Romanticism wasn’t about romance. It was about feeling.

In the late 1700s, a generation of European painters decided that reason and order had gone far enough. They wanted raw emotion. Storms, ruins, madness, sublime terror, the overwhelming power of nature.

You know the big names: Delacroix, Turner, Caspar David Friedrich, Goya.

Here are ten others, just as powerful, that you’ve probably never heard of.

1 | Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)

He lived directly above Caspar David Friedrich in Dresden. They were godfathers to each other’s children.

Friedrich was the brooding loner. Dahl was the sociable one. They painted side by side for decades anyway.

The difference? Friedrich loaded every tree with metaphysical weight. Dahl just looked. Really looked.

The way light falls on a fjord at dusk. Birch trees after a storm. Clouds forming over the North Sea.

He brought Norwegian nature into European painting when no one cared about Scandinavia. Friedrich got the legend. Dahl got the fjords.

2 | Richard Parkes Bonington (1802–1828)

Dead at twenty five. Younger than Keats.

In that short life, he shared a studio with Delacroix in Paris. Delacroix later called his watercolors “a type of diamond, both brilliant and hard.”

That’s Delacroix talking about someone else’s work. Think about that.

His coastal scenes have this liquid, translucent quality. The sky isn’t painted on top of the canvas. It feels like the canvas is made of sky.

Tuberculosis took him before he’d even peaked.

3 | John Martin (1789–1854)

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1 | Saint Peter : The Rock

Who is he?

• A fisherman named Simon, renamed by Christ : “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church.”
  The word Peter means rock. The whole Church rests on a pun.

• Leader of the twelve apostles, but the most human :
  he panics, he doubts, he denies knowing Christ three times in one night.
  Then he hears a rooster crow.

• Crucified upside down in Rome :
  he did not consider himself worthy to die like his master.

• First Pope. Every Pope since claims a direct line back to him.
  The keys on the Vatican flag? His keys.

Secret Codes to Recognize Him

• 🔑 The two keys (gold and silver)
  No other figure in Christian art carries keys.
  Gold opens heaven. Silver governs earth.
  If you spot keys anywhere in a painting, it is Peter.
  Every joke about “Saint Peter at the pearly gates” comes from this image.
  It escaped the museums and entered everyday language.

• 🔵 Gold and blue robes
  Peter almost always wears a golden yellow cloak over a blue tunic.
  The gold signals his role as leader of the apostles.
  In a crowded scene, look for this color pair first.
  It will find him faster than the keys.

• 🧔 The short white curly beard
  The Bible never describes his face. Artists invented it :
  stocky, square jaw, tight white curls.
  He looks like a man who hauled fishing nets his whole life.
  One rough face, one refined face. If you see them side by side, Peter is always the rough one.

  

• 🐓 The rooster
  Look for it in Passion scenes, perched on a wall or crowing in the background.
  Jesus predicted it : “Before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times.”
  The rooster does not symbolize dawn.
  It marks the exact second a man discovered he was a coward.

• ✝️ The inverted cross
  In martyrdom scenes, he hangs upside down. He chose this.
  For 2,000 years it meant humility, nothing else.
  Its modern satanic association would have bewildered every painter who ever used it.

• 🐟 The fishing net
  In calling scenes, when Christ recruits him on the lake.
  The net overflows with fish, tearing under the weight.
  The net is what he was. The keys are what he became.

• 👑 The papal tiara
  In later paintings, he wears the three tiered papal crown.
  No fisherman ever wore this. Patrons put it there to make papal authority look ancient.
  The tiara is not history. It is advertising.

The detail to spot :

Look for the duo. Peter almost never appears alone.

He stands paired with Paul, framing Christ or the Virgin like two pillars.
Peter is always on Christ’s right (your left as viewer). White beard, keys = Peter.

Dark beard, sword = Paul.
Two old men flanking a holy figure? Check their hands.

Periods and movements :

• The Middle Ages showed him frontal, seated, keys in hand.
  A symbol of authority, not a man.

• The Renaissance turned the handover of the keys into a grand spectacle.
  Painters used perspective to make the gesture look monumental, like the founding of an institution happening live.

• The Baroque focused on his failure.
  The “Tears of Saint Peter” became a genre : an old man alone in the dark, weeping, the rooster somewhere in the background.
  Even the founder of the Church needed forgiveness.

2 | Saint Paul : The Blinding Light

Who is he?

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1. Vincent Van Gogh — Portrait of Adeline Ravoux (1890)

You know this painting. A young girl in blue, looking away, almost melancholic.

Her name was Adeline Ravoux. She was 13. Her dad ran the tiny inn in Auvers sur Oise where Van Gogh rented a room for 3.50 francs a night. It would be his last home.

Van Gogh painted her three times in one sitting. Adeline hated the result. She said it looked nothing like her.

Here’s the twist: decades later, someone found a photograph of Adeline as an old woman. The resemblance to the painting was jaw dropping.

Van Gogh had painted the woman she would become, not the girl sitting in front of him.

He died 70 days after checking into that inn. She lived to be 90.

2. Gustav Klimt — Portrait of Emilie Flöge (1902)

Gustav Klimt is the guy who painted “The Kiss.” One of the most reproduced images on Earth. Gold leaf, intertwined lovers, you’ve seen it on every poster and tote bag.

This portrait is of Emilie Flöge. She ran a high fashion salon in Vienna and designed clothes that were revolutionary for the time: flowing, uncorseted, made for women who wanted to breathe.

They met through family. Klimt’s brother married Emilie’s sister. When the brother died young, Gustav kept showing up at the Flöge house. He and Emilie spent every summer together at a lake in Austria. For over twenty years.

Were they together?

Nobody really knows.

But when Klimt had a stroke in 1918, his last words were: “Get Emilie.”

3. Alfons Mucha — Precious Stones: Emerald (1900)

If you’ve ever seen an Art Nouveau poster with a beautiful woman surrounded by flowing hair and ornamental patterns, chances are it was by Alfons Mucha.

He basically invented that style.

This piece is part of a series where four women each embody a precious stone. Emerald, ruby, amethyst, topaz. Every color in the composition matches the gem.

Nobody knows the model’s name. She vanished from history.

What survived is Mucha’s armchair in the background, the one with carved animal heads. That same chair shows up in dozens of his works. It was practically his co-star.

Her face is now in museums across the world. And we still don’t know who she was.

4. Vincent Van Gogh — Portrait of His Mother (1888)

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WHO IS GOYA?

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes is born on March 30, 1746, in Fuendetodos, a remote village in Aragon. Son of a frame gilder and a mother from minor nobility, nothing destines him for glory.

At 14, he enters apprenticeship with a painter in Zaragoza and spends 4 years copying prints.

He attempts the Royal Academy competition in Madrid twice. Two failures. The jury finds his style too personal, not academic enough.

He then travels to Italy at his own expense to study the masters. Upon his return, he marries the sister of a court painter. The door finally opens.

He becomes painter to the king in 1786, at age 40. Late for the era.

In 1792, catastrophe. A mysterious illness strikes him down. Vertigo, hallucinations, partial paralysis. In 1793, he returns to Madrid. Deaf for life. He is 46 years old.

This deafness cuts the thread. The cheerful painter who decorated royal tapestries disappears. The dark Goya is born.

He then paints what no one had dared paint before: war seen through the eyes of victims, unfiltered human madness, the monsters of the unconscious.

In 1808, Madrid rises up against Napoleon. Goya witnesses the massacres and documents them. In 1814, Ferdinand VII returns to power. Repression.

Goya, suspected of liberal sympathies, goes into exile in Bordeaux in 1824. He dies there in 1828, at 82.

That’s why the debate makes sense: Goya is the bridge. Between the Old Regime and modernity. Between Velázquez and Picasso.

Some say he invented modern art. Others that he was an academically mediocre painter who got lucky living through a terrible era.

We’re going to settle this. With numbers.

THE CARD

TEC (Technique/Mastery): 84/99

What it judges: Drawing ability, perspective management, anatomy, texture rendering, sfumato, compositional complexity. Does the painter master their tool or are they struggling?

Goya fails the Academy competition twice. The jury prefers safer, smoother candidates. His personal style disturbs them.

When he lands his first fresco commission for the Basilica del Pilar, they force him to redo everything. Too sloppy, say the academics. His brother-in-law has to retouch his work. Public humiliation.

Yet Goya builds his paintings like Velázquez built his. Through color, through light, through broad brushstrokes that create the illusion from a distance but dissolve up close.

In The Third of May 1808, the martyr’s white shirt is applied with a palette knife. Impasto, brutal. From afar, it shines like a host. Up close, it’s crushed matter.

This brutal technique reinforces the urgency of the message.

His true mastery explodes in printmaking. He is, alongside Rembrandt, the absolute summit of this art. He creates deep, velvety, unsettling blacks. His print series rival the greatest masters of the medium.

But compared to Ingres, who draws like a Swiss watchmaker, Goya looks sloppy. Compared to Raphael, where each figure occupies exactly the right place, Goya looks unbalanced.

The academics were right about one thing: Goya wasn’t seeking formal perfection. He was seeking expressive truth.

INV (Innovation/Revolution): 92/99

This is the “Avant-garde” rating. Did this painter change the rules of the game? Did he invent a new way of seeing the world? Or did he “just” copy his predecessors very well?

Before Goya, war was painted as grand spectacle. Muscular heroes dying nobly on orderly battlefields.

After Goya, lying becomes impossible.

The Third of May 1808 shows an anonymous firing squad facing terrified civilians. No glory. No meaning. Just the killing machine grinding flesh.

Goya invents modern war reporting. In the 82 plates of The Disasters of War, he engraves what he saw. Hanged bodies. Raped women. Starving children.

Some plates bear the inscription Yo lo vi. I saw it.

No heroes. No God. No morality. Just documented horror.

He also invents the pictorial exploration of madness and the unconscious.

With the Black Paintings, painted directly on the walls of his house between 1819 and 1823, he plunges into nightmare. The Witches’ Sabbath shows emaciated old women worshiping a giant goat. Duel with Cudgels shows two men sinking into sand while beating each other to death.

These paintings weren’t meant to be seen. Goya painted them for himself alone, deaf, isolated, old.

He opens the door to Surrealism 100 years early.

David, his exact contemporary, revolutionizes style by imposing Neoclassicism. Goya revolutionizes content. He says: you can paint ugliness, madness, absurd death. And it’s art.

Picasso will say that Guernica doesn’t exist without him.

EMO (Emotion/Visceral Impact): 94/99

This is the “Hard-hitting” rating. What it judges: What we feel when looking at the paintings. Do we cry? Are we afraid? Are we at peace? It’s the artist’s ability to transcend the intellect and touch the heart.

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In the 1820s, a group of American painters looked at the wilderness around them and decided it was sacred.

They painted mountains, rivers and forests with the kind of reverence Europeans reserved for cathedrals. This was the Hudson River School, America’s first major art movement.

You probably know Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church.

Here are ten others who deserve the same attention.

1 | Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823–1900)

His autumn colors were so vivid that when he exhibited in London, critics refused to believe American trees actually looked like that.

So he had real leaves shipped from New York to prove it.

Cropsey painted fall like no one else. Entire valleys burning orange and crimson, rivers reflecting skies on fire, sunlight caught in the canopy like stained glass.

Queen Victoria was a fan. The American public worshipped him. Then Impressionism arrived, his style went out of fashion, and he died nearly forgotten, selling his estate to pay debts.

The leaves, though. Nobody has ever painted leaves like that.

2 | Martin Johnson Heade (1819–1904)

While every other Hudson River School painter was going big — mountains, waterfalls, canyons — Heade went small. And horizontal. And quiet.

His salt marshes are the opposite of grandiose. Flat light. Tiny haystacks. A sky that takes up three quarters of the canvas. It shouldn’t work. It’s mesmerizing.

Then there’s the other Heade. Three trips to South America to paint orchids and hummingbirds in the jungle. Over forty tiny canvases of iridescent birds hovering in tropical heat.

He planned a book called The Gems of Brazil. It never got published. The paintings survived. They’re the most original still lifes in American art.

3 | William Louis Sonntag (1822–1900)

Here’s the irony: he’s considered a central figure of the Hudson River School, but he never painted the Hudson River valley.

His thing was the Ohio River Valley where he grew up, and idealized Italian ruins he painted after living in Florence. Grand, sweeping, deeply romantic. Thomas Cole without ever having studied under Cole.

He also co-created a massive panorama of Milton’s Paradise Lost. A painting you literally walked through.

Died in 1900 as one of America’s most respected landscape painters. Today, almost nobody knows his name.

4 | Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823–1880)

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If you’ve ever been to the National Gallery in London, you’ve seen it happen. A small crowd, five or six people huddled in front of a not-very-large painting, phones raised, trying to capture the reflection in a tiny convex mirror. The painting is 82 by 60 centimeters. It dates from 1434. And it is probably the most clue-packed painting in the entire history of Western art.

This is the Arnolfini Portrait, painted by Jan van Eyck. Van Eyck was the personal painter of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, the most powerful man in Europe at the time. An artist so respected that when his treasurers once forgot to pay him, the Duke sent them a furious letter saying he would never find another painter this good. He was also entrusted with secret diplomatic missions. He was as much a spy as he was a painter. (I tell his incredible story here.)

And in this painting, he hid clues everywhere. Let’s look at them one by one.

The oranges

Let’s start with a detail most visitors don’t even notice. On the windowsill and on the chest below it, there are oranges. Three, maybe four.

It looks unremarkable. It’s anything but.

This is Bruges, 1434, northern Europe. Oranges come from the Iberian Peninsula, by ship. They cost an absolute fortune. Placing oranges in plain sight in a portrait sends a very clear message: we can afford this.

Bruges is the commercial capital of Europe at this point. Italian, Spanish, and Hanseatic merchants all cross paths here. The Arnolfini are silk traders from Lucca, Italy, who supply the court of the Duke of Burgundy directly. Every object in this room says something about their wealth. The oranges are the first clue. The carpet on the floor is another: it’s an Oriental rug with geometric Anatolian patterns. In Bruges, a rug like this was so precious that people placed them on tables, not on the ground. Here, it’s being walked on.

But the oranges also carry a religious meaning. In Flemish painting, the orange often replaces the apple of original sin. They evoke the Garden of Eden. The Fall. Here, they sit in the light from the window, and if you look very, very closely, you can see that Van Eyck painted their reflection in the polished wood. The reflection of a piece of fruit in a piece of furniture. On a panel 82 centimeters wide.

The shoes

In the foreground, a pair of wooden pattens tossed on the floor. These are the man’s street shoes, still caked with mud from the roads. The woman’s red shoes are placed further back, near the bed.

They are both barefoot indoors.

In the Bible, when God speaks to Moses at the burning bush, he says: “Remove your sandals, for the place where you stand is holy ground.” It’s a reference any fifteenth-century viewer would have understood immediately. Whatever is happening in this room is sacred. This is consecrated ground.

The rosary

To the left of the mirror, hanging from a nail in the wall, is a rosary made of amber beads. In Flanders, this was a traditional engagement gift.

But what’s extraordinary is the way Van Eyck painted it. Light enters through the window, catches the upper left edge of each bead as a bright white dot, passes through the translucent amber, and comes out the other side as a small orange crescent. Each bead works like a tiny lens. On top of that, Van Eyck painted the shadow of the cord on the wall and the reflections the beads cast onto the plaster.

These beads are a few millimeters across in the actual painting. He probably worked with a single-hair brush.

The green dress (and no, she’s not pregnant)

The woman wears a voluminous green dress lined with white ermine. The amount of fabric is enormous. This type of dyed wool could cost more than silk. Green symbolizes fertility and hope.

And yes, she looks pregnant. People have believed it for centuries. A Spanish inventory from 1700 actually describes the painting as “a pregnant German woman in green.”

Except she’s not. The protruding belly is simply the fashion of the time. Every elegant woman in the fifteenth century is depicted this way. The dress is so heavy it has to be gathered up in front to walk, which naturally creates this rounded silhouette. In the Ghent Altarpiece, Van Eyck’s great masterpiece, he paints Eve completely naked with exactly the same belly. It’s a beauty standard, not a pregnancy.

The mirror

This is the center of the painting. Literally. Van Eyck placed it exactly between the two figures, at the central point of the composition.

It’s a convex mirror, curved outward. In its distorted reflection, you can see the entire room in reverse, the backs of the couple, and two small figures stepping through the doorway. One in red, one in blue.

The figure in red is almost certainly Van Eyck himself. He’s recognizable by the red chaperon he wears in his self-portrait from 1433. The painter placed himself inside his own painting, in a reflection, two centuries before Velázquez did the same thing in Las Meninas.

But the truly mind-blowing part is the frame of the mirror. It’s decorated with ten tiny medallions. Each one measures just a few millimeters in the actual painting. And each one depicts a scene from the Passion of Christ, from the Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane through to the Resurrection. The figures inside them are identifiable. Van Eyck probably used a magnifying glass to paint them.

And the scenes are not arranged randomly. All the ones before Christ’s death are on the man’s side. All the ones showing the death, the entombment, and the resurrection are on the woman’s side.

Keep that in mind.

The chandelier and the candle

On the ceiling, a brass chandelier with six branches. Six spots for candles, but only one is lit.

It’s above the man.

Above the woman: nothing. Just melted wax, still dripping, where a candle once burned.

Candle lit, candle out. Alive, dead? Hold that thought too.

The signature

Just above the mirror, Van Eyck wrote on the wall in very careful Gothic lettering: “Johannes de eyck fuit hic 1434.” Jan van Eyck was here, 1434.

Normally, when a painter signs a painting, they write “made this” or “painted this.” Van Eyck wrote “was here.” He doesn’t claim to have created this image. He says he was present. Like a witness. Like a notary signing a legal document.

And the lettering itself imitates the calligraphy used in legal documents of the time. It’s the only time in his entire career that he placed his signature directly on the painted surface.

A witness to what?

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Spring 1883, the train slows between Vernon and Gisors.

Claude Monet watches through the window. Orchards in bloom scroll past, yellow irises carpet the wet meadows, poplars line the banks of the river Epte. The carriage stops at every station.

At 43, Monet is fleeing Poissy, where his landlord is chasing him for 18 months of unpaid rent.

He needs a place to house ten people: himself, his two sons, Alice Hoschedé and her six children. Alice is still married to Ernest Hoschedé, who refuses to grant a divorce. In Paris, the newspapers already refer to her as Monet’s “charming wife.”

The scandal clings to this blended family.

The train moves on. Monet catches sight of a village perched on the hillside. Giverny. He gets off at the next stop and walks back.

Three days later, he signs a lease with Louis Joseph Singeot, a local winemaker who owns a long farmhouse with pink walls, nicknamed Le Pressoir because cider was once pressed there. The rent is modest: a walled hectare of land, four rooms on the ground floor, four upstairs, and several farm outbuildings.

Monet borrows 5,000 francs from his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel to cover the deposit.

On April 29, 1883, the whole tribe arrives.

The villagers watch from behind their windows. An unknown painter, a woman married to someone else, eight children, eccentric hats, clothes in vivid colors. In Giverny, population 279, all farmers or winemakers, people whisper.

Nobody says hello. Monet shrugs.

He hates the garden. The box hedges suffocate him, the cypress trees steal the light. He tears everything out, keeping only the linden trees and two yews.

He plants in chromatic bands: yellow irises here, pink peonies there, orange nasturtiums further along. The neighbors nickname him “the painter-gardener.”

He has the shutters repainted from grey to bright green.

Scandal. In Normandy, shutters are grey or black. Never green.

In 1890, Singeot decides to sell. Monet writes to Durand-Ruel that he will “never find such a perfect setup or such beautiful countryside again.” He buys the property for 20,000 francs, payable over four years.

The price of three paintings.

At 50, he becomes a homeowner. The real work can finally begin.

The small blue sitting room

You enter through the central door.

First room: the blue sitting room. Everything in it is painted that color, from the woodwork to the furniture. The white walls are accented with pale blue moldings. In stark contrast, the floor is covered in brick-red cement tiles.

Alice Hoschedé rules here.

She reads with the children, embroiders, oversees the education of the whole household. Eight children to raise in a narrow house: the four girls occupy the bedrooms on the first floor, the four boys sleep in the attic rooms.

On the shelves, rattan and bamboo furniture. Japanese prints on the walls. Monet owns 231 of them, collected over fifty years. Hokusai, Hiroshige, Utamaro. He hangs them everywhere.

Alice keeps the keys to every room. Food is expensive, the servants might steal, everything must be watched.

She is the one holding the household together.

Without Alice, Monet does not paint. When he leaves to paint his series in Rouen or Brittany, he writes to her every single day. Apart from her, he has nightmares, sleeps badly, puts away his brushes.

She manages the household, the correspondence, the servants, and keeps unwanted visitors at bay.

In return, Monet destroys every photograph of Camille, his first wife who died in 1879. Alice is jealous. She erases the past.

The pantry

You walk through the blue sitting room.

The pantry is unheated: provisions keep better in the cold. Locked sideboards protect the tea, spices and olive oil. On the wall, two wooden racks can hold 116 eggs.

With ten people to feed, they go quickly. The hens on the property supply them. Alice counts every egg and writes everything down.

Through this room pass all the luxury goods Monet insists on: Dutch cheeses, English orange marmalade, Norman sausages. Marguerite, the cook, comes to collect what she needs. Alice checks.

Nothing goes to waste.

The schedule is strict.

Five in the morning: wake up, cold bath, glass of white wine. A hearty breakfast. At 11:30 sharp, lunch. Never late.

If the meal is not ready, Monet grows irritable and bangs his fist on the table. The children thunder down the stairs, Alice rushes between the kitchen and the dining room, Marguerite panics.

At seven in the evening, dinner. At half past nine, bed. Monet never receives guests in the evening; artificial light exhausts him.

The yellow dining room

Then comes the shock.

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Giotto: before him, painting felt nothing

For a thousand years, painted faces in Europe are masks. Fixed eyes, identical mouths, flat bodies on gold backgrounds. Byzantine art has imposed its codes: frontality, rigidity, no individual expression.

A Christ from the 8th century looks exactly like a Christ from the 12th. Four hundred years without moving.

In 1305, a 38 year old Florentine painter receives the commission to cover the walls of a private chapel in Padua, the Scrovegni Chapel. He paints the life of Christ in 37 scenes. But it’s not the story that changes everything. It’s the way he tells it. For the first time in the West, figures have volume.

Their feet touch the ground.

Their clothes fall according to gravity.

And above all, their faces express something.

Look at the Lamentation of Christ. The body of Jesus lies on the ground, held by his mother.

Mary presses her face against her dead son’s, mouth to mouth, in a gesture of intimacy with no precedent in medieval painting. Around them, each figure expresses a different shade of grief. Saint John leans backward, arms spread wide.

A woman cradles the dead man’s head in her hands.

Now look at the ten small angels in the sky. Each one has a distinct expression. One wrings his hands. Another covers his face.

A third screams, mouth wide open. Giotto painted ten different ways of suffering in a space of a few centimetres.

Six centuries of Western painting begin in this chapel in Padua.

Adam Elsheimer: the first Milky Way in the history of art

Before 1609, night in painting is a convention. You darken the background, scatter a few stars as white dots, and light the figures as if an invisible theatre lamp followed them everywhere. Nobody truly looks at the night sky and tries to reproduce it.

Adam Elsheimer, a German painter living in Rome, looks. He is 31. Galileo points his telescope at the sky the same year.

The firmament ceases to be a metaphysical abstraction and becomes an object of observation.

Elsheimer paints a biblical scene that dozens of artists have painted before him: the Flight into Egypt. Mary, Joseph, the child, a donkey, the night. The subject is unremarkable. The result is not.

The painting measures 31 by 41 centimetres. A small copper panel. It contains four distinct light sources: the full moon reflecting on the lake, a shepherds’ campfire on the right, Joseph’s torch in the foreground, and the sky itself. Because Elsheimer’s sky is the first accurate sky in the history of painting.

The Milky Way stretches across the firmament as a milky band, not as decoration. The constellations are identifiable. The moon shows its craters.

Rubens tries to acquire the panel. Hendrick Goudt turns it into an engraving that circulates across Europe. Rembrandt will paint his own version.

Elsheimer dies at 32, penniless. The inventor of the nocturne dies in the dark.

Caravaggio: one light source, and everything changes

Before Caravaggio, light in painting comes from everywhere, soft, diffuse. Renaissance painters bathe their scenes in ideal clarity. Leonardo blurs. Raphael harmonises. Light serves beauty.

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For International Women’s Day, The Art Girl and Cool Stories About Art joined forces.

Between us, we each picked five women artists worth knowing. Some reshaped art history without ever getting the credit they deserved. Some are building it right now.

Ten names. One list.

The Art Girl is Tahlia Sisney, a New York based art advisor and writer who works with collectors, galleries, and artists. She’s drawn to the whimsical, the mysterious, the slightly surreal. Artists who build entire worlds in their work.

Julien is the voice behind Cool Stories About Art, a Substack dedicated to learning art the fun way. The anecdotes, the hidden details, the stories that make you see a painting completely differently.

Ready?

1 | Hilma af Klint (1862–1944)

Curated by

In 1906, a Swedish artist painted radically abstract work. Five years before Kandinsky, the man history would call the “father of abstraction.” And she hid every single painting.

Hilma af Klint believed spirits guided her hand during séances. They allegedly instructed her to create nearly 200 paintings for a mysterious temple. She did. Then in her will, she set one condition: the work could not be shown until twenty years after her death. The world wasn’t ready, she wrote.

What fascinates me is that she was right on both counts. That no one would understand. And that one day, everyone would.

When the Guggenheim dedicated a retrospective to her in 2018, it became the most attended exhibition in the museum’s history.

2 | Leonora Carrington (1917 – 2011)

Curated by

If you love surrealism, you have to know Leonora Carrington.

She’s often described as a surrealist painter and writer, but that almost feels too small for what she actually was. Carrington built an entire universe through her art. It’s filled with mythological creatures, strange rituals, animal spirits, and dreamlike landscapes that feel both ancient… yet futuristic at the same time?

Born in England in 1917, Carrington rejected the life that was expected of her very early on. She left a wealthy and traditional family background behind and ran toward the surrealist circle in Europe, where she became deeply connected to artists like Max Ernst. But Carrington was never just a muse within the movement, she was one of its most imaginative architects.

Her life itself reads like surrealist fiction. During World War II she fled Europe, survived a traumatic institutionalization in Spain, and eventually settled in Mexico. Mexico became the place where her vision fully expanded. There she found a community of artists, writers, and thinkers who encouraged the mystical and the magical qualities that were already present in her work.

Her paintings feel like secret stories unfolding. Figures transform into animals. Women appear as alchemists, witches, and creators of entire worlds. There’s an intelligence and humor in her work that makes it endlessly fascinating.

Surrealism is my favorite art movement and honestly one that has shaped how I think about creativity and life itself. The surrealists believed in intuition, dreams, imagination, and the idea that reality is far stranger than we usually allow ourselves to see. Carrington embodies that philosophy perfectly.

If you’re just discovering her work, prepare to fall into a rabbit hole.

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3 | Anna Ancher (1859–1935)

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Denmark’s most celebrated woman painter grew up in a fishing village where her parents ran the only inn. Every summer, male artists would arrive and head straight to the coast to paint dramatic seascapes. Anna stayed inside. She was obsessed with something quieter: the way sunlight moved through a room, the way it landed on a woman’s shoulders while she sewed.

There’s something quietly radical about that choice. When everyone around you is painting the spectacular, deciding that the ordinary is enough, actually more than enough, takes a kind of confidence that’s rare.

Her husband was a painter too, and unlike most men of his era, he actively supported her career after they had a child. In the 1880s, that alone was nearly unheard of.

Denmark eventually put her face on their currency. Which feels right. She spent her life looking carefully at the world everyone else walked past without noticing.

4 | Karyn Lyons (b. 1981)

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Switching gears completely, I want to talk about an artist who is incredibly important right now.

Karyn Lyons is a contemporary painter whose work centers around portraiture, but the emotional intensity of her figures pushes far beyond traditional portrait painting. Her work is raw, psychological, and deeply human.

I had the opportunity to show one of her paintings, The Straight C Student, in my 2024 exhibition Persona. That painting stuck with people in a powerful way. There is something about Lyons’ figures that feels instantly recognizable but also slightly unsettling. You feel like you’re looking at someone’s inner world, not just their face.

Lyons often paints young people navigating identity, vulnerability, and the awkwardness of existing in the world. Her brushwork is expressive and visceral. Faces are layered with emotion. The colors can feel heavy and atmospheric, like the painting itself is holding a complicated memory. Everytime I look at one of her paintings, I feel like I’m experiencing deja-vu, or like I’m seeing something I’ve experienced before in 4K. It’s amazing, she has such a special way of painting real life.

What I love most about her work is how honest it feels. There’s no performance in it. The figures she paints seem to exist in moments of reflection or quiet intensity. It’s portraiture that feels psychologically alive. She’s one of my favorite female artists working right now and someone whose career I’m very excited to watch unfold.

5 | Lee Krasner (1908 – 1984)

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Here’s something that has always bothered me.

Almost everyone knows the name Jackson Pollock. But far fewer people know Lee Krasner.

And that’s a problem.

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James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903)

Whistler was one of the key figures of the Aesthetic movement, the idea that art exists purely for its beauty and owes nothing to morality, storytelling, or social purpose. He named his paintings like musical compositions (nocturnes, arrangements, harmonies) and the portrait the whole world calls Whistler's Mother is actually titled Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1.

When Britain's most powerful critic, John Ruskin, accused him of "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face," Whistler sued him for libel, won the case, and was awarded one farthing in damages, which bankrupted him.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

Leonardo is the defining figure of the High Renaissance: he invented sfumato (that smoky, blurred effect you see on the Mona Lisa), pioneered aerial perspective, and pushed oil painting into territory no one had imagined.

He was also an anatomist, an engineer, and an inventor who envisioned flying machines centuries before anyone, yet completed fewer than twenty paintings in his entire life because he abandoned nearly every commission. He dissected over thirty human bodies to understand how muscles worked beneath skin, and those studies went directly into the faces and hands you see in his paintings.

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Cassatt was the only American Impressionist, recruited by Degas himself after he saw her work at the Salon and said, "There is someone who feels as I do." She is best known for her intimate scenes of mothers and children, painted with a directness and warmth that was entirely new in a movement dominated by landscapes and café scenes.

She never married and never had children herself, and in 1890 a Japanese woodblock print exhibition transformed her technique so radically that she produced the color prints that became some of the finest of the 19th century.

Ivan Aivazovsky (1817–1900)

Aivazovsky is the greatest marine painter in history: over six thousand seascapes, all painted entirely from memory, without ever setting up an easel outdoors. His specialty was light on water, moonlit nights, storms, and shipwrecks, rendered with a photographic precision that made him the most commercially successful Russian artist of the 19th century.

When he exhibited a moonlit seascape in Rome, audience members walked behind the canvas looking for a hidden lamp.

Frida Kahlo (1907–1954)

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1 | The Virgin Mary: The Mother of God

Who is she?

• Mother of Jesus, the central female figure of Christianity

• Chosen by God during the Annunciation : the archangel Gabriel appears and announces she will carry his child

• Virgin before, during, and after the birth : Catholic dogma is explicit on all three

• Born without original sin (the Immaculate Conception) : the only human to whom this privilege is granted

• At the end of her life, taken body and soul into heaven (the Assumption) : she does not decompose like other mortals

• The preferred intermediary between humans and God : tradition holds that Jesus refuses nothing to his mother

Secret Codes to Recognize Her

• 🔵 Blue mantle over red dress Red = her human nature. Blue = divine grace. In Renaissance Florence, lapis lazuli blue cost more than gold by weight, and patrons specified it by name in their contracts. The Virgin had to be the most expensive figure on the canvas.

• ⚪ White lily Always present in Annunciation scenes, held by the angel or placed in a vase nearby. Closed bud = virginity. Open flower = the moment of conception. Sometimes painters showed both on the same stem.

• 👑 Crescent moon and twelve stars In Assumption scenes, she stands on a crescent moon, crowned with twelve stars, taken directly from the Book of Revelation. Those same twelve stars appear on the European flag today. Its designer confirmed in 1987 that he borrowed them from this exact image.

• 🐦 The goldfinch A small bird with a red spot on its head, often held by the infant Jesus. According to medieval legend, it wounded itself trying to pull the thorns from Christ’s crown. Find this bird in a Nativity scene and know this : the Crucifixion is already announced.

• 🐍 The snake under her foot In Immaculate Conception paintings, she crushes a serpent beneath her. The snake represents original sin. She is the only human ever born without it.

• ⚔️ Seven swords piercing her heart In Mater Dolorosa paintings, seven blades cross her chest. Each one stands for a specific Sorrow : the Crucifixion, the flight into Egypt, the loss of Jesus in the Temple. Count the swords. They tell you exactly what the patron ordered.

• 📖 The open book When Gabriel arrives, she is reading. The book sits open, mid-page, abandoned. She was studying prophecies about the coming Messiah. She was, without knowing it, reading about herself.

The detail to spot :

In Virgin and Child scenes, she rarely looks at the baby. Her gaze drifts away, somewhere beyond the frame. She already knows what's coming. She doesn't see the newborn. She sees the future crucified.

Periods and movements:

• Byzantine art and the Middle Ages depicted her as a hieratic icon, a distant and majestic celestial queen seated on a throne.

• The Renaissance made a radical turn by “humanizing” the Virgin: she becomes an earthly mother, beautiful and tender, placed in natural landscapes (Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci).

• The Baroque, meanwhile, favored spectacular representations of her Assumption, in whirlwinds of clouds and light.

2 | Saint John the Baptist: The Forerunner

Who is he?

• Jesus’s cousin and the last prophet of the Old Testament

• His entire mission: announce the coming of the Messiah, then step aside

• Baptized Jesus in the Jordan River, the founding act of the Christian sacrament

• Chose the desert over civilization, locusts and wild honey over banquets

• Executed by Herod Antipas after publicly denouncing his affair with his own sister-in-law

• Salome, Herodias’s daughter, danced for Herod at a banquet. He promised her anything she wanted. Her mother dictated the answer : John’s head on a platter.

How to recognize him?

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1 | Giuseppe De Nittis (1846–1884)

An Italian from a small town near Bari who taught himself to paint, moved to Paris in his twenties, and became one of the sharpest observers of modern city life the Impressionist era produced. He had a particular talent for capturing movement and weather, rain on pavements, wind on a racecourse, crowds in motion.

Degas personally invited him to the very first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. He died of a stroke at 38, at the height of his career.

2 | Henri Martin (1860–1943)

He took the dot-based technique of Pointillism and loosened it into something more painterly and warm, applying it almost exclusively to the sun-flooded landscapes and terraces of southern France.

Unlike Seurat, who used the method for precise, almost frozen compositions, Martin was after atmosphere and light. The French government commissioned him to decorate the Capitole in Toulouse and the Sorbonne in Paris, major public institutions, which tells you how seriously he was taken in his lifetime.

3 | Peder Severin Krøyer (1851–1909)

A Danish painter who studied across Europe before settling in Skagen, a remote fishing village at the very tip of Denmark, where a group of Scandinavian artists gathered in the 1880s.

He became known for painting the particular blue light that falls at dusk on the Danish coast, a tone so distinctive it became associated with him specifically. He suffered from severe mental illness later in life, with periods of breakdown that interrupted his work for years. His wife, also a painter, eventually left him for a composer.

4 | Pierre Prins (1838–1913)

He was embedded in the Impressionist circle, close friends with Manet and Berthe Morisot, a regular presence at the cafés where the movement was being argued into existence. His subject was Paris at night, streets under gaslight, rain-slicked pavements, the city in low light and bad weather.

He almost never exhibited, which is the main reason his name disappeared while his friends became famous. Collectors who know him tend to be very quiet about it.

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📖 DEFINITION

Realism paints peasants and workers instead of gods and kings, giving ordinary people the monumental dignity once reserved for heroes.

🎨 IF REALISM WERE...

EMOJIS

👨‍🌾🥔⚒️🏭🍞

A CAKE

Yogurt cake: Simple, honest, made with what’s in the cupboard, no pretension, dense and true texture.

A MOVIE

“Norma Rae” (1979): Southern textile worker organizing a union, authentic Sally Field, class struggle without romance.

A NOVEL

“The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck: Dust Bowl migrant workers, raw truth about American poverty, dignity in survival.

COLORS

• Pantone 19-1218 (Potting Soil): Dark, fertile earth under boots.

• Pantone 16-1142 (Golden Ochre): Wheat fields and late afternoon light.

• Pantone 18-4005 (Steel Gray): Overcast sky and metal tools.

• Pantone 19-0414 (Forest Night): Deep, shadowy forest greens.

A CAR

1952 Citroën 2CV: Literally designed so French farmers could transport eggs across plowed fields without breaking them, pure function, zero pretension.

A CELEBRITY

Bruce Springsteen: “The Boss” singing about workers, closed factories, working America, assumed working class authenticity.

A SPORT

Rugby: Muddy, physically exhausting, brutal, and played without pads or helmets.

A WINE/ALCOHOL

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1 | Pablo Picasso — The comrade nobody knew what to do with

In October 1944, Paris had been liberated for two months. Picasso was 63 years old, the most famous living artist in the world, and he publicly announced he was joining the French Communist Party. What most articles leave out is that the party’s leadership found his painting unreadable and incompatible with the Soviet aesthetic they imposed on their artists.

He funded the party, lent his name to its campaigns, and received the Lenin Prize in 1962. In 1953, when Stalin died, he published a portrait of the dictator in the party’s newspaper, drawn in his own style: a youthful face, loose lines, nothing solemn. The PCF’s secretariat was furious. Militants called for his head. Picasso did not apologize. He remained a member until his death in 1973.

2 | Gustave Courbet — The bill he never paid

Courbet hid nothing. A republican with anarchist sympathies, he refused the Legion of Honor in 1870, France’s highest distinction, on the grounds that a reward from an imperial regime was worthless. The following year, Paris rose up against the central government in an insurrection known as the Paris Commune. Courbet was elected to the municipal council and took charge of the Federation of Artists, the equivalent of an improvised ministry of culture. In his paintings, peasants, quarrymen and wrestlers became legitimate subjects of great art, replacing gods and generals.

In April 1871, a large commemorative column on the Place Vendôme, symbol of Napoleonic militarism, was toppled by the insurgents. Courbet had been part of the discussions but had not given the order. No matter: when the army crushed the Commune, he was convicted and ordered to pay the reconstruction costs out of his own pocket, a sum equivalent to several million dollars today. He fled to Switzerland to avoid having his assets seized. He died there in 1877, before making a single payment.

3 | Käthe Kollwitz — The woman the Nazis silenced but never dared arrest

Käthe Kollwitz is a German artist whose name remains little known outside Europe, but whose work is immediately recognizable: grieving mothers, exhausted workers, bodies bent under poverty. She joined the SPD, the German Social Democratic Party, and stayed for life. Her commitment shows more clearly in each print than in any speech she ever gave.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, she was expelled from the Prussian Academy of Arts, lost her studio and her right to exhibit publicly. She stayed in Berlin and refused exile. The Nazis did not arrest her: she was too well known abroad and her arrest would have drawn unwanted attention. Her son had been killed in World War One. Her grandson died in World War Two. She passed away in April 1945, a few weeks before Germany surrendered.

4 | William Morris — The most expensive artist in London fought for the poor

William Morris was one of the most successful artists of Victorian England. His wallpapers decorated the homes of the London bourgeoisie. Each roll cost the equivalent of a month’s working-class wage. In 1883, at 49, he joined the Social Democratic Federation. The following year, he co-founded the Socialist League with Eleanor Marx, Karl’s daughter.

He preached in the streets of London, was arrested at demonstrations and paid fines for disturbing the peace. What he argued was straightforward: private property should disappear, work should become a source of dignity again, and art should be accessible to everyone. He acknowledged the contradiction without trying to resolve it. His utopian novel News from Nowhere, published in 1890, describes a socialist England where craftsmanship has replaced industry.

5 | Frida Kahlo — The last outing

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1. Filipp Malyavin (1869–1940)

Picture a peasant kid from rural Russia so determined to study art that his entire village pooled money to send him to Mount Athos at sixteen. He ends up painting icons in a monastery until a visiting professor sees his work and gets him into the Imperial Academy in St. Petersburg.

What makes him unforgettable are these massive, almost violent canvases of peasant women spinning in explosions of red fabric. Paris loved him, Russia called him vulgar, and he died in Nice after being arrested by the Gestapo.

2. Ernst Ferdinand Oehme (1797–1855)

German Romantic who painted Gothic cathedrals emerging from fog and mysterious figures disappearing into mist. He worked as a gate keeper before becoming an artist, then spent time hiking with Caspar David Friedrich through the Saxon countryside.

Think moody, atmospheric landscapes where the weather is almost the main character. His snowbound cathedral glowing from within made him court painter, though critics wished he'd paint something a bit cheerier.

3. Vasily Vereshchagin (1842–1904)

Russian war painter who actually went to the front lines with an easel and a pistol to paint what he saw. The result? Frozen corpses crushed into snow, pyramids of skulls, the brutal reality of war that made everyone uncomfortable.

The Tsar refused to buy his work, a German field marshal banned his soldiers from seeing it. He died aboard a battleship that hit a mine, reportedly painting calmly until the end. His anti-war paintings are still used on military history textbooks today.

4. Anna Ancher (1859–1935)

The only painter in the Skagen artist colony who was actually from Skagen. Her parents ran the town's hotel where all the visiting artists stayed, so she grew up surrounded by painters.

Women couldn't attend the Royal Academy then, but she studied privately and became obsessed with capturing how that unique Nordic light moves through everyday domestic scenes. First woman to win Denmark's top art honor. They put her on the 1000 krone note with her painter husband.

5. Andrey Remnev (b. 1962)

Contemporary Russian who spent eight years studying medieval icon painting in a monastery, then started creating these hypnotic canvases of women in traditional dress against flat, patterned backgrounds.

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Vincent Van Gogh, Café Terrace at Night

In September 1888, Van Gogh painted the gas-lit terrace at Place du Forum in Arles, southern France. The café, now at 11 Place du Forum (renovated in the 1990s to match the painting's yellow facade), closed in 2023 but the building still stands. You can visit Arles, about 130 km north of Marseille, to see where Van Gogh created this starry night scene.

Johannes Vermeer, The Little Street

Around 1657, Vermeer painted this scene at what is now 40 and 42 Vlamingstraat in Delft, Netherlands, where his aunt ran a tripe business. The original buildings are gone, replaced by 19th-century structures, but you can still walk this quiet canal street in Delft's eastern quarter.

Grant Wood, American Gothic

In August 1930, Wood spotted this house with its Gothic window in Eldon, Iowa, and sketched it on an envelope. The house, built in 1881, still stands at 301 American Gothic Street as a National Historic Landmark where visitors can tour and recreate the famous photo.

Vincent Van Gogh, The Church at Auvers

Van Gogh painted the Église Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption in early June 1890, weeks before his death. This 13th-century Gothic church at Place de l'Église in Auvers-sur-Oise (30 km northwest of Paris) remains virtually unchanged today.

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Spring 1797, Edo. Katsushika Hokusai steps back three paces, studies the sketch before him. The wave refuses to come alive. He moves closer, crumples the paper, tosses it across the studio. The basket at the back already overflows. Three weeks now that he has been starting over.

His studio in the Katsushika district accumulates failed sketches, stacked cardboard, filth. His first wife died four years ago, leaving him with three children. He remarried last year. He hates cleaning. When the studio becomes unbearable, he simply moves elsewhere. He also changes his name every five years or so, like many Japanese artists, but he takes the practice further than anyone.

Last year, in a city gallery, he stopped before a painting by Shiba Kōkan. Kōkan is a Japanese artist who frequents the Dutch, those foreigners permitted to dock at Nagasaki since the country closed in 1639. He has brought back their techniques, their way of structuring space, of creating depth. The painting fascinated him. He cannot stop thinking about it.

He takes out a fresh sheet, begins again. Strollers gaze at the sea from the beach of Enoshima, Mount Fuji appears tiny on the horizon. The wave spreads across the shore, trapped on the left side. But the sea sleeps.

1803

Six years have passed. Hokusai has changed his name twice, moved at least ten times. At 44, he engraves View of Honmoku off Kanagawa in a new studio in the printmakers’ district. This time he removes almost everything: the strollers, Mount Fuji. The wave invades the image, occupies two thirds of the space. A vessel cuts through the water nearby, shrunk to heighten the contrast.

But the blues remain pale, the vegetable indigo fades in the sun within months. On the finished print, the wave is there but does not move, stylised crest, almost mineral. He files it with the other attempts.

The Turning Point

In 1804, Hokusai is 44 and lives off modest commissions. During a Tokyo festival, he sets up buckets of ink and a broom in the middle of the street. He paints a portrait of the Buddhist priest Daruma 180 metres long on the ground. People stop, watch, talk. The story reaches the ears of the court.

A few months later, a summons. The shogun, the military leader who governs Japan, invites him to the palace for a competition. His opponent is Buncho, a master recognised for decades. Hokusai has never set foot in these places.

When the day comes, Buncho paints a landscape of perfect mastery. Hokusai observes, waits his turn. He traces a broad blue curve on the paper, takes a chicken from a cage, dips its feet in red paint, releases it onto the canvas. The animal runs across the paper, leaving traces that form maple leaves floating on the Tatsuta river. The shogun laughs. Hokusai wins the competition.

He returns home with a new reputation. For the first time in years, he has money, assured commissions. He can choose his subjects. That same year, he returns to his obsession, engraves Fast Cargo Boat Confronting the Waves. Seven years since he last touched this image.

He makes a decision: move the wave from the left side to the right side. It now breaks from the right, engulfs the boat from the left. This configuration will not change again.

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You know those football shows where blokes in suits spend hours debating whether Messi’s better than Ronaldo? Or those endless arguments about Federer versus Nadal, Jordan versus LeBron?

Today, we’re doing the same thing. But with painting.

The question: is Paul Cézanne the greatest painter of all time? The absolute GOAT?

To answer, we’re going to rate him like a FIFA card. Six criteria. Numbers. Facts. And at the end, you decide.

WHO IS CÉZANNE?

Paul Cézanne was born in 1839 in Aix-en-Provence into a well-off family. His father was a banker. He wanted Paul to take over the business. Didn’t happen.

After two years studying law, Cézanne ditched everything for Paris in 1861. He attended the Académie Suisse, copied the masters at the Louvre, met Pissarro. He hung around with the Impressionists, exhibited in 1874, then disappeared. Back to Provence. Radio silence for 20 years.

The art world rediscovered him around 1895. He died in 1906 during a storm, brush in hand, painting his beloved mountain. A year later, retrospective in Paris. Picasso and Braque saw the paintings. Cubism was born.

That’s why this debate makes sense: between 19th-century Impressionism and the chaos of the 20th, there’s Cézanne. He changed the rules without making a fuss. Some say he’s the father of modern art. Others that he’s an obsessive bungler who got lucky.

We’re going to settle it. With scores.

THE CARD

TEC (Technique/Mastery): 83/99

What it judges: Drawing ability, perspective management, anatomy, texture rendering, sfumato, compositional complexity. Does the painter master their tool or are they struggling?

Cézanne doesn’t draw like Ingres. His nudes are awkward, his perspectives wonky, his faces sometimes blurred. Émile Bernard, who visited him in 1904, writes that he “knows nothing of anatomy” and leaves “inexplicable white patches everywhere”. The Academy rejected him from the Salon for 20 years.

But this chap constructs paintings like cathedrals are built. Through colour. Not through drawing. Each brushstroke is placed slowly, thought through, calculated. He spends hours on an apple to find the right red next to the right green.

The Card Players: two peasants around a table. Nothing moves. But the volumes are there, massive, sculpted purely through gradations of browns and blues. Not a single cast shadow. Just colour creating volume. The Basket of Apples: the table tilts, the basket’s askew, and yet everything holds together.

Ingres surpasses him in academic precision. Monet beats him in atmospheric fluidity. But for building a painting through pure colour, Cézanne has no equal in the 19th century. Pissarro compares one of his still lifes to “an Ingres”, so perfect is the harmony.

INV (Innovation/Revolution): 97/99

This is the “Avant-garde” rating. Did this painter change the rules of the game? Did he invent a new way of seeing the world? Or did he “just” copy his predecessors very well?

Cézanne invents something no one had seen before. He paints each object in the picture from a slightly different angle. The table seen from above, the bottle seen from the front, the apple seen from the side. All in the same painting. It should be chaos. It’s a symphony.

He abandons the single vanishing point perspective inherited from the Renaissance. He replaces it with layered coloured planes. Look at Mont Sainte-Victoire: no vanishing lines, just horizontal layers. Ochre, green, blue, sky. Each band builds depth.

His formula: “Treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone.” He reduces the world to simple geometric shapes. It’s exactly what Picasso and Braque will do 10 years later when inventing Cubism. Except they go all the way. Cézanne stays on the edge.

He wants to “make of Impressionism something solid and lasting”. He succeeds. Monet captures changing light. Cézanne captures enduring structure. Without him, no Cubism, no Mondrian, no Kandinsky.

Picasso would say: “Cézanne is the father of us all.”

EMO (Emotion/Visceral Impact): 72/99

This is the “Hard-hitting” rating. What it judges: What we feel when looking at the paintings. Do we cry? Are we afraid? Are we at peace? It’s the artist’s ability to transcend the intellect and touch the heart.

You don’t cry in front of a Cézanne. You don’t tremble. You’re not afraid. His paintings tell no story. No drama, no scream, no tears.

His Provençal landscapes exude a mineral serenity. His apples are mute. His portraits of Hortense, his wife, are icy. She sits for him 27 times. Result: impassive faces, almost empty.

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Adolf closes the door of the administrative office. His worn soles echo in the corridor of the Academy of Fine Arts. He clutches the paper in his left hand, no longer looks at it. No need. The words are engraved: Nicht zur Prüfung zugelassen (Not admitted to the examination). His application has been rejected outright, deemed insufficient.

Vienna, October 1908. He is 19 years old. This is his second refusal. The last one the regulations permit.

He descends the steps, exits into the street. Walks without destination through the avenues of the Ringstrasse. The Burgtheater passes by, then the Parliament, then the Opera. These monuments he has admired since childhood, which he has drawn a hundred times. Adolf knows every column, every pediment, every ornament. His watercolours reproduce these buildings in the minutest detail. Rigorous perspectives, exact proportions, stones meticulously rendered. But the examiners want none of them.

Last year already, they noted his weaknesses. Too few human figures. Lack of anatomical mastery. He cannot draw bodies, only façades.

His father was perhaps right. Alois Hitler, former customs officer who died 5 years earlier, wanted to make his son a civil servant. Adolf obstinately refused, preferring to scribble sketches in the margins of his notebooks. His results plummeted brutally upon entering the secondary school in Linz. His father would strike him. Adolf would take it without crying out. In the kitchen, his mother Klara would console him. She is 23 years younger than her husband, gentle and loving.

The boy devours art books, dreams before the watercolours of Rudolf von Alt, those meticulous views of Vienna. He wants to study architecture, paint monuments.

Klara financed a fortnight’s stay in the capital despite the family’s limited means. Adolf discovers the imperial metropolis at the beginning of May 1906. Dazzled. He walks the Ringstrasse for hours, admires the sumptuous façades of public buildings, visits museums, attends Tristan und Isolde at the Opera. On 8 May, he writes to August Kubizek, his best friend who remained in Linz. Describes the monumental architecture, the magnificence of the Opera’s interior hall.

Back in the provinces, Adolf has but one obsession: joining the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. The Holy of Holies. The institution that trains the elite of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Reputed to be conservative, attached to classical canons, to historicism. Exactly what Adolf admires. Whilst Klimt and the moderns shatter academic codes, he remains faithful to the masters of the past. Klimt exhibits his gilded canvases, Schiele his tormented portraits. Adolf, for his part, wants to faithfully reproduce the Pantheon or the fountains of Schönbrunn in a rigorous academic style.

In September 1907, Klara is already ill. The breast cancer diagnosed a few months earlier is incurable. She nevertheless encourages her son to leave for Vienna. Adolf settles into a modest room, feverishly prepares for the examination. That year, out of 113 candidates, the jury retains only 78 for the main tests. Adolf passes this pre-selection. On 1 and 2 October, drawing tests in the studio. Imposed compositions on biblical or historical themes. Two sessions of 3 hours. He applies himself.

The verdict falls a few days later. Insufficient. His sketches contain too few heads. Gaps in anatomical drawing are prohibitive. The director Christian Griepenkerl advises him: orient yourself rather towards architecture.

He informs no one of his failure. Neither his sick mother. Nor Kubizek. Conceals the truth. He returns to Linz at the beginning of October. Klara is dying. Dr Eduard Bloch, family physician of Jewish origin, attempts treatment with iodoform. The flat reeks of this sickly sweet and nauseating antiseptic with which necrotic wounds are swabbed. Without success. Adolf watches over his mother daily for more than 2 months, watches her suffer atrociously. On 21 December 1907, she expires at 47 in the arms of her children.

Adolf collapses. Weeps hot tears before the deathbed. This is more than an emotional tragedy. Klara leaves the Hitler orphans in a precarious financial situation. Adolf organises the funeral, handles the formalities. A modest life insurance. A few savings.

After this painful winter spent in Linz, Adolf decides to return to Vienna. He writes to August Kubizek, convinces him to join him, proposes sharing his room. On 23 February 1908, August arrives by train. Adolf waits for him on the platform. Smiling. They move in together on Stumpergasse. 20 crowns per month rent. A cramped attic room in the back courtyard, poorly ventilated, lit by oil lamp, infested with bedbugs.

The cohabitation functions harmoniously. Kubizek enrols at the music conservatory, studies viola and conducting. He goes to his lessons every morning, works assiduously on his score in the evening, dreams of becoming a conductor. Adolf claims to attend classes at the Academy of Fine Arts. Complete lie. He says nothing of his failure the previous year. August, absorbed by his musical studies, suspects nothing.

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