where Renoir set up his easel in the summer of 1880.

Aline and the Little Dog

In the foreground, at the bottom left, a young woman playfully looks into the eyes of a small black dog she is holding in front of her.

She looks at nothing else.

She is 21 years old. Her name is Aline Charigot. She’s a seamstress. She comes from Essoyes, a winegrowing village in the Aube, on the edge of Champagne.

For a few months now, she’s been having lunch every day at a creamery on rue Saint-Georges, in the 9th district of Paris. She pays a few sous for her daily plate.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, eighteen years older than her, broke, single, sleeps on the fifth floor right across the street. He comes to lunch there every day at the same time she does.

One noon, he arranged to sit at the table next to hers.

By the end of 1879, she had fallen in love with him.

In the summer of 1880, he takes her to pose at Chatou. He places her in the bottom left, in the softest light of the table.

The dog isn’t hers. Renoir placed it there later, during the execution, because at that spot there had first been someone else.

We’ll come back to this.

The Big Red-Bearded Fellow

Behind Aline, standing, leaning on the wrought-iron railing, a tall guy in a white cotton singlet.

Bare arms, thick moustache, red beard, flat-topped straw hat tilted back on his head.

This is Alphonse Fournaise junior. 34 years old. The restaurateur’s son. He grew up on this island, in this inn.

He’s the one in charge of renting out the boats. He has about thirty of them. Thin rowing boats, flat-bottomed barges, even a Canadian canoe brought back from a World’s Fair.

That white singlet he’s wearing is the visual marker of a boater. Bare arms in the presence of ladies, in 1880, is a measured transgression.

At Chatou, you allow yourself what the city forbids.

Exactly one month from now, this face will be found in a book.

The Baron and the Young Widow

Shift your gaze to the center of the painting. Two figures are in deep conversation.

A man seated with his back to us, a brown bowler hat, a wide neck. A woman leaning on the railing, white dress with red trim, yellow straw hat, half-smile.

The man is Baron Raoul Barbier. 40 years old. Former cavalry officer. Mayor of Saigon between 1871 and 1872, at the time when France was setting up its colonial administration in Indochina (today’s Vietnam). Légion d’honneur. Bon vivant.

The woman he’s talking to is Alphonsine Fournaise. 35 years old. The restaurateur’s daughter. A young widow.

She’s the one who welcomes the guests at the inn, who handles the reservations, who knows which boat to rent at what time. Renoir had already painted her on five other canvases.

In the autumn of 1880, while Renoir is working on this painting, another young painter is setting up at Chatou to decorate the ground floor of the inn with frescoes. His name is Maurice Réalier-Dumas. He is 20 years old.

And Alphonsine is in the process of falling in love with him.

Barbier, meanwhile, talks. She listens. But her mind is on the floor below.

The Drinking Woman at the Center

Come back to the center. To the young woman lifting a glass to her lips, the one who opens this article.

Her name is Ellen Andrée. 23 years old. Actress, model, former dancer at the Folies Bergère.

At 18, Édouard Manet paints her in La Parisienne. At 22, in La Prune. At 23, in Chez le père Lathuile.

When she poses for Renoir, she’s on the rise at the Comédie-Française and the Variétés. She has posed for half the Impressionist painters in less than ten years.

She stares into space. The glass serves her as a screen.

More than a century later, a filmmaker will spend years trying to figure her out.

Remember her glass.

The Journalist and the Florist

Still at the center, two figures are openly flirting.

A standing man leans toward a seated young woman who’s drinking gracefully from her glass.

The man is Adrien Maggiolo. 37 years old. A monarchist journalist, editor at L’Union then director of La France nouvelle. Six years earlier, in 1875, he had fought a sword duel for seven rounds against a fellow journalist after accusing him of cheating at cards. The duel ended with a shared glass of Malaga wine between the two men.

The young woman he’s talking to is Angèle Legault. A florist from Montmartre, model for the painters of the hill.

Renoir said he appreciated her for her Parisian street slang.

She listens while drinking. She might well be the only person in the painting who’s actually listening to someone else.

The Boater Sitting Backwards

Front right. A man has sat down backwards on his chair. Arms folded over the backrest, chin almost resting on it.

He wears a white singlet identical to Fournaise’s and a straw boater hat.

This is Gustave Caillebotte. 32 years old. Painter. Amateur naval architect. Well-known regatta sailor on the lower Seine.

He comes from a family of wealthy magistrates. His father is dead, his brother is dead, his mother died in 1878. At 30, he inherited a massive fortune. He lives alone, without children.

He has just bought, in 1881, a house at Petit-Gennevilliers, on the other side of the Seine facing Chatou.

At 28, he had already drawn up his will. One of its clauses, thirteen years from now, will trigger one of the most violent cultural battles of the Third Republic.

The Banker in the Top Hat

In the background to the right, among the bare heads and straw hats, one silhouette stands out.

Black suit, strict frock coat, rigid top hat firmly on his head. White shirt, collar buttoned.

Not a single concession to the heat, not a single concession to Chatou.

This is Charles Ephrussi. 31 years old. A Jewish banker from Odessa, settled in Paris for ten years in a private townhouse on rue de Monceau.

He doesn’t really do banking. His family made its fortune in the wheat trade on the Black Sea, and his grandfather was nicknamed “the wheat king”.

Charles, for his part, writes. He publishes art history essays in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. He’s currently preparing a major monograph on Albrecht Dürer.

What he does for Renoir and his friends isn’t visible in the painting.

Right next to him, almost in his shadow, a young man in a brown jacket and soft cap. 20 years old. Not Parisian.

His name is Jules Laforgue, born in Montevideo, Uruguay. Destitute, he sleeps in maids’ rooms and reads all day at the Bibliothèque nationale. Ephrussi hired him in 1881 for 150 francs a month.

He’s the one who actually writes the Dürer monograph his boss is about to publish next year.

In a few months, he’ll be the official guest of an empress.

Remember his cap.

The Trio on the Right

At the far right of the painting, a trio crammed into the corner. A young woman standing, two men cornering her. One by the shoulder, the other almost at her neck.

The young woman is laughing while raising her hands to cover her ears.

Her name is Jeanne Samary. 23 years old. A permanent member of the Comédie-Française since 5 December 1878. Specialist in comedy roles. Her father is a cellist at the Opéra. Renoir had already painted her a dozen times.

She had also been his mistress, briefly, in 1877.

The one holding her by the waist on her right wears a pince-nez and a boater hat. This is Paul Lhote. 30 years old. Sailor, weekend painter, journalist, traveler. He’s one of Renoir’s closest friends.

The other one, behind her in a dark felt hat, is Eugène-Pierre Lestringuez. A senior civil servant at the Ministry of the Interior. Impeccable dark gray suit.

Beneath the suit, a passion: the occult. He reads Éliphas Lévi, frequents spiritualist circles, believes in animal magnetism and palmistry.

He’s telling Jeanne a story. Something you don’t tell a lady in the city.

The Gazes

Step back and look at the whole.

Caillebotte stares at Aline. Aline looks at the dog. Barbier talks to Alphonsine, but Alphonsine is thinking of the young painter working on the floor below.

Ellen Andrée stares into space. Jeanne Samary looks away from the civil servant with the passion for the occult who is whispering in her ear. Ephrussi speaks to his secretary, but their bodies are turned in two different directions.

Not a single guest in the painting meets the gaze of another.

Fourteen people around the same table for an entire Sunday, and no one really meets anyone.

There’s a technical reason for this. Renoir never brought these fourteen people together at the same time on the terrace.

He painted the still life and the decor first, then had his friends come one by one, or in small groups, over sixteen months.

None of them could meet the gaze of another who wasn’t there.

Then you start counting.

Thirteen, or Fourteen?

Aline, Alphonse junior, Caillebotte, Barbier, Alphonsine, Ellen Andrée, Maggiolo, Angèle, Ephrussi, his secretary in the cap, Samary, Lhote, Lestringuez.

Thirteen.

And then this partial face behind Ellen Andrée, this half-profile beneath a backwards-tilted cap, who speaks to no one and to whom no one is listening.

The fourteenth.

Thirteen would have been a problem for Renoir. Thirteen guests around a table in a large 19th-century painting, any French viewer of the time would have recognized as The Last Supper.

Christ’s last meal with his twelve apostles, painted a thousand times since Leonardo da Vinci. The moment when Jesus announces that one of the twelve is going to betray him, six hours before his arrest.

Renoir is painting the exact opposite. He’s painting a Sunday of friendship, warmth, light wine.

He couldn’t afford thirteen.

So who is this fourteenth face he added at the very last moment?

If you enjoyed this story, you'll also love:

• Inside Monet's House: A Room by Room Tour

• 12 Amazing Impressionist Facts to Drop at Your Next Dinner Party

• 10 Underrated Impressionists You Need to Know

That’s the first secret of the painting. Others follow. And several of these unknown people, from this terrace at Chatou, will weigh on the century that is about to open…

Read more

130 000+ readers. Learn art the fun way.

This is a preview. Paid subscribers get the full story. You'll also get:

• 10 new stories every month

• The full archive (120+ Art stories)

• Your personal art guide. Comment, ask questions, DM me anytime

iPhone user? Subscribe at coolstoriesabout.art, not via the app. Apple adds 30% to the price.

Three of the most painted saints in Western art.

All three known for one thing : their bodies bear marks no other saint carries.

Arrows. A stone. Stigmata.

1 | Saint Sebastian : The Arrow Magnet

Who is he?

• A Roman officer who secretly helped persecuted Christians.
  Once exposed, he was sentenced to death by archers.

• Left for dead, riddled with arrows, he survived.
  A widow named Irene nursed him back to health.

• Instead of hiding, he returned to confront the emperor.
  This time he was beaten to death.

• He became the patron saint against the plague.
  In ancient myth, Apollo sent disease through arrows : Sebastian, who survived them, became the one who stops them.

Secret Codes to Recognize Him

• 🏹 The arrows
  His absolute signature.
  Arrows pierce his torso, legs, or neck : no other saint is shown this way.
  See a body full of arrows in a church? It is Sebastian. Always.

• 💪 The nearly nude body
  Apart from Christ on the cross, he is the only male figure in Christian art regularly shown almost naked.
  Young, beardless, muscular, wearing just a loincloth.
  While every other saint has a signature color, Sebastian’s signature is his skin.
  A Christianized Greek Apollo.

• 🪢 The tree or column
  He is always tied to something : a tree trunk, a column, or a post.
  The binding forces his body into elegant twisted poses that painters used to show off their skill.
  Arms behind the back or above the head, the body turning like a Greek statue.

• 😌 The calm face
  His body is full of arrows but his face is peaceful, sometimes almost ecstatic.
  Painters did not want to show suffering : they wanted to show beauty.
  Sebastian was less a martyr and more a figure study.

• 🎨 The contrapposto
  His body almost always takes a hip swayed stance : one leg bearing the weight, the other relaxed.
  This is the same pose used for ancient Greek statues of Apollo.
  See this classical pose with arrows in a religious painting?
  It is Sebastian performing sculpture inside a Christian frame.

The detail to spot :

Sebastian is the “supermodel” of the Church. No other male figure was painted nude this often, his face calm, his body elegant, his pose borrowed from Greek gods.

For painters, he was the perfect alibi to prove their skill at anatomy while following the rules of a religious commission.

His image has been borrowed ever since : fashion photography, contemporary art, album covers. A body pierced by arrows, 1,700 years and still iconic.

Periods and movements :

• The Middle Ages sometimes painted him clothed and bearded.
  A soldier martyr, not a model.

• The Renaissance seized him with obsession.
  Young, nude, bound, lit from one side : everything a painter needed to show mastery of the human body.

• His image exploded during the great plagues.
  Plague chapels across Europe are covered with him : a vaccine painted on a wall.

2 | Saint Jerome : The Wild Scholar

Who is he?

• The great intellectual of the early Church (4th century).
  He translated the entire Bible into Latin, a version called the Vulgate, used for over a thousand years.

• A man of extremes : after years of scholarly life in Rome, he left for the Syrian desert to live as a hermit.
  Sleeping on the ground, eating nothing, punishing his own body.

• Painters loved him because he gave them two completely opposite scenes :
  the scholar surrounded by books, and the hermit alone in a cave with a skull.

Secret Codes to Recognize Him

Read more

Ghent, March 2026.

On the walls of the city, in the windows of cafes, at the entrance of libraries and theaters, three slogans have appeared.

The Old Masters were women too.

Muse or Master?

She painted, he signed.

The posters lead to the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent. On the facade, the announcement of the exhibition Unforgettable. Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600 to 1750.

More than forty artists from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, brought together for the first time.

From Rachel Ruysch to Johanna Koerten, from Maria Faydherbe to Anna Maria van Schurman, stars of their time whose names have slipped into oblivion. In their day, they painted, sculpted, engraved, sold their work to the courts of Europe, trained pupils, ran workshops. They were read, exhibited, cited in the biographies of their era.

And then, after their death, their names slipped away.

For four of them, the erasure lasted three hundred years. Each through a different path.

Clara Peeters. Judith Leyster. Michaelina Wautier. Maria Sibylla Merian.

This is their story.

1. Clara Peeters, Antwerp, 1612

Antwerp, 1612. Clara Peeters, 25 years old, signs a still life.

Not in the lower corner of the panel, as the painters of the city do. Not on a marble plaque painted in trompe l’oeil, as some do. On the handle of the knife she has just painted.

The knife is not a table detail. It is a bridal knife, the conjugal object given to newlyweds in the Low Countries (modern day Belgium and the Netherlands), on whose handle one engraved both names and moral virtues. On Peeters’ knife, in place of the husband’s name, it is her own.

CLARA PEETERS. In capitals.

The gesture is deliberate.

In 1612 in Antwerp, women painters exist. They can even be members of the Guild of Saint Luke, the all powerful painters’ corporation of the city. But they are rare. Most paint in the workshop of a father, a brother, or a husband, and sign under that workshop’s name. A man’s name.

Peeters is one of the exceptions. No painter father, no family workshop. She runs her own studio. She specializes entirely in still life, a genre that barely exists before her.

Before 1608, the year she paints her first dated work, fewer than five food still life paintings are known to have been produced in all the Low Countries. Five, in total.

Peeters will largely help invent the genre.

The falconry still life, that is her, in 1611, the year Archdukes Albert and Isabella reinstate hunting at court. She also establishes the first codes of the breakfast still life, what Dutch painters will soon call the ontbijtje, which will become a generation later one of the great subgenres of Golden Age painting. She is also one of the first to paint fish.

But she does not place her name on the surface of her canvases. She slips it inside the painting itself.

She places a discreet CLARA P on the edge of a painted table. And in at least eight of her known paintings, she slips her own face into the reflective surfaces of the objects she herself has painted. Silver gilt goblets. Bulging pewter pitchers.

In a still life painted in 1611, her face appears six times in the same painting, on two different objects. In the reflection of the goblet, she stands before her easel, brush in hand, painting. In the reflection of the pitcher, she wears a tall lace bonnet and a white ruff, the large pleated collar typical of women of the Antwerp upper class.

She does not sign the canvas. She paints herself into it.

For centuries, her paintings circulate under her name. But the system is not understood. The signatures engraved into the objects and the tiny self portraits in the pitchers are not read for what they are: a continuous, methodical assertion of who painted the canvas.

It takes the late twentieth century for art historians to start looking at her paintings as closely as she painted them.

Peeters paints for over thirty years. After 1639, nothing. No will, no last dated painting. She is 52, and she vanishes from the archives.

The exhibition Unforgettable brings together six of her paintings. The still life with cheeses and shrimp is among them. If you step close to the panel, both gestures appear side by side: the name engraved on the handle of the bridal knife, and the tiny face of the painter in the reflection of the jug’s lid.

Discover the Exhibition

2. Judith Leyster, Haarlem, 1635

Haarlem, 1635. Before the officers of the Guild of Saint Luke, Judith Leyster, 26 years old, files a complaint against Frans Hals.

Hals is 53. He is the most famous master painter in the city. He has just accepted into his workshop a young apprentice, Willem Wouters, who had begun his training with Leyster a few days earlier. Wouters left Leyster without the guild’s permission. Hals recruited him.

Leyster attacks, before the most powerful institution in the city, the most respected master in the trade.

The ruling comes a few weeks later. Wouters’ mother pays four guilders to Leyster, half the sum she had claimed. Hals pays a fine of three guilders. Wouters is no longer allowed to paint in Hals’ workshop. Leyster, too, is sanctioned for failing to register the apprentice in time with the guild.

A partial victory. But in 1635, the act of a woman who does not bend before Frans Hals.

Leyster was born in Haarlem in 1609. Her father runs a small brewery he named De Leyster: the pole star in Dutch, the guiding star. A few years after her birth, he goes bankrupt. The father loses the sign. The daughter keeps the name.

She learns to paint with a master of the city, possibly Hals himself.

At 17, the chronicler of Haarlem, Samuel Ampzing, notices her. In the margin of his Description of Haarlem, about a painter’s workshop, he writes that there is someone else there who paints with beauty and boldness. The name in the margin is Leyster.

At 24, in 1633, she enters the guild. She opens her workshop. She takes three male apprentices in two years.

She never signs her full name. Just a monogram: a J and an L intertwined, and a five pointed star on the right, a play on her family name.

She marries the painter Jan Miense Molenaer in 1636. She dies in 1660, at 50, in Heemstede, near Haarlem.

After her death, her name disappears from the major histories of art. Houbraken, who publishes in 1718 the great collection of biographies of Dutch painters, gives her no entry.

For 233 years, her paintings are sold, bought, exhibited under other names. Most often as Frans Hals. Sometimes as Pieter de Hooch, Gerard van Honthorst, Jan Miense Molenaer, Jan de Bray.

Someone, at some point, paints the signature of Hals over the star monogram on one of Leyster’s canvases, The Happy Couple, dated 1630.

May 1893. London. New Bond Street.

The Dutch art historian Cornelis Hofstede de Groot walks into the gallery of Thomas Lawrie, which opened a few months earlier. On the wall, The Happy Couple. Lawrie bought it from another London dealer, Charles Wertheimer, as a Frans Hals. Wertheimer, when selling him the painting, had told him it was the finest Hals he had ever seen.

Hofstede de Groot steps closer. Under the Hals signature, he makes out a smaller monogram. A J. An L. A star.

May 1893. London civil court. Lawrie sues Wertheimer for misrepresentation: the painting is authentic, but the Hals signature painted over it is the forgery. The two dealers settle out of court.

The name Judith Leyster is never spoken during the trial.

The woman who had taken Hals before the Haarlem guild in 1635 sees, two hundred and fifty eight years later, her signature covered by that of the same Hals on one of her own paintings.

The 1630 self portrait has become the image used as the banner for most publications and exhibitions on women painters. It is in Unforgettable, along with four other Leysters.

The Happy Couple stayed in Paris, at the Louvre.

3. Michaelina Wautier, Brussels, c. 1655

Brussels, around 1655. Michaelina Wautier, fifty years old, paints a life size male nude.

The canvas is two meters seventy high and three meters fifty wide. Bacchus, drunk, round bellied, is carried by his satyrs. Several full length male nudes surround him, precise anatomy, nothing concealed.

It is, to the knowledge of art historians today, the first time a woman painter depicts a life size male nude in a mythological scene of this scale.

And she paints herself into the canvas.

At center right, standing among the revelers, a clothed woman in her fifties looks the viewer straight in the eye. She is not part of the procession. She observes the scene. She observes us.

Wautier signs the painting with her name.

She was born in Mons, County of Hainaut, in 1604, baptized in September. She has an older brother, Charles, also a painter. In 1645, they settle together in Brussels, share a studio, and stay there for the rest of their lives. Neither of them marries.

She sells four paintings to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria, governor of the Southern Low Countries, the greatest collector at the Brussels court. Her brother Charles sells him fewer.

She dies in Brussels in 1689, at 85. She leaves everything to Charles.

That is the last time her name is attached to her paintings for three centuries.

From the late seventeenth century on, her works enter private collections and resurface in inventories under the name of Charles Wautier. The signatures are still there, perfectly visible. They have been read as Charles, or ignored.

No one could believe that these canvases, these full length male nudes, this Triumph of Bacchus, were the work of a woman.

The self portrait Wautier paints around 1649 is for decades catalogued as a work by Artemisia Gentileschi. When that attribution collapses, it is reassigned to the Dutch scholar Anna Maria van Schurman.

The Triumph of Bacchus itself remains hanging in Vienna under the name of her brother Charles for generations. The official attribution to Michaelina Wautier dates from 1967.

It took three hundred years, give or take, to rewrite the label.

The first solo retrospective dedicated to Michaelina Wautier alone opened in 2018 at the MAS, the Museum aan de Stroom in Antwerp. It brought together for the first time nearly all the known paintings by the artist.

The Triumph of Bacchus has not left Vienna. But Unforgettable shows two other Wautiers, including A Boy with Tobacco, around 1650, the study of a child sneezing, considered one of the chiaroscuro masterpieces of its era.

Discover the Exhibition

4. Maria Sibylla Merian, Port of Amsterdam, July 10, 1699

Port of Amsterdam, July 10, 1699. Maria Sibylla Merian, 52 years old, boards a ship bound for Surinam.

With her, her younger daughter Dorothea, 19, and the drawing materials needed for two years of work on site. The crossing to Paramaribo, capital of the Dutch colony of Surinam, takes about two months.

No institution commissions her. No prince pays her passage. To leave, she has sold part of her own collections. Before boarding, she has written her will. She is divorced. She leaves behind in Amsterdam her other daughter, Johanna Helena, and a small studio.

What she wants to do in Surinam, no one has done before her.

Go there, see the insects alive, watch them lay eggs, feed, molt, become adults, on their own plants, in a tropical climate, and draw everything from life.

Merian was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1647. Her father is Matthaus Merian the Elder, one of the greatest engravers and publishers in Europe, founder of a printing dynasty. He dies when she is three. Her mother remarries Jacob Marrel, a still life painter, who becomes her first teacher.

At thirteen, Merian raises caterpillars in sealed jars and draws their transformation day by day.

At 32, she publishes her first book on caterpillars, in German, in Nuremberg.

In Surinam, she stays two years. She treks through plantations, draws, observes. She catches malaria. In June 1701, she is forced to return.

In 1705, she publishes Metamorphosis insectorum surinamensium. Sixty giant plates, each engraved and hand colored by Merian and her workshop. Each plate shows a plant, the insects that feed on it, and their complete life cycle.

The book founds modern entomology.

In her entry on the peacock flower, plate 45, Merian writes a sentence no scientific publication of her century would have printed. Translated from her seventeenth century Dutch:

The Indians, who are not well treated by their Dutch masters, use the seeds to abort their children, so that their children will not become slaves like them.

She names the plant. She names the act. She names the master slave relationship. She does not name the women who told her.

Merian dies in Amsterdam in 1717, at 70.

In the decades that follow, her name is misattributed within her own family. Some of her plates are reissued under the name of Matthaus Merian, her father, who died when she was three. Others are republished under the name of Jacob Marrel, her stepfather, who never set foot in Surinam.

The book of one woman becomes the legacy of two dead men.

Her name is not restored to the science of entomology until the twentieth century.

Unforgettable shows seven of her works. Including the plate that opens the Surinam book: a pineapple surrounded by cockroaches, engraved by Merian a year and a half after her return to Amsterdam.

Unforgettable

Forty women artists from the Low Countries (modern day Belgium and the Netherlands) across the long seventeenth century, brought together for the first time in the same museum.

Nearly one hundred and fifty works.

The exhibition spans three centuries, from the Antwerp still lifes of Clara Peeters to the tropical plates of Merian, through the flowers of Rachel Ruysch painted when she was still working at 78, the intricate paper cutouts of Johanna Koerten, the Hebrew calligraphy of Anna Maria van Schurman, the sculptures of Maria Faydherbe.

Six Peeters. Five Leysters. Two Wautiers. Seven Merians. And thirty five other women painters, sculptors, engravers, embroiderers, most of whom have never been shown in the same room.

Unforgettable. Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600 to 1750 is open at the MSK in Ghent until May 31, 2026. Co organized with the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington.

The exhibition closes May 31. After that, these forty women go back to their separate museums across the world, and some go back to storage.

If you are anywhere near Ghent this month, this is the reason to go. Allow ninety minutes for the exhibition. And stay another hour in the permanent galleries of the MSK right after: it is one of the finest collections of Flemish and Dutch painting in Europe, with Bosch, Rubens, Memling, and many leave without seeing it.

Three hundred years of recovered signatures.

If you enjoyed this story, you'll also love:

• The Tragic Life of Frida Kahlo Told in 24 Rare Photos

• Leonora Carrington: The Woman They Coulndn't Destroy

• 10 Women Artists You Need to Know for International Women’s Day

• If you love these stories, give a year of them to someone you love.

• Write them a note to go with the gift.

• You become the one who got them into art.

Give a gift subscription

Follow CSAA on Instagram