First and last paintings of 11 famous artists
Compare first and last works of Leonardo da Vinci, Whistler, Rembrandt, Kahlo, Ingres & Tarsila do Amaral. See how 11 masters evolved from start to finish.
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.