How famous artists started
Picasso at 8, Dalí at 6, Michelangelo at 12, Frida at 17: the very first paintings of 10 famous artists, made when they were still children.
1. Edward Hopper, age 9 - Little Boy Looking at the Sea
Nyack, New York. 1891.
A nine-year-old boy sits on a wooden chair facing the Hudson River.
He paints the back of another child looking at the water.
His name is Edward Hopper.
The family lives on North Broadway, three blocks from the river. His father runs a general store. His mother Elizabeth draws in her spare time and slips pencils, paper, and watercolor sets into little Edward’s hands as soon as he is old enough to hold a brush.
Nyack is a shipbuilding town. From the family kitchen, Edward watches schooners and steamers cross the Hudson every day.
He is tall for his age, awkward, quiet. He prefers watching to playing.
The painting is small. A figure in dark clothes, seen from behind, alone in front of an empty horizon. No face. No detail. Just the back of a child looking at the water.
He signs the bottom right corner: “E. Hopper, 1891.”
His family keeps the painting. It later passes to his sister Marion, and then to the Edward Hopper House Museum in Nyack. The house where he was born.
2. Artemisia Gentileschi, age 17 - Susanna and the Elders
Rome, summer 1610.
In the workshop on Via della Croce, a seventeen-year-old girl rests her brush against a canvas and signs the bottom left corner: ARTEMITIA GENTILESCHI F. 1610.
The canvas shows a naked young woman flinching as two old men lean over her bath. She twists away. She pushes them back with both hands.
The painter is Artemisia Gentileschi.
Her father Orazio is one of the most respected followers of Caravaggio in the city. The workshop is full of male apprentices. Artemisia is the only daughter, the only girl allowed near the paint.
At 14, she already paints in oil better than most of her father’s students.
Most male Baroque painters show Susanna seductive, half smiling, almost flattered. Artemisia paints her terrified. Twisted away. In the act of refusing.
The canvas has been at Schloss Weißenstein in Pommersfelden, Bavaria, since 1728.
3. Albrecht Dürer, age 13 - Self-Portrait in Silverpoint
Nuremberg, 1484.
A thirteen-year-old boy sits in front of a small mirror set on the wooden table of his father’s goldsmith workshop. He holds a metal stylus. He draws his own face on a sheet of prepared paper.
The technique is called silverpoint. It allows no corrections. One wrong stroke and the drawing is destroyed.
The boy is Albrecht Dürer.
His father, Albrecht the Elder, was born in Hungary, trained in Budapest, and later settled in Nuremberg, the printing capital of Europe.
The family has 18 children. Only three will live to adulthood.
Young Albrecht draws himself half turned, finger pointing somewhere out of frame, hair falling in long curls. The line moves without hesitation.
Decades later, the adult Dürer returns to the drawing and adds an inscription in the upper right corner, in dense old German:
“This I drew myself from a mirror in the year 1484, when I was still a child. Albrecht Dürer.”
The drawing now rests at the Albertina Museum in Vienna, in a climate-controlled drawer that opens only for special exhibitions.
4. Michelangelo, age 12 - The Torment of Saint Anthony
Florence, around 1487.
A twelve-year-old boy bends over a wooden panel of 47 by 34 cm. He is copying an engraving by a German master, Martin Schongauer, which shows Saint Anthony lifted into the air by a swarm of demons.
The boy is apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandaio, the most fashionable fresco painter in the city. He sweeps the workshop, prepares the panels, stretches the canvases.
The other apprentices are older. He is the youngest in the workshop.
His name is Michelangelo Buonarroti.
The engraving is in black and white. He decides to paint it in full color. And he invents details that are not in the original.
The demons get fish scales because he has been to the fish market on the banks of the Arno and studied them from memory. He also adds the river itself in the lower part of the panel, a Tuscan landscape that is absent from Schongauer’s print.
The panel disappeared for centuries. It resurfaced in a private collection in 2008 and was identified by experts after months of authentication.
It now belongs to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Bought for around 6 million dollars.
5. Claude Monet, age 15 - Caricatures Sold for 20 Francs
Le Havre, France. 1858.
A fifteen-year-old boy walks into a frame shop on rue de Paris with a stack of charcoal drawings under his arm.
He draws his teachers and the wealthy residents of Le Havre with a sharp, mocking pencil. Big heads, tiny bodies, monstrous noses.
His name is Oscar-Claude Monet.
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