First and last paintings of 13 famous artists
Compare first and last works of Van Gogh, Renoir, Goya, Lempicka, Vermeer, Murillo & Rothko. See how 13 masters evolved from start to finish.
1/13 - Tamara de Lempicka (1898–1980)
De Lempicka is the defining painter of Art Deco: glossy surfaces, geometric forms, and women painted with the same sleek power usually reserved for machines and skyscrapers. She fled the Russian Revolution at eighteen, arrived in Paris with nothing, and within four years was the portrait painter the Parisian elite couldn’t stop commissioning.
Her work vanished from galleries after World War II; it took Madonna collecting her paintings in the 1980s for the art world to remember what it had been ignoring.
2/13 - Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675)
Vermeer is the painter of silence: quiet domestic interiors, a woman reading a letter, pouring milk, playing music, lit by a single window, with an attention to light and surface that wouldn't be matched until photography.
He produced only 36 known paintings, used ultramarine ground from lapis lazuli more expensive than gold, and died at 43 with eleven children and catastrophic debts. He was so thoroughly forgotten that nearly two centuries passed before a French critic rediscovered him in 1866 and reintroduced him to the world.
3/13 - Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–c. 1654)
Gentileschi was the first woman admitted to the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence and one of the most accomplished Baroque painters of her generation, known for dramatic lighting and psychologically intense scenes of biblical women.
She specialized in heroines: Judith, Susanna, Cleopatra, Lucretia, and in every case the woman holds the sword, the power, or the last word. To get there she survived a public rape trial at seventeen where she was tortured with thumbscrews to verify her testimony, which makes the defiance in her paintings feel earned, not decorative.
4/13 - Mark Rothko (1903–1970)
Rothko is one of the founders of Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting: large canvases with soft, hovering rectangles of color that are meant to produce an emotional response as direct as music. He refused to explain his work and insisted his paintings were not about color but about “tragedy, ecstasy, doom.”
He accepted a $35,000 commission for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, then returned the money after eating there once because he refused to let his work decorate a room built for showing off.