Artists & Artworks

Begin with ancient objects and regional traditions, then follow artists and works through the historical periods. Keep a creator’s major works together, with subjects, patrons, techniques, and small identifying details beneath that framework.

Ancient Objects and Regional Traditions

Locate ancient objects and regional traditions before studying individual makers.

Ancient (Selected)

Ancient art history preserves far more objects than securely known makers. Greek and Roman literary sources elevate named male artists, while workshops, women, enslaved artisans, and makers outside elite traditions are often anonymous; Roman copies and later attributions further complicate any artist list.¹

• Standard of Ur — The Standard of Ur is a Sumerian object from the Royal Cemetery at Ur, made as a hollow wooden box covered in mosaic scenes of war and peace. Its lapis lazuli background and narrative panels make it a famous early Mesopotamian artwork.

• The Seated Scribe — The Seated Scribe is a famous Old Kingdom Egyptian sculpture now in the Louvre. Its cross-legged pose, realistic pudgy torso, and inlaid eyes make it one of the best-known examples of ancient Egyptian naturalism.

• Thutmose
  • Bust of Nefertiti — The Bust of Nefertiti is the famous painted limestone portrait of Akhenaten’s queen, attributed to Thutmose and now displayed in Berlin’s Neues Museum. It is especially noted for the broken uraeus and the missing inlaid eye, making it one of the most recognizable works of Amarna art.
• Assyrian art
  • Lion Hunt of Ashurbanipal relief — The Lion Hunt of Ashurbanipal is an Assyrian palace relief showing the king killing lions with ceremonial precision. It is now associated with the British Museum and was excavated from Nineveh-era remains.
• Archaic Greek sculpture
  • Rampin Rider — The Rampin Rider is the earliest known free-standing equestrian statue from the Athenian Acropolis. Its rider shows archaic Greek features associated with kouroi and sits perched on the horse with his knees drawn up.

• Exekias (active c. 545–530 BCE) — Athenian potter and black-figure vase painter whose signed or attributed works use controlled incision and concentrated narrative, including Achilles and Ajax gaming. A vase painter’s name may identify painter, potter, workshop owner, or some combination. Another major attributed work is the Dionysus Cup.

• Euphronios (active late 6th–early 5th century BCE) — an early red-figure painter and later potter who used foreshortening and anatomical detail to explore bodies in space. Signed vessels help scholars reconstruct workshop collaboration and changing techniques.²

• Myron (5th century BCE) — known principally through ancient descriptions and Roman copies of works such as the Diskobolos. The sculpture’s poised body turns athletic motion into a stable, legible composition rather than a snapshot of natural movement.

• Phidias (active c. 460–430 BCE) — supervised major sculptural work for the Athenian Acropolis and was credited with colossal cult statues of Athena Parthenos and Zeus at Olympia. The originals are lost, so reconstruction depends on architecture, copies, small reproductions, inscriptions, and ancient testimony.

• Polykleitos (5th century BCE) — a sculptor associated with the Doryphoros and a theoretical Canon on bodily proportion and balance. Surviving Roman versions reveal the influence of contrapposto but cannot reproduce the lost bronze original exactly.³ Other works include the Diadumenos and Discophoros; he is associated with Argos and its school of sculpture.

  • Doryphoros — Polykleitos’s famous bronze nude statue of a youthful athlete, the Spear-Bearer, shown in contrapposto. It became a canonical example of balanced proportions and harmonious symmetry, and is associated with Polykleitos’s Canon, the sculptor’s treatise on ideal beauty. The work is known mainly through Roman marble copies; Galen praised it as an ideal expression of Greek beauty. It depicts a walking warrior carrying a spear.

  • Polykleitos Sicyonius — Polykleitos Sicyonius was a major Greek sculptor associated with the Doryphoros, the Diadumenos, and the Canon, a treatise on ideal proportions. He is also linked to contrapposto and to a competition win for a wounded Amazon sculpture.

  • Polykleitos the Elder or Polyclitus the Elder — Polykleitos the Elder was the Argive sculptor associated with contrapposto and works such as the Doryphoros and Diadumenos. He is also linked to a sculpting contest at Ephesus and to the classical Greek ideal of balanced proportion.

• Zeuxis and Parrhasius (late 5th–early 4th centuries BCE) — ancient anecdotes made their contest in illusionistic painting a model of artistic rivalry: grapes deceived birds, while a painted curtain deceived another painter. The story matters for reception even though it is not a neutral eyewitness record.

• Praxiteles (4th century BCE) — associated with softer modeling, sinuous posture, and the Aphrodite of Knidos, a celebrated monumental female nude known through copies and texts. Attributions to his workshop and followers are often uncertain.

• Praxiteles of Athens — Praxiteles of Athens was a major Classical Greek sculptor known for the Aphrodite of Knidos and Hermes Bearing the Infant Dionysus. His works also include Apollo Sauroktonos, and his style helped define the late Classical ideal of relaxed, sensuous figures.

• Lysippos (4th century BCE) — court sculptor to Alexander the Great in later tradition, credited with a slimmer proportional system and figures that occupy surrounding space. The Apoxyomenos type survives mainly through Roman copies.

• Apelles (4th century BCE) — court painter associated with Alexander the Great and praised by Pliny as antiquity’s supreme painter. No accepted original survives; titles such as Aphrodite Anadyomene are known through texts and later responses. Calumny is another lost work known through later responses, including Botticelli’s. Pliny describes his fine-line contest with Protogenes; Campaspe also appears in stories about him.

• Alexandros of Antioch and the Venus de Milo — an inscribed base found with the Hellenistic statue once supported attribution to Alexandros, but the base was lost and the relationship remains debated. The object illustrates how museum fame, restoration history, and missing context shape an artist attribution.

• Roman sculptors and copy workshops — Roman artists adapted Greek types for temples, houses, baths, gardens, and portraits rather than merely reproducing them mechanically. Material, scale, display setting, and new combinations changed meaning.

• Attribution as method — signatures, find context, tool marks, clay analysis, casting technique, stylistic comparison, and documentary sources carry different evidentiary weight. Familiar attributions should be presented with confidence levels, not as equally secure facts.

• Elgin Marbles — marble sculptures (c. 447–432 BCE) originally part of the Parthenon and other structures on the Athenian Acropolis; removed by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, and sold to the British Museum (1816) where they remain; constitute about half the surviving Parthenon sculptures; Greece has repeatedly requested their return; the frieze depicts the Panathenaic procession. The Elgin Marbles are sculptures taken from the Parthenon on the Acropolis and housed in the British Museum. They are central to disputes over the return of antiquities removed by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, and are often discussed as part of the Parthenon frieze and the “universal museum” debate.

• chryselephantine sculpture — Chryselephantine sculpture combines ivory and gold, usually over a wooden core. The best-known examples are Pheidias’s Athena Parthenos and Statue of Zeus at Olympia.

• Ancient Greek vase painting
  • White-ground technique — White-ground technique is an ancient Greek vase-painting style that uses a light clay slip, often allowing figures to be drawn in outline or painted in color on a pale background. It is associated with works such as the Reed Painter, who used the style for delicate scenes including figures awaiting Charon at the edge of the Styx.

• Ancient Greek vases — Ancient Greek vases are ceramic vessels such as kraters and amphorae that were decorated with black-figure and red-figure painting. They are central to clues about Geometric ornament, Exekias, Euphronios, and vase attribution by Beazley.

• Euthymides — Euthymides was an Athenian red-figure vase painter of the early classical period and a member of the group known as the Pioneers. He is especially associated with ambitious foreshortening and with signed vases advertising his pride in rivaling Euphronios.

• Zeuxis — Zeuxis was an ancient Greek painter famous for grapes so realistic that birds pecked at them and for losing a curtain-painting contest to Parrhasius. Pliny’s anecdotes also say he assembled the best features of several women to paint Helen of Troy and died laughing at an old woman posing as Aphrodite.

• Agasias of Ephesus
  • Borghese Gladiator — A Greek bronze statue signed by Agasias of Ephesus, known for its dramatic twisting pose. Despite its name, it depicts a Greek fighter. It was once in the Borghese collection and later inspired works by Joseph Wright of Derby, John Singleton Copley, and Watson and the Shark.
• Classical sculpture

  • Apollo Belvedere — The Apollo Belvedere is the famous classical sculpture of Apollo drawing a bow, long praised as an ideal of antique art. Associated with the Vatican’s Belvedere court, it was admired by Winckelmann and copied by later artists such as Canova and Dürer.

  • Farnese Hercules — The Farnese Hercules is the famous sculpture of the hero resting on his club with the apples of the Hesperides hidden behind his back. The surviving marble copy was found at the Baths of Caracalla and later came into the Farnese collection.

• Hellenistic art
  • Pergamon Altar — The Pergamon Altar was a huge Hellenistic monument from Asia Minor famous for its Gigantomachy frieze and Telephus panels. Its dramatic sculptural style later influenced modern monumental architecture, and the work is now associated with the Berlin museum collections.
• Hellenistic sculpture
  • Belvedere Torso — The Belvedere Torso is a fragmentary Hellenistic sculpture attributed to Apollonius. Its dramatic pose influenced Michelangelo and later Baroque artists, and it was once proposed for completion by Pope Julius II.
    • The Belvedere Torso — The Belvedere Torso is a famous ancient Roman sculpture associated with a seated male torso and a powerful twisting pose. Its influence on Michelangelo is often noted, especially in the poses of Adam and St. Bartholomew in the Sistine Chapel.

  • Dying Gaul — The Dying Gaul is the famous Hellenistic statue of a wounded Celtic warrior, often associated with Pergamon and a Roman copy in the Capitoline Museum. The figure is shown nude, mustached, and slumped in agony after battle.

  • Laocoön and His Sons — A famous Hellenistic marble sculpture group in the Vatican showing the Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons being attacked and strangled by serpents. Ancient writers attributed it to Rhodian sculptors, commonly named as Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydoros. The work is known from a celebrated Roman copy rediscovered in a Rome vineyard in 1506, and it became a major touchstone for Renaissance art, later criticism, restoration debates, and Lessing’s essay on the limits of painting and poetry; it was also discussed by Winckelmann and inspired later parodies.

    • Laocoön — The Laocoön group is the famous Hellenistic sculpture showing the Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons struggling against sea serpents. Its dramatic discovery inspired major debate about whether sculpture should emphasize nobility, pain, or silence.

    • The Laocoon group — The Laocoon group is the famous Hellenistic sculpture of Laocoon and his two sons struggling against serpents. Attributed to Hagesander, Athenodorus, and Polydorus of Rhodes, it was unearthed in 1506 and impressed Michelangelo.

• The Thorn-Puller — The Thorn-Puller, also called the Spinario, is the Greco-Roman sculpture of a seated youth removing a thorn from his foot. One tradition links the figure to a messenger who had just delivered a message to the Roman Senate.

• Venus de Milo — The Venus de Milo is the famous armless Hellenistic marble statue of the goddess of love, usually identified with Aphrodite. Discovered on Melos and now in the Louvre, it is typically attributed to Alexandros of Antioch rather than Praxiteles. Its missing arms and draped torso made it one of the most recognizable works of ancient Greek sculpture; it is often thought to have originally held an attribute such as a shield or apple. It also inspired modern reinterpretations, including Salvador Dalí’s Hallucinogenic Toreador and works by Jim Dine and Magritte.

• Venus de Milo or Aphrodite of Milos — The Venus de Milo is the famous armless statue of Aphrodite from Melos, sometimes attributed to Alexandros of Antioch. Its missing arms and idealized Hellenistic style make it one of the best-known works of ancient Greek sculpture.

• Winged Victory of Samothrace — The Winged Victory of Samothrace, also called the Nike of Samothrace or Winged Victory, is a Hellenistic marble statue of the goddess Nike. Discovered by Charles Champoiseau on the island of Samothrace, it is now displayed at the top of the Louvre’s Daru staircase. The sculpture is famous for its missing head and arms, windblown drapery, and ship-prow base, which suggest a commemoration of a naval victory and make the figure seem to be alighting on a ship’s prow.

• Ancient sculpture
  • Hellenistic sculpture
    • Barberini Faun — The Barberini Faun is a Hellenistic sculpture of a reclining satyr or woodland spirit, usually identified as a drunken satyr. The best-known version is in Munich’s Glyptothek, and a later copy was damaged in a modern selfie incident.
  • The Dying Gaul — The Dying Gaul is the Roman copy of a Hellenistic statue showing a mortally wounded Celtic warrior collapsing with a torc around his neck. Long admired for its pathos and realism, it is often cited as one of the greatest surviving works of ancient sculpture.
• Etruscan art

  • Chimera of Arezzo — The Chimera of Arezzo is a famous Etruscan bronze sculpture from Arezzo showing a lion, a goat, and a snake-tailed monster in combat posture. It is often cited as one of the best-known surviving examples of Etruscan art.

  • Etruscan Tombs — Etruscan tombs are the painted burial chambers of ancient Etruria, especially at sites such as Tarquinia and Cerveteri. Their frescoes often show banquets, dancers, hunting scenes, and other elaborate images preserved in necropolises near former Etruscan cities.

• Etruscan sculpture
  • L’Ombra della Sera — L’Ombra della Sera is a famous Etruscan statuette from Volterra, notable for its tiny, detailed head atop an extremely elongated body. Named by Gabriele D’Annunzio, it is a classic example of Etruscan sculpture and later inspired a type of votive offering.
• Mummy portraits
  • Fayum mummy portraits — The Fayum mummy portraits are the famous Roman-era panel portraits from Egypt, named for the Fayum region and among the oldest surviving portraits. They are often cited for their striking realism, encaustic technique, and the specimens found at Tomb of Aline and by Flinders Petrie.

• Portrait of Paquius Proculus and His Wife — The Portrait of Paquius Proculus and His Wife is a famous Pompeian wall painting showing a Roman couple with the tools of literacy. It is also sometimes given as the Portrait of Terentius Neo and His Wife, another name used for the same Pompeian fresco.

• Rome
  • The Capitoline Wolf — The Capitoline Wolf is the bronze she-wolf statue associated with the legend of Romulus and Remus. It is a symbol of Rome and is displayed in the Capitoline Museums.
• Ancient Greek art
  • Archaic period — The Archaic period of Greek art followed the Dark Ages and preceded the Classical period. Clues include kouroi, the Archaic smile, the Lady of Auxerre, and early sculptural styles such as the Severe Style’s reaction against it.
• Ancient Greek pottery

  • Kerch style — Kerch style is an ornate form of red-figure pottery associated with Athens and named for finds near the modern city of Kerch. Its figures are often shown in three-quarter view and decorated with white paint and gilding for polychrome effect.

  • red and black — Red and black are the two colors that define the classic Greek red-figure and black-figure pottery styles. The labels also title works in other fields, but in art history they point to the painted vases whose figure and background colors are reversed between the two techniques.

• Ancient Greek sculpture
  • Charioteer of Delphi — The Charioteer of Delphi is the famous early Classical bronze statue from the Sanctuary of Apollo, also called the rein-holder or Iniohos. It depicts a victor from the Pythian Games and is notable for its restrained pose, detailed drapery, and surviving inlaid eyes.
• Kritios Boy — The Kritios Boy is a Late Archaic Greek statue from the Acropolis, often cited as an early surviving example of contrapposto. Named for the sculptor Kritios, it marks the transition from kouroi to more naturalistic Classical sculpture.

Makers and Traditions across Regions

• Chinese landscape painting — compare Fan Kuan’s Travelers Among Mountains and Streams with later literati painting. Brushwork, landscape, calligraphy, and inscriptions can express artistic identity and cultural ideals; these works require their own vocabulary rather than a European Renaissance timeline.⁴

• Mughal painting — Bichitr’s Jahangir Preferring a Sufi Shaykh to Kings combines portraiture, symbolic scale, and courtly allegory. The painter includes his own likeness within an image that ranks spiritual and political authority.⁴

• Yoruba sculpture — Olowe of Ise’s veranda posts connect carving to palace architecture and social hierarchy. A named sculptor’s formal choices belong within patronage and performance contexts; “African art” is not one style or an exclusively anonymous tradition.⁴

• Indigenous American and Oceanic making — Maya sculpture includes artists’ signatures, while many other surviving works have no recorded individual attribution. Compare that evidence with korwar ancestor figures from Cenderawasih Bay, whose roles included maintaining relations between ancestors and the living. The relevant unit is sometimes an individual maker and sometimes a workshop, lineage, or community.⁴

• Chinese calligraphy — Chinese calligraphy is the East Asian art of writing Chinese characters with brush and ink, often discussed through styles like running script and cursive script. Common clues include the Four Treasures of the Study, Wang Xizhi, and the Orchid Pavilion Preface.

• Ni Zan — Ni Zan was a Yuan dynasty Chinese painter known for a spare, dry style that later artists admired. He was famous for his extreme cleanliness, later living as a hermit on a boat after giving away his wealth.

• screens — Screens are flat display surfaces used in devices such as televisions, computers, and phones. In art history, folding screens also appear as room dividers and as painted surfaces in East Asian and colonial Latin American works.

• Scroll paintings
  • handscrolls — Handscrolls are long Chinese scroll paintings meant to be viewed gradually on a tabletop rather than hung on a wall. They are associated with works such as Along the River During the Qingming Festival and the Night Revels of Han Xizai.
• Indian miniature painting
  • Rajput painting — Rajput painting, also called Rajasthani painting, is the courtly Indian miniature tradition associated with kingdoms such as Kishangarh and Marwar. Its subjects include epic scenes from the Mahabharata and Ramayana and celebrated portraiture such as Nihal Chand’s Bani Thani.
• Persian and Mughal miniature painting
  • muraqqa — Muraqqa is the album form associated with Persian and Mughal miniature painting, where calligraphy and small paintings were compiled together. The same tradition also includes manuscript illustrations used for rulers, saints, and courtly scenes.
• Benin art
  • Benin Bronzes — The Benin Bronzes are the famed metal plaques and figurines taken from the royal palace of Benin in modern-day Nigeria. They were cast by local artisans and often depict the oba, Portuguese visitors, and other courtly imagery.

• Giuseppe Castiglione — Giuseppe Castiglione, known in China as Lang Shih-ning, was an Italian Jesuit painter and architect at the Qing court. He worked on imperial projects in Beijing and helped bring Baroque and Rococo styles into Chinese court art.

• Japanese art
  • folding screens — Folding screens, or byōbu, are Japanese painted panels used as room dividers and as major surfaces for decorative art. Works by artists such as Ogata Kōrin and Nagasawa Rosetsu are famous examples of this format.
• Olmec art
  • colossal Olmec heads — The colossal Olmec heads are massive basalt sculptures from ancient Mesoamerica, probably portraying rulers or ballplayers. Examples from San Lorenzo, La Venta, and La Cobata are famous for their size and distinctive facial features.

Begin with the related works in the art study list, preserving each object’s specific place, community, and use.⁴

• Buddhist painting
  • thangkas — Thangkas are Tibetan Buddhist hanging paintings, often depicting a Buddha, bodhisattva, mandala, or other sacred figure in a detailed scroll format. Related regional forms include Nepalese paubhas and Bhutanese thongdrels, which are especially large examples.
• Calligraphy and ink painting
  • ink — Ink is a major medium in calligraphy and East Asian painting, including ink wash and shan shui landscapes. It also appears in works by artists such as Wang Xizhi, Chen Chong Swee, and modern painters who use it for drawing and scroll painting.

• handscroll — A handscroll is a long, horizontal East Asian painting or calligraphic format viewed by unrolling it section by section. Zhang Zeduan’s Along the River During the Qingming Festival is one famous example, and these works often show sweeping panoramas and travel scenes.

• ukiyo-e

  • Hiroshige — Hiroshige was a master of ukiyo-e, the Japanese woodblock-print genre known as “pictures of the floating world.” His prints are often tied to the Thirty-Six Views style, the Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido, rain scenes, and the Great Wave tradition associated with Hokusai.

  • kabuki actors — Kabuki actors were favorite subjects of ukiyo-e printmakers, especially in the yakusha-e genre associated with the Torii school and artists like Sharaku. Their stylized roles, dramatic poses, and thick stage makeup made them popular portrait subjects in Edo-period Japan.

• Utagawa Hiroshige — Japanese ukiyo-e artist and printmaker of the late Edo period, especially known for landscape and travel series such as The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, and The Sixty-Nine Stations of the Kiso Kaido. His work includes panoramic views of Edo, the rain scene at the Great Bridge, and the view of Plum Garden in Kameido. He worked within the Utagawa school. His landscapes influenced Van Gogh.

• Utagawa Kuniyoshi — Utagawa Kuniyoshi was a major ukiyo-e artist of the Utagawa school known for imaginative historical and supernatural prints. His famous works include Takiyasha the Witch and the Skeleton Spectre, cats arranged as the Tokaido stations, and playful animal-and-monster transformations in the style of visual puns.

• Utagawa school — The Utagawa school was a major Japanese woodblock-print lineage that produced many famous ukiyo-e artists. Its members included Hiroshige and Kuniyoshi, who made scenes like The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō and Takiyasha the Witch and the Skeleton Spectre.

• Dong Xiwen
  • The Founding Ceremony of the Nation — The Founding Ceremony of the Nation is Dong Xiwen’s monumental oil painting of Mao Zedong reading the proclamation founding the People’s Republic of China. It is associated with Tiananmen Square and later politically revised versions that removed or altered figures purged from the original composition.

Asian Art Traditions

• Bamiyan Buddhas — The Bamiyan Buddhas were the two monumental Buddha statues carved into the cliffs of central Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Valley. They were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, becoming a major symbol of cultural destruction.

• Hishikawa Moronobu — Hishikawa Moronobu was an early master of ukiyo-e and one of the genre’s foundational artists. His prints often depicted the pleasure quarters, theater, and idealized female beauty.

• Raja Ravi Varma — Raja Ravi Varma was a major Indian painter known for realist scenes from the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and the story of Shakuntala. He also helped popularize printed images of Hindu deities through a lithographic press tied to his work in Travancore.

• Suzuki Harunobu — Suzuki Harunobu was an eighteenth-century Japanese ukiyo-e artist who helped popularize full-color nishiki-e prints. His Parlor Views series and other prints made him an important predecessor of artists such as Hiroshige and Hokusai.

• Zhang Zeduan

  • Along the River during the Qingming Festival — Along the River during the Qingming Festival is Zhang Zeduan’s famous panoramic scroll of urban life along a river during the Qingming holiday. It is often identified with Song-era Kaifeng and is known for crowded market scenes, a bridge incident, and later imperial reception in Chinese art history.

Indigenous Art Traditions

• Danzantes — Danzantes are carved Mesoamerican relief figures, especially associated with Monte Albán and Zapotec art. Despite the name, they are often interpreted as depictions of captives or ritual figures rather than literal dancers.

• Norval Morrisseau — Norval Morrisseau was an Ojibwe painter who founded the Woodlands style, often identified with the name Copper Thunderbird. His work uses bright colors and thick black outlines, and it helped inspire later Indigenous artists such as Carl Ray and Daphne Odjig.

Medieval and Renaissance Artists

Connect medieval and Renaissance artists to media, patrons, and major works.

Medieval and Proto-Renaissance

• Bayeux Tapestry — c. 1070s (Bayeux, Normandy); not a true woven tapestry but an embroidered cloth (wool thread on linen), roughly 70 m (about 230 ft) long and 50 cm tall; narrates the Norman Conquest of England, culminating in the Battle of Hastings (1066) and the death of King Harold II (traditionally shown taking an arrow to the eye); early scenes show Count Guy capturing Harold Godwinson at Ponthieu and a Mont-Saint-Michel episode in which a figure rescues soldiers from quicksand; a crowd points skyward at the passage of Halley’s Comet; an enigmatic scene depicts a clergyman touching a woman (“Ælfgyva”); traditionally attributed to Queen Matilda (wife of William the Conqueror) and her ladies, but likely commissioned by William’s half-brother Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, and made in England; the World War II “Overlord Embroidery” commemorating D-Day was modeled on it. Its borders contain animals, fables, and other marginal scenes, including Harold Godwinson’s oath and the death of Edward the Confessor.
  • The Bayeux Tapestry — The Bayeux Tapestry is the famous Norman embroidery that depicts the conquest of England and the Battle of Hastings. It is also known for its scenes of Harold Godwinson, Halley’s Comet, and the tradition linking it to Queen Matilda.
    • the Bayeux (BAY-you) Tapestry — The Bayeux Tapestry is the embroidered medieval cloth that depicts William the Conqueror’s conquest of England. Tradition links it to Odo, and its long narrative panels include decorative borders with animals and fable scenes.

• Wilton Diptych — c. 1395–1399 (National Gallery, London); small portable diptych in egg tempera on oak; shows English King Richard II kneeling before the Virgin and Child attended by eleven angels; the outside panels bear Richard’s heraldic arms; of unknown authorship (possibly French or English); a masterpiece of International Gothic style and a primary image for English medieval court painting.

• Robert Campin — Flemish (Tournai); Early Netherlandish (often identified as the Master of Flémalle); Mérode Altarpiece (c. 1425–1428, triptych); pioneered domestic realism and disguised symbolism in oil on panel. He is also linked to The Entombment, The Virgin and Child Before a Firescreen, and the Werl Altarpiece; he may have taught Rogier van der Weyden.
  • Merode Altarpiece — An early Netherlandish triptych usually attributed to Robert Campin or the Master of Flémalle. It depicts the Annunciation in a domestic interior, with Joseph working in the right panel and the donors kneeling in the left panel. It is also noted for details such as the extinguished candle and mousetraps.

• Giotto di Bondone — Italian; Proto-Renaissance; Lamentation of Christ and Kiss of Judas (Scrovegni Chapel frescoes, Padua, c. 1304–1306); credited with moving beyond Byzantine flatness toward naturalism and emotional depth. He also designed the bell tower of Florence’s cathedral and painted the Arena Chapel frescoes in Padua, including the Scrovegni Chapel cycle and works such as Madonna Enthroned. The cycle includes a Last Judgment; other clues include the Ognissanti Madonna and the legend of the perfect circle drawn for the pope.

• Cimabue — Italian; Late Medieval; Santa Trinità Madonna (c. 1280); considered a forerunner of Giotto; Dante mentions him in the Divine Comedy. He was a Florentine painter born Cenni di Pepo, working in a Byzantine-influenced style that bridged older traditions and the more naturalistic 14th-century manner; he taught Giotto and is associated with the Santa Trinita Maestà, the Rucellai Madonna, the Madonna Enthroned, the Diptych of Devotion, monumental crucifixes, paintings for San Domenico, and the Pisa cathedral mosaic. Vasari opened the Lives with his biography.

• Duccio di Buoninsegna — Italian (Sienese); Gothic/Proto-Renaissance; Maestà altarpiece (1308–1311); refined Byzantine conventions with greater expressiveness.

• Simone Martini — Italian (Sienese); Gothic; Annunciation Altarpiece (1333); known for elegant line and gilded surfaces. He painted the Maestà in Siena and works such as the Altar of St. Louis of Toulouse and the Annunciation with Lippo Memmi.

• Jan van Eyck — Flemish; Early Netherlandish; credited with perfecting oil-paint technique; Ghent Altarpiece (completed 1432, with Hubert van Eyck); Arnolfini Portrait (1434); extraordinary surface detail. He is often called the father of Flemish painting and is also associated with self-portraits, Madonnas, and works signed with the motto “As I Can.”

  • As I Can — “As I Can” is the motto associated with Jan van Eyck, often written in pseudo-Greek letters. It appears on his self-referential portraits, including the frame of Man in the Red Turban and a portrait of his wife Margaret.

  • Madonna of Chancellor Rolin — The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin is an early Netherlandish painting by Jan van Eyck showing the Virgin and Child opposite Chancellor Nicolas Rolin. The detailed background and donor portrait make it one of the most famous devotional panels of the Northern Renaissance.

  • Madonna with Chancellor Rolin — Jan van Eyck’s 1435 painting showing Chancellor Nicolas Rolin kneeling before the Virgin and Child. The scene includes a walled garden, an angel crowning Mary, and an elaborate townscape seen beyond an arcade.

  • Man in a Red Turban — Man in a Red Turban is a Jan van Eyck painting often treated as an early self-portrait. Its dark background, inscribed frame, and direct gaze make it one of the best-known examples of early Northern Renaissance portraiture.

  • The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin — The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin is Jan van Eyck’s portrait-like devotional painting showing Chancellor Nicolas Rolin kneeling before the Virgin and Child. An angel hovers above to crown Mary, and the richly detailed setting includes peacocks in the background.

  • Arnolfini Portrait — Jan van Eyck, 1434 (National Gallery, London); oil on panel depicting Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini and his wife; famous for the convex mirror on the back wall that reflects two figures including, perhaps, van Eyck himself; debated as a marriage certificate or memorial image. The interior is filled with symbolic objects, including a single lit candle in the chandelier, a small dog, oranges, and the artist’s signature on the back wall near the mirror. The work is often described as a richly furnished double portrait of a wealthy merchant and his wife, and some interpretations also focus on the couple’s clasped hands and the woman’s dress or pose.

• Carolingian manuscripts
  • Utrecht Psalter — The Utrecht Psalter is a Carolingian illustrated psalter from around 830 CE, famous for its energetic sketch-like style and landscape scenes. Though made in Reims, it takes its name from Utrecht and is linked to the visual culture of Carolingian renovatio.
• Illuminated manuscripts
  • Book of Kells — The Book of Kells is an early medieval Insular Gospel manuscript famous for its lavish decoration, including the Chi-Rho page, carpet pages, and elaborate canon tables. Usually associated with Kells and possibly Iona, it is one of the best-known masterpieces of Irish illuminated art.
• Illuminators
  • Limbourg brothers — The Limbourg brothers were a fifteenth-century Flemish trio of manuscript illuminators: Paul, Jean, and Hermann. They worked in Nijmegen and are best known for the illuminated manuscript Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, also called the Très Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry, one of the great masterpieces of medieval art. Their calendar scenes are noted for their rich color, and their work was left unfinished when they died in 1416, probably of plague, before being completed by Jean Colombe.

    • Limbourg — The Limbourg brothers were three Netherlandish illuminators named Herman, Paul, and Jean. They are best known for the Très Riches Heures and other manuscripts commissioned by the Duke of Berry.

    • Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry — A famous illuminated Book of Hours commissioned for the Duke of Berry and decorated by the Limbourg brothers. Its calendar miniatures include zodiac imagery and an early famous snow scene, and later additions by Jean Colombe make it one of the best-known medieval manuscripts; it is celebrated as an example of Gothic style.

• Tapestries
  • The Hunt of the Unicorn — The Hunt of the Unicorn, also called the Unicorn Tapestries, is a tapestry cycle about hunting a legendary unicorn. Its panels include the unicorn cleansing poison, a maiden’s betrayal, and a final scene of the creature chained in a fenced enclosure.
• Stained glass
  • stained glass window(s) — Stained glass windows are decorative panels made by joining colored glass pieces with lead cames. They are especially associated with churches and cathedrals such as Chartres and with artists like Chagall and Tiffany.

• Cennino d’Andrea Cennini — Cennino d’Andrea Cennini was a late medieval Italian painter and writer best known for Il libro dell’arte, The Craftsman’s Handbook. His handbook is an important early source on fresco and egg-tempera painting techniques.

• Nicola Pisano — Nicola Pisano was a thirteenth-century Italian sculptor associated with the pulpits of the Pisa Baptistry and Siena Cathedral. He also created the Fontana Maggiore at Perugia and the sculpture Fortitude, often treated as an early modern heroic nude.

• Taddeo Gaddi — Taddeo Gaddi was a pupil of Giotto who worked on fresco cycles in Florence, especially in the Baroncelli Chapel at Santa Croce. He is associated with works such as Stories of the Virgin and other early Trecento paintings in the Giottesque tradition.

• Duccio
  • Rucellai Madonna — The Rucellai Madonna is Duccio’s large panel painting of the Virgin and Child surrounded by angels and saints. It was commissioned for Santa Maria Novella and is often linked to the early development of Renaissance painting in Florence.

• Andrea da Pisano — Andrea da Pisano was a fourteenth-century Italian sculptor and goldsmith associated with the southern doors of the Florence Baptistery. His Baptism of Christ relief preceded Ghiberti’s later Gates of Paradise.

• Andrea Orcagna — Andrea Orcagna is the Florentine artist associated with the ornate marble tabernacle in Orsanmichele. He worked in a civic-religious Florentine context that also featured guild-sponsored sculpture by artists such as Ghiberti, Donatello, and Nanni di Banco.

• Lippo Memmi — Lippo Memmi was a Sienese painter associated with Simone Martini and known for refined Gothic Madonnas and collaborative altarpieces. He is connected with the Madonna della Febbre and other gilded devotional images.

• Lorenzetti brothers — The Lorenzetti brothers, Pietro and Ambrogio, were Sienese painters active in the early 14th century. Pietro is associated with works at Assisi and Arezzo, while Ambrogio is known for the Allegory of Good and Bad Government in Siena, including the panoramic Peaceful City.

• Pietro Cavallini — Pietro Cavallini was a late thirteenth-century Roman artist who worked in fresco and mosaic. He is associated with apse mosaics at San Paolo fuori le Mura, a Life of the Virgin cycle in Santa Maria in Trastevere, and a Last Judgment at Santa Cecilia in Trastevere.

• Siena — Tuscan city and artistic center associated with Duccio, Simone Martini, the Lorenzetti brothers, and the Sienese school. Its civic art tradition includes Duccio’s Maestà, Simone Martini’s Annunciation, and Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good and Bad Government, along with the Palazzo Pubblico and its frescoes, the cathedral works of the Sienese school, the Piccolomini Library, and rivalry with Florence.

• Bible
  • the Annunciation — The biblical scene in which the angel Gabriel tells Mary that she will bear Jesus. In art it is often shown with a lily, an open book, the dove of the Holy Spirit, and Mary’s response “Ecce ancilla domini.” Famous versions include works by Fra Angelico, Simone Martini, Leonardo da Vinci, Jan van Eyck, and the Merode Altarpiece; clues may also point to Isaiah.

• Hubert van Eyck — Hubert van Eyck is a Flemish painter traditionally linked with the early development of the Ghent Altarpiece. He is also associated with works such as Three Marys at the Tomb and with the artistic circle that included his brother Jan van Eyck.

• Jean Clouet — Jean Clouet was a French Renaissance portraitist best known for court portraits of Francis I and his family. He is associated with finely detailed oil portraits such as the portrait of Francis I in lavish dress.

• Jean Fouquet — Jean Fouquet was a fifteenth-century French painter and manuscript illuminator active at the court of Charles VII. He is known for the Melun Diptych, the Book of Hours for Étienne Chevalier, and richly colored court scenes.

• Adoration of the Magi — The Adoration of the Magi depicts the infant Jesus being visited by the three Magi, often in elaborate Renaissance or Gothic settings. Quizbowl clues commonly point to Botticelli’s Medici-filled version, Leonardo’s unfinished panel, Gentile da Fabriano’s ornate altarpiece, or Bosch and Brueghel depictions of the same Biblical scene. The title is also called the Epiphany in Christian art.
  • The Adoration of the Magi — The Adoration of the Magi is the biblical scene in which the three kings present gifts to the infant Jesus. It appears in major paintings by Giotto, Botticelli, and Bosch.
• Ambrogio Lorenzetti — Ambrogio Lorenzetti was a Sienese painter known for the fresco cycle of the Allegory of Good and Bad Government in the Palazzo Pubblico. His works include personified civic virtues and vices such as Justice, Peace, Timor, and the Tyrant.
  • Allegory of Good and Bad Government — Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good and Bad Government is a fresco cycle in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico that contrasts civic prosperity with tyranny. Its panels show Justice, Concordia, Security, and Fear arranged as moral and political personifications of good rule and its opposite.

• Theophanes the Greek — Theophanes the Greek was a major Byzantine icon painter who worked in the Russian tradition and influenced the Novgorod school. He is linked to Andrei Rublev and to icons such as the Transfiguration and Christ Pantocrator.

• Andrei Rublev — Andrei Rublev was a Russian medieval icon painter and one of the most famous figures of late medieval Russian art. He is associated with The Old Testament Trinity, the Trinity icon showing the three angels at Mamre, icons from the Kremlin and Vladimir cathedrals, and frescoes in Russian churches; his fame made him a model for later Orthodox depictions of the Trinity. He is also associated with Tarkovsky’s film Andrei Rublev.

Italian Renaissance

Early and High Renaissance

• Filippo Brunelleschi — Italian; Renaissance; primarily an architect; dome of Florence Cathedral (1436); formalized linear perspective theory, transforming all subsequent painting.

• Donatello — Italian; Renaissance sculpture; David (c. 1440s, bronze — first freestanding male nude since antiquity); Saint George (c. 1415–1417); Mary Magdalene (c. 1453–1455, wood). Born Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi, he also made the bronze equestrian Gattamelata, St. Mark, and Habakkuk (the “Zuccone”), and was a pioneer of naturalistic relief and expressive bronze work.

  • Banquet of Herod — Donatello’s bronze relief the Banquet of Herod depicts the dance and aftermath surrounding the execution of John the Baptist. It was made for the Siena Cathedral baptistery and is notable for its early use of perspective and narrative space.

  • Donatello or Donato di Niccolo di Betto Bardi — Donatello, born Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi, was an early Renaissance sculptor known for the bronze David and the equestrian Gattamelata. Other clues about him include St. George, the Zuccone, and his dramatic wooden Mary Magdalene.

  • Equestrian Statue of Gattamelata — Donatello’s Equestrian Statue of Gattamelata is the famous bronze memorial to the condottiero Erasmo da Narni in Padua. It is often noted as the first monumental equestrian sculpture since antiquity and for the horse’s raised hoof resting on a sphere.
    • The Equestrian Statue of Gattamelata — Donatello’s Equestrian Statue of Gattamelata honors Erasmo da Narni and is remembered as the first surviving Renaissance equestrian statue. The work stands in Padua and gets its nickname from the condottiere’s epithet, “honey cat.”

  • Gattamelata — Donatello’s bronze equestrian statue in Padua’s Piazza del Santo depicts the Venetian condottiero Erasmo da Narni, nicknamed Gattamelata, the “Honeyed Cat.” It became a model for Renaissance equestrian monuments and is often compared with the ancient equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius.

  • Il Zuccone — Il Zuccone is Donatello’s statue of the prophet Habbakuk for the Florence Cathedral belltower, named for the figure’s bald head. Vasari links it to the artist’s dramatic command, “Speak, damn you! Speak!” It originally stood in a niche on the east campanile of Florence Cathedral and is sometimes proposed to depict Elisha instead.

  • Lo Zuccone — Lo Zuccone is Donatello’s sculpture of the prophet Habakkuk, commonly called the Pumpkin-Head. It adorns the campanile in Florence.

  • The Feast of Herod — Donatello’s gilded bronze relief The Feast of Herod is in the Siena Baptistery and dramatizes the presentation of John the Baptist’s head on a platter. The scene is divided into multiple sections and includes figures such as a dancer, musicians, and Herod recoiling at the gruesome offering.

  • The Penitent Magdalen — The Penitent Magdalen is a sculpture of Mary Magdalene shown after years of extreme fasting and penitence. Donatello’s wooden figure is notable for its emaciated face, long hair, and the dramatic contrast between bodily decay and spiritual intensity.

  • The Penitent Magdalene — The Penitent Magdalene is Donatello’s poplar-wood sculpture of a skeletal, nearly toothless woman clothed only in her hair. It is often dated to the artist’s later Florentine period, though its exact date is disputed. The same subject also appears in painted works associated with a candlelit mirror and skull imagery.

  • Zuccone — Donatello’s marble statue of the prophet Habakkuk, nicknamed for its bald, pumpkin-like head. It stands on the bell tower (campanile) of Florence Cathedral; a later copy replaced the original there. Donatello reportedly treated the baldness of the figure with unusual intensity while sculpting it.
• Masaccio — Italian; Early Renaissance; The Tribute Money and Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (Brancacci Chapel frescoes, c. 1425–1428); applied Brunelleschi’s perspective to monumental figures.

  • Masaccio (mah-SAH-chee-oh) — Masaccio was an early Renaissance painter known for The Tribute Money and The Holy Trinity. His work in the Brancacci Chapel and the Pisa Altarpiece helped define the naturalism of fifteenth-century Florentine painting.

  • The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden — The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden is Masaccio’s fresco in the Brancacci Chapel showing Adam and Eve driven out by an angel with a sword. It is commonly identified by the pair’s grief and the scene’s placement near The Tribute Money. The painting belongs to the cycle in which Filippino Lippi’s work appears below it, and it was later censored with fig leaves. The scene is also known by Italian titles that translate as the expulsion from paradise.

  • The Holy Trinity with the Virgin and Saint John and donors — Masaccio’s The Holy Trinity with the Virgin and Saint John and donors is the famous Renaissance fresco at Santa Maria Novella with a painted barrel vault and tomb below the scene. Mary and John flank the crucified Christ while God appears behind him, and donors are shown kneeling at the sides.

  • The Holy Trinity with the Virgin, Saint John the Evangelist, and Donors — The Holy Trinity with the Virgin, Saint John the Evangelist, and Donors is Masaccio’s fresco in which God the Father, the dove of the Holy Spirit, and the crucified Christ are shown in a perspectival chapel-like setting. A skeleton tomb below adds the memento mori inscription about what the viewer will become.

  • The Tribute Money — Masaccio’s The Tribute Money is a Brancacci Chapel fresco showing Christ and the apostles alongside Peter retrieving a coin from a fish’s mouth. It is often clued by the sequence of three scenes, the vanishing point at Christ’s head, and its pairing with The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

  • The Trinity — Masaccio’s The Trinity, or The Holy Trinity, is a Renaissance fresco in Santa Maria Novella in Florence. It was rediscovered in the nineteenth century and is famous for its illusionistic crucifixion scene and the memento mori inscription on the tomb below.

  • Tribute Money — Masaccio’s Tribute Money is a Brancacci Chapel fresco that depicts the story from Matthew 17 about paying the temple tax. Its three moments are arranged across the scene, including Peter taking a coin from a fish and the tax collector receiving payment.

• Fra Angelico — Italian; Early Renaissance; Annunciation (c. 1438–1450, San Marco, Florence); combined spiritual devotion with Renaissance spatial clarity. He was a Dominican friar and beatified painter born Guido di Pietro, later associated with Fiesole. Other works attributed to him include the Coronation of the Virgin, the Linaiuoli altarpiece, the Annalena Altarpiece, and fresco cycles and altarpieces in Florence, Orvieto, Rome, and the Vatican Chapel of the Sacrament; he also collaborated with Fra Filippo Lippi on an Adoration of the Magi.

• Domenico Ghirlandaio — Italian (Florentine); Early Renaissance; Old Man with a Young Boy (c. 1490); frescoes in the Tornabuoni Chapel, Santa Maria Novella (1486–1490); teacher of Michelangelo. He was also noted for portrait figures embedded within religious scenes and for the Sassetti Chapel fresco cycle.

• Sandro Botticelli — Italian; Early Renaissance; The Birth of Venus (c. 1484–1486); Primavera (c. 1477–1482); Adoration of the Magi (1475–1476); worked under Medici patronage.
  • Madonna of the Magnificat — Botticelli’s Madonna of the Magnificat is a round Madonna-and-Child painting in which Mary writes the Magnificat while angels crown her. The title comes from the hymn book or prayer associated with the scene, and the work is also known as Madonna and Child with Angels.
    • the Madonna of the Magnificat — Botticelli’s Madonna of the Magnificat is a circular tondo in which Mary writes in a book while the infant Jesus touches a pomegranate. Two youthful attendants flank the scene as a crowned, radiant composition emphasizes the devotional theme.

  • Madonna of the Pomegranate — Madonna of the Pomegranate is a Botticelli painting showing Mary holding the Christ child and the titular fruit. Its composition includes angels arranged behind the figures with flowers and books.

  • Mars and Venus — Mars and Venus is the title of a Botticelli painting showing the two deities after lovemaking, with Mars asleep and satyrs playing with his armor. The work is often connected with Botticelli’s fascination with Simonetta Vespucci.

  • mystical — Mystical is the adjective partly titling Botticelli’s Mystical Nativity and Mystic Crucifixion. Those works are pointed to by clues about devils retreating into the ground, angels, and the Florence setting.

  • Primavera — Sandro Botticelli’s mythological Renaissance painting, usually dated to the 15th century and housed in the Uffizi, shows an orange or flowering grove filled with Venus at the center, Mercury on the left, the Three Graces nearby, Cupid above, and Zephyr pursuing Chloris as she becomes Flora on the right. It is often interpreted as an allegory of spring, love, fertility, and Neoplatonic or classical themes, and is commonly linked to Renaissance literature such as Poliziano and to a Medici wedding commission for Lorenzo de’ Medici or Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici.
    • Primavera by Botticelli — Primavera is Sandro Botticelli’s famous Renaissance painting showing Venus, Mercury, the Three Graces, Cupid, and other mythological figures in a flowering grove. It is also known for its allegorical treatment of spring and its elegant procession of female figures.

  • The Adoration of the Magi — The Adoration of the Magi is a painting by Botticelli commissioned for Santa Maria Novella in Florence. Its crowded composition includes members of the Medici family and is notable for a possible self-portrait of the artist.

  • The Birth of Venus — Botticelli’s famous Renaissance painting of the nude goddess Venus emerging from the sea on a seashell while Zephyr blows her ashore. It is often associated with the Hora of Spring, orange groves or orange trees, roses blowing through the air, and the broader classical motif of Venus emerging from the sea; some descriptions identify Chloris or Aura among the figures, and Venus is sometimes shown in the pudica pose.
    • Hora of Spring — The Hora of Spring is the figure in Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus who offers the cloak to Venus. Clues about her usually come from the right side of the painting, where she stands opposite Zephyr and the nymph Chloris.

  • The Calumny of Apelles — The Calumny of Apelles is Sandro Botticelli’s famous allegorical painting based on a lost ancient work by Apelles. It depicts Slander dragging a victim before King Midas and is often discussed alongside Botticelli’s other mythological paintings.

  • The Mystical Nativity — Sandro Botticelli’s signed 1500 painting of the birth of Christ. It is notable for its apocalyptic Greek inscription at the top, Savonarola-inspired symbolism, and unusual treatment of the Holy Family. The scene includes the Virgin and Child with angels, shepherds, and kings around the manger, with details such as sleeping Joseph, dancing angels, angels holding ribbons, and a small demon in the lower left corner; it is often described as the only painting Botticelli signed.
• Andrea del Sarto — Italian (Florentine); High Renaissance; Madonna of the Harpies (1517); fresco cycles in the Annunziata, Florence; admired for drawing and perfect execution, which earned him the sobriquet “the faultless painter.” Also known as Andrea d’Agnolo, he is often described as an early Mannerist painter; his works also include frescoes for the Chiostro dello Scalzo.
  • Madonna of the Harpies — Andrea del Sarto’s Madonna of the Harpies shows the Virgin and Child standing on a pedestal among saints and putti, with reliefs of harpies below. The painting is a major High Renaissance altarpiece now in the Uffizi.
• Leonardo da Vinci — Italian; High Renaissance; Mona Lisa (c. 1503–1519, Louvre); The Last Supper (mural, c. 1495–1498, Milan); Virgin of the Rocks (two versions); Vitruvian Man (c. 1490, drawing); invented sfumato technique.

  • Battle of Anghiari — The Battle of Anghiari was Leonardo da Vinci’s unfinished mural commission for the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The work was never completed and later became famous through copies and related drawings, including one associated with Rubens.

  • Codex Leicester — The Codex Leicester is a notebook by Leonardo da Vinci. It contains his scientific notes and observations, and it is one of his best-known surviving manuscripts.

  • Ginevra de’ Benci — Ginevra de’ Benci is Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of a Florentine noblewoman and the only Leonardo painting in the United States. It is known for the Latin motto on the reverse, the juniper pun on the sitter’s name, and scholarly debate over its cut-down lower section.

  • Lady with an Ermine — Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine portrays Cecilia Gallerani, the mistress of Ludovico Sforza, holding a white ermine. The portrait’s history includes mistaken titles, repainting, restoration, and its residence in the Czartoryski Museum. The work is one of Leonardo’s best-known portraits and is sometimes confused with La Belle Ferronnière. Its title animal alludes to Ludovico’s emblem and nickname.

  • Leonardo da Vinci’s Horse — Leonardo da Vinci’s Horse is the monumental equestrian statue project inspired by Leonardo’s never-built design for a huge bronze horse. Modern versions were completed in places such as Grand Rapids and near Milan’s racetrack.

  • Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks — Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks were the artist-inventor’s vast working papers, filled with sketches, scientific notes, and mirror-script observations. They include codices such as the Leicester and Madrid notebooks and were later mined for studies of flight, anatomy, and mechanics.

  • Mona Lisa — Leonardo da Vinci’s famous portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, often identified as Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo. The painting is in the Louvre in Paris and is noted for its enigmatic smile, sfumato shading, missing eyebrows, and the distant winding road and bridge in the background. It is a small work whose fame far exceeds its size; its theft by Vincenzo Perugia in 1911 is another notable fact, and Marcel Duchamp parodied it in L.H.O.O.Q., adding a mustache and goatee. Later pop-art versions were made by Warhol and Johns.

  • Salvator Mundi — Salvator Mundi is the disputed Leonardo painting of Jesus holding an orb while raising his right hand in blessing. It became famous for its record-breaking sale at auction and for the controversy surrounding its attribution and current location. The work’s image history includes early engravings, restorations, and a famous rediscovery.

  • The Battle of Anghiari — The Battle of Anghiari was Leonardo da Vinci’s lost mural of a Florentine victory over Milanese forces. Its damaged legacy survives mainly through later copies and drawings, especially the famous Rubens sketch.

  • The Last Supper — The scene of Jesus Christ’s final meal with his twelve apostles before the Crucifixion, most famously painted by Leonardo da Vinci as a mural. Notable versions also include Tintoretto’s dramatic treatment, Veronese’s altered Feast in the House of Levi, Dalí’s version, and Andrea del Castagno’s version. Common details associated with the subject include Judas, the disciples’ shock at the announcement of the betrayal, and the sacramental context.

  • The Last Supper — The Last Supper is Leonardo da Vinci’s mural in Milan’s Santa Maria delle Grazie showing Jesus and the apostles at the title meal. Later artists repeatedly reworked it, including Marisol, Mary Beth Edelson, and Renee Cox.

  • The Virgin of the Rocks — Leonardo da Vinci’s painting shows the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus, the young John the Baptist, and an angel in a rocky grotto or shadowy landscape. It is known in two major versions, one in the Louvre and one in the National Gallery in London, and was intended for an altarpiece commissioned in Milan. The work is especially noted for its sfumato modeling and the angel’s pointing gesture toward John.

  • Vitruvian Man — Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man depicts ideal human proportions as a nude figure inscribed in a circle and a square. The drawing is based on Vitruvius’s architectural measurements and is famous for its extensive notes on symmetry and body ratios.

• Michelangelo Buonarroti — Italian; High Renaissance/Mannerism; David (marble, 1501–1504, Florence); Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508–1512, including The Creation of Adam); Pietà (1498–1499, marble, St. Peter’s Basilica); The Last Judgment (Sistine Chapel altar wall, 1536–1541); also architect of St. Peter’s dome.

• Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio) — Italian; High Renaissance; School of Athens (1509–1511, Vatican Stanze); The Sistine Madonna (c. 1512); numerous Madonna compositions; known for harmonious composition and graceful idealism. Other works include La Disputa and The Parnassus; he also worked on the design of St. Peter’s Basilica.

  • La disputa — Raphael’s fresco in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican shows theologians debating the Eucharist and transubstantiation below Christ enthroned in heaven with the saints and heavenly host. It hangs opposite The School of Athens and is one of the Vatican Stanze’s most famous works.

  • Madonna of the Goldfinch — Raphael’s painting shows the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus and the child John the Baptist in a quiet Renaissance landscape. John offers the title goldfinch to Jesus; the bird symbolizes the Passion. The work was made as a wedding gift for Lorenzo Nasi and was later repaired after earthquake damage.

  • Madonna with the Goldfinch — Madonna with the Goldfinch is a Raphael painting showing the Virgin and two children holding the title bird together. Mary is shown seated with a book while watching the children.

  • Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione — Raphael’s Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione depicts the humanist author of The Book of the Courtier as an ideal gentleman. The portrait became famous for its poised half-length composition, folded hands, and influence on later artists such as Rembrandt.

  • Raphael or Rafaello Sanzio da Urbino — Raphael, also called Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, was a High Renaissance painter famous for The School of Athens. His other works include the Sistine Madonna, the Mond Crucifixion, and the tapestry cartoons for the Acts of the Apostles.

  • Sacrifice at Lystra — Sacrifice at Lystra is Raphael’s tapestry cartoon showing Paul and Barnabas in the city of Lystra from Acts 14. The scene centers on a pagan sacrifice mistakenly offered to them as gods, with Mercury and an ox appearing in the composition.

  • School of Athens — Raphael’s Vatican fresco in the Stanza della Segnatura, a High Renaissance wall painting that depicts an idealized gathering of philosophers and scientists in a grand hall. Plato and Aristotle stand at its center, with figures identified as Heraclitus, Ptolemy, and Zoroaster among the surrounding crowd. The composition is often noted for the tondo above it and for likenesses modeled on Leonardo and Bramante; it is also paired with the nearby fresco La Disputa and associated with the liberal arts.
    • The School of Athens or Scuola d’Atene — The School of Athens, or Scuola d’Atene, is Raphael’s fresco in the Stanze of the Vatican showing Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek philosophers. Its architecture frames figures such as Euclid, and Raphael even included his own self-portrait in the scene.

  • Sistine Madonna — Raphael’s Sistine Madonna shows the Virgin and Child with Saint Barbara and Pope Sixtus, framed by curtains and the famous pair of putti at the bottom. The painting is now associated with Dresden and with the legend that its cherubs inspired later admiration for the work.

  • St. George and the Dragon — Raphael’s St. George and the Dragon shows the Christian knight on horseback battling the dragon in a highly idealized Renaissance scene. Paolo Uccello’s version is famous for its golden lance and dramatic, more geometric treatment of the same legend.

  • Stanza della Segnatura — The Stanza della Segnatura is the Vatican room frescoed by Raphael and his workshop with The School of Athens and La Disputa. It also contains Parnassus and allegorical figures of the cardinal virtues, making it one of the best-known chambers in the Raphael Rooms.

  • The Fire in the Borgo — The Fire in the Borgo is a Raphael fresco in the Stanze that shows a raging fire being checked by a dramatic rescue scene, including a man carrying another to safety from the flames. It is tied to Pope Leo IV and to the Raphael Rooms, and its title was also used for another room in the Vatican complex.

  • The Mass at Bolsena — The Mass at Bolsena is Raphael’s Vatican fresco about the Eucharistic miracle in which blood flows from the host when a priest doubts transubstantiation. Julius II appears in another version, and the scene belongs among Raphael’s papal chamber paintings.

  • The Mond Crucifixion — The Mond Crucifixion is Raphael’s early altarpiece also known as the Gavari Crucifixion. It shows Christ on the cross with angels catching his blood in chalices while Mary Magdalene, the Virgin, St. John, and St. Jerome gather below.

  • The Parnassus — Raphael’s The Parnassus is a fresco in the Stanza della Segnatura that represents poetry. Apollo appears at the center surrounded by the Muses and poets, including figures such as Virgil and Dante. It hangs on the north wall opposite other celebrated Vatican Room paintings like The School of Athens.

  • The Sistine Madonna — Raphael’s Sistine Madonna shows the Virgin and Child descending on clouds with Saint Sixtus and Saint Barbara below. Its two small angels at the bottom are among the most reproduced details in Western art.

  • The Transfiguration — The Transfiguration is Raphael’s last painting, showing the transfigured Christ above and the possessed boy below. Its dramatic upper-and-lower split and late-Renaissance style make it one of his most famous works.

  • The Transfiguration of Christ — The Transfiguration of Christ is Raphael’s unfinished altarpiece showing Jesus radiant on Mount Tabor with Moses and Elijah above, and the possessed boy below. It was intended for Narbonne Cathedral and is often linked to the artist’s death on Good Friday before completion.

  • The Triumph of Galatea — The Triumph of Galatea is Raphael’s major mythological painting at the Villa Farnesina. It shows Galatea riding a shell amid sea creatures and cupids, making it one of the artist’s best-known secular works.

  • Triumph of Galatea — Raphael’s Triumph of Galatea is the Villa Farnesina fresco showing the nereid Galatea riding a shell or dolphin-pulled chariot. The scene is crowded with Tritons, putti, and sea gods, and the composition draws the eye to Galatea at the center.
• Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) — Italian (Venetian); High Renaissance/Mannerism; Assumption of the Virgin (1516–1518); Venus of Urbino (1538); Bacchus and Ariadne (1520–1523); pioneered loose, expressive brushwork influencing Baroque painters. Other works include the Pesaro Madonna, Sacred and Profane Love, Allegory of Prudence, Rape of Europa, Danaë, and Man with a Glove. He worked for Charles V and helped establish Venetian colorito.

  • Allegory of Age Governed by Prudence — Titian’s Allegory of Age Governed by Prudence, also called Allegory of Prudence, links the heads of an old man, an adult, and a youth with animal heads beneath them. The work is often read as a meditation on wisdom, age, and experience.

  • Bacchus and Ariadne — Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne shows Bacchus leaping from his chariot to pursue Ariadne on the island of Naxos. The scene includes cheetahs, a festive entourage, and Ariadne in blue as she is abandoned by Theseus.

  • Danae and the Shower of Gold — Danae and the Shower of Gold is Titian’s mythological painting of Danae receiving Zeus’s golden rain. The composition typically includes Danae reclining on a bed with a handmaiden or servant nearby witnessing the miraculous shower.

  • Pesaro Madonna — Titian’s Venetian altarpiece for the Pesaro family in the Frari, Venice, shows the Virgin enthroned with the Pesaro family kneeling before her and saints, including Peter and Francis, who present the donors to Mary. Its composition is famously offset rather than centered, with towering columns and putti in the sky.

  • Rape of Europa — The Rape of Europa is Titian’s mythological painting of Zeus carrying off Europa in the form of a bull. The scene became a celebrated subject for later artists as well.

  • Sacred and Profane Love — Titian’s allegorical painting Sacred and Profane Love, also called Amor Sacro e Amor Profano, shows two female figures as different aspects of Venus: a clothed bride and a nude Venus beside a sarcophagus, with Cupid playing in water. The landscape includes rabbits, a castle, and a hunting scene. The title is a later moralizing interpretation of a work associated with Niccolò Aurelio’s marriage to Laura Bagarotto and was commissioned in honor of that marriage.

  • the Pesaro Madonna — The Pesaro Madonna is a Titian altarpiece for the Frari Basilica that places the Pesaro family before the Virgin and Child on a diagonal staircase. Clues include the red papal banner, the captured Turk, the kneeling donor figures, and the elaborate background procession of riders and animals.

  • The Venus of Urbino — Titian’s 1538 Venus of Urbino shows a reclining nude woman in a domestic interior, with a lapdog, servants or attendants in the background, tapestries, and a chest. Commissioned by Guidobaldo della Rovere, it became one of the most famous Renaissance depictions of the female nude and a canonical Uffizi image of Venus reclining indoors. The painting is often discussed for its frank gaze, inspired Manet’s Olympia, and was famously criticized by Mark Twain for its eroticism.

• Correggio (Antonio Allegri) — Italian (Parma); High Renaissance; Assumption of the Virgin (dome fresco, Parma Cathedral, 1526–1530); Jupiter and Io (c. 1532); Holy Night (c. 1528–1530); soft sfumato and illusionistic ceiling painting prefigured the Baroque. Other works include The Vision of St. John on Patmos, Leda and the Swan, and The Abduction of Ganymede.

  • Jupiter and Io — Jupiter and Io is Correggio’s painting of the rape of Io, the Argive princess transformed into a heifer after being seduced by Jupiter. The work shows Io draped in a landscape while Jupiter appears as a dark, cloudlike figure embracing her from above.

  • The Loves of Jupiter — The Loves of Jupiter is a series of mythological paintings by Correggio commissioned for Federico Gonzaga. The works depict Ovidian scenes such as Leda and the Swan and Ganymede Abducted by the Eagle.

• Giorgio Vasari — Italian (Aretine); Mannerism; Perseus and Andromeda (1570–1572); author of Lives of the Artists (1550/1568), the foundational text of art history; architect of the Uffizi. Florentine painter, architect, and art historian best known for Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. He designed the Uffizi and the Vasari Corridor and became a central source for Renaissance anecdotes about Giotto and Brunelleschi.

• Giorgio Giorgione — Italian (Venetian); High Renaissance; The Tempest (c. 1508); Sleeping Venus (completed by Titian); key figure in the Venetian painterly tradition. Other works include the Castelfranco Altarpiece, Allendale Nativity, and The Three Philosophers, whose attribution has been debated.

  • Castelfranco Madonna — The Castelfranco Madonna is Giorgione’s sacra conversazione altarpiece named for his hometown. It shows the Virgin and Child with saints usually identified as Francis and Nicasius, though one figure is sometimes read as Liberalis of Treviso.

  • Sleeping Venus — Sleeping Venus, also called the Dresden Venus, is a reclining nude associated with Giorgione and later completed by Titian’s workshop. It became famous for its pastoral setting and the figure of Venus lying asleep with her arm behind her head.

  • The Three Philosophers — Giorgione’s The Three Philosophers shows three thinkers in a wooded landscape, including a turbaned man, an old bearded man, and a seated youth with compass and slate. The painting’s background cave, astronomical parchment, and possible magi or ages-of-man symbolism are recurring clues.

• Andrea Mantegna — Italian; Early Renaissance; Dead Christ (c. 1480, foreshortened perspective); Camera degli Sposi ceiling (1465–1474, Mantua); strong influence of classical antiquity. He worked for the Gonzaga family at Mantua and is also known for the Triumphs of Caesar and the San Zeno Altarpiece.

  • San Zeno Altarpiece — Mantegna’s San Zeno Altarpiece is a triptych named for Verona’s patron saint and centered on a Madonna enthroned beneath an elaborate architectural setting. Its panels include saints such as John the Baptist, John the Evangelist, Peter, and Paul, and it is famous for its fruit garlands and suspended ostrich egg.

  • The Triumphs of Caesar — The Triumphs of Caesar is Andrea Mantegna’s nine-canvas series celebrating a Roman triumph. The paintings include captives, standard-bearers, cup bearers, and captured treasures, and the whole cycle is now at Hampton Court Palace.

  • Camera degli Sposi — The Camera degli Sposi, also called the Camera Picta, is Andrea Mantegna’s famous fresco room in the Palazzo Ducale at Mantua. It is best known for its illusionistic ceiling oculus, painted in di sotto in su, with putti looking down on the viewer.

• Gentile da Fabriano — Gentile da Fabriano was an International Gothic painter from Fabriano best known for the ornate Adoration of the Magi commissioned by Palla Strozzi. His works use rich gold leaf, pseudo-Kufic detail, and lavish processions that make him a key early fifteenth-century painter.
  • Gentile — Gentile is an Italian Renaissance painter best known for his strong use of light and shadow. One of his major works is The Rediscovery of the Relic of the Cross.

• Jacopo Bellini — Jacopo Bellini was a Venetian painter and the patriarch of the Bellini family. He is remembered for his sketchbooks and for training Andrea Mantegna in Padua, with only a few paintings securely attributed to him.

• Paolo Uccello — Paolo Uccello, born Paolo di Dono, was a Florentine Renaissance painter famous for his studies of perspective, foreshortening, and geometric composition. His nickname means “bird.” He is especially known for The Battle of San Romano, along with The Hunt in the Forest, the Funerary Monument to Sir John Hawkwood, and The Profanation of the Host.

  • Battle of San Romano — The Battle of San Romano is Paolo Uccello’s famous three-panel cycle showing a Florentine victory over Siena. The series is especially known for its rigid perspective and toy-soldier look, and the panels are now split among the Uffizi, the Louvre, and the National Gallery.

  • Funerary Monument to Sir John Hawkwood — Paolo Uccello was the Florentine painter obsessed with perspective, vanishing points, and dramatic military scenes such as The Battle of San Romano. He also painted the Funerary Monument to Sir John Hawkwood and The Hunt in the Forest, and his nickname came from his love of birds.

  • The Battle of San Romano — Paolo Uccello’s three-panel painting cycle depicts the 1432 clash between Florence and Siena, celebrating Florence’s victory. The works are noted for their dramatic perspective, bright heraldic details, crowded cavalry, bright armored horses, broken lances, fallen knights and armor, and almost toy-like soldiers; scenes center on Niccolo da Tolentino and Michelotto da Cotignola. The panels are now divided among London, Paris, and Florence.

  • The Hunt in the Forest — The Hunt in the Forest is Paolo Uccello’s late hunting scene in which men and dogs chase deer through a regimented, wooded landscape toward a central vanishing point. Its repeated cues include the Ashmolean Museum, crescent motifs, and the influence it may have had on Botticelli’s Nastagio degli Onesti panels.

• Piero della Francesca — Piero della Francesca was the Early Renaissance painter and mathematician associated with geometric composition, perspective, and works like The Flagellation of Christ and The Resurrection. Quizbowl clues often mention his court portraits of Federico da Montefeltro, the Legend of the True Cross cycle, and his treatise On the Perspective of Painting.

  • The Flagellation of Christ — The Flagellation of Christ is Piero della Francesca’s enigmatic Passion scene with the whipping in an open architectural space at left and several figures conversing in the foreground. The painting has long drawn political and iconographic interpretations involving John VIII Palaiologos, Oddantonio da Montefeltro, and other possible identities.

  • The Resurrection — The Resurrection is Piero della Francesca’s fresco of Christ emerging from the tomb with a bannered cross. It became famous through Aldous Huxley’s praise and is known for its striking use of perspective and paired landscapes.

• Fra Filippo Lippi — Fra Filippo Lippi was a Florentine Renaissance Carmelite friar, priest, and painter known for graceful Madonnas and works on the Life of the Virgin. Trained by Masaccio, he was later freed from monastic vows so he could marry Lucrezia Buti; their son Filippino Lippi also became a painter. He taught Botticelli and painted the Coronation of the Virgin, Adoration in the Forest, the Barbadori Altarpiece, Madonna Enthroned, the Tarquinia Madonna, The Relaxation of the Carmelite Rule, and the Annunciation with Two Kneeling Donors, as well as major fresco cycles at Prato and in Spoleto Cathedral. His art helped bridge early Renaissance style with more monumental composition.

• Benozzo Gozzoli — Benozzo Gozzoli was a Quattrocento painter best known for the fresco cycle of the Procession of the Magi in Florence’s Medici-Riccardi Palace. His ornate Medici portraits and other Florentine works, including scenes such as the Journey of the Magi, make him a frequent answer in clues about Medici patronage.

• Bacchus in the Landscape — Bacchus in the Landscape is a Louvre painting depicting John the Baptist in a landscape. The work has uncertain attribution and has been associated with Cesare da Sesto, Bernazzano, and Francesco Melzi.

• St. Jerome in the Wilderness — St. Jerome in the Wilderness is a Renaissance depiction of Jerome in penitence with his lion companion. The subject appears in a famous unfinished work by Leonardo da Vinci and in later paintings that show him with a book or in the Syrian Desert.

• Michelangelo

  • Buonarroti — Buonarroti is the surname associated with Michelangelo, the Renaissance artist often asked for by his full name. The same family name also appears in references to other artistic commissions tied to the Buonarroti family.

  • Creation of Adam — Michelangelo’s famous fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It shows God reaching toward Adam’s outstretched finger, with the near-touch of their hands as the central image. It is one of the best-known scenes from the ceiling and has been widely parodied in popular culture.

  • David — Michelangelo’s monumental 14-foot marble sculpture of the biblical youth David, shown nude in contrapposto with a sling over his shoulder and a stone in his hand. Carved between 1501 and 1504, it became a symbol of Florentine civic pride and once stood in front of the Palazzo Vecchio before being moved to the Galleria dell’Accademia.

    • Donatello’s David — Donatello’s David is the Renaissance bronze sculpture of the biblical hero David standing over Goliath’s head. Associated with the Medici in Florence, it is noted as the first freestanding bronze nude since antiquity, and for its contrapposto pose, youthful and feminine appearance, small scale, confident stance, and the elaborate hat and boots worn by the figure.

    • Michelangelo’s David — Michelangelo’s David is the marble statue of the biblical hero before his battle with Goliath. Now in Florence’s Galleria dell’Accademia, it was originally intended for the Piazza della Signoria and became famous for its contrapposto and oversized hands and head.

  • Dying Slave — Michelangelo’s Dying Slave is one of the unfinished sculptures made for the tomb of Pope Julius II. The figure is a nearly nude man with one hand on his head, and the work is paired with the related Rebellious Slave in the Louvre.

  • Florentine Pieta — The Florentine Pietà is a sculptural group associated with Michelangelo and intended for his tomb. It is noted for a bearded self-portrait of Michelangelo as an aged figure supporting the dead body of Christ.

  • God Dividing the Waters — God Dividing the Waters is a Sistine Chapel ceiling painting from Michelangelo’s Creation series. It shows the deity separating the waters and uses illusionistic painting to make the ceiling appear open.

  • Horned Moses — The Horned Moses is Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses for the tomb of Pope Julius II. Its horns come from a Vulgate mistranslation of the Hebrew text that actually referred to rays of light.

  • Pietà — A Pietà is a depiction of the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus. The best-known example is Michelangelo’s signed marble sculpture in St. Peter’s Basilica. The theme also appears in painting as a type of Lamentation or Vesperbild, and in Spanish sculpture and in El Greco’s art.

    • Michelangelo’s Pieta — Michelangelo’s Pieta is the marble sculpture of the Virgin Mary cradling the dead Christ, and it is one of his earliest major works. It is famous for its idealized proportions and for the artist’s decision to sign his name across Mary’s sash after hearing the work misattributed.

    • the Pietà — Michelangelo’s marble sculpture in St. Peter’s Basilica depicts the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus after the Crucifixion. It is his only signed work and became especially famous after being attacked with a hammer by Laszlo Toth in 1972; it was later restored and placed behind protective glass.

  • Rondanini Pietà — The Rondanini Pietà is Michelangelo’s late sculpture of the Pietà, depicting Mary and Jesus in an elongated, unfinished form. It is often discussed as a late, highly expressive work that anticipates Mannerist tendencies.

  • Sistine Chapel ceiling — Michelangelo’s monumental fresco cycle covering the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. It depicts scenes from Genesis, including The Creation of Adam, The Separation of Light from Darkness, The Great Flood/The Deluge, and the Drunkenness of Noah, and also features prophets, sibyls, the Ignudi, the Libyan Sibyl, and ancestral figures arranged around the chapel ceiling.

    • God the Father — God the Father appears prominently in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, including in The Creation of Adam and Separation of Light from Darkness. The figure is often shown as a muscular, bearded creator surrounded by ignudi and dramatic biblical scenes.

    • ignudi — Ignudi are the nude male figures painted on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, where they frame the central biblical scenes. They are often shown in varied poses with garlands or ribbons and are named for their nakedness.

  • The Doni Tondo — The Doni Tondo is Michelangelo’s round-panel painting of the Holy Family, also known as The Holy Family with the infant St. John the Baptist. It is notable for the muscular, twisting pose of the Virgin and for the nude figures in the background.

  • The Dying Slave / The Rebellious Slave — The Dying Slave and the Rebellious Slave are Michelangelo sculptures originally intended for Julius II’s tomb. Both unfinished figures now stand in the Louvre.

  • Tomb of Julius II — Michelangelo’s unfinished papal tomb for Pope Julius II, located in San Pietro in Vincoli. The project was drastically reduced from its original grand design and is associated with the sculptures of Moses, Rachel, Leah, the Genius of Victory, the Dying Slave, and the Struggling Slave.

  • tomb of Pope Julius II — The tomb of Pope Julius II is Michelangelo’s unfinished funerary monument, famous for the statue of Moses and several slave figures. It was originally planned on a much larger scale, but the final version was drastically reduced and completed only after Julius’s death.

• Marcantonio Raimondi — Marcantonio Raimondi was a Renaissance engraver best known for reproductive prints after Raphael. His engravings, including a Judgment of Paris, helped influence later artists such as Manet.

• Perugino — Italian Renaissance painter from Umbria, best known for The Delivery of the Keys (Christ Giving the Keys to Saint Peter) in the Sistine Chapel. He was Raphael’s teacher and is also associated with a work once mistaken for a self-portrait, later identified as Francesco delle Opere.

• Sofonisba Anguissola — Sofonisba Anguissola was a Renaissance painter and portraitist from Cremona who became court painter to Philip II of Spain. Her best-known works include self-portraits, The Chess Game, a family portrait, and the painting in which Bernardino Campi appears to paint her portrait. Her works also influenced later artists such as Anthony van Dyck and helped inspire Caravaggio’s Boy Bitten by a Lizard.

• Lorenzo Lotto — Lorenzo Lotto was a Venetian Renaissance painter best known for his psychologically strange portraits and devotional works. He painted works such as Portrait of Andrea Odoni, Recanati Annunciation, and Portrait of a Young Man, and ended his life at Loreto.

• Sebastiano del Piombo — Sebastiano del Piombo was a Venetian Renaissance painter known for works such as The Violinist and The Raising of Lazarus. He also painted versions of the Flagellation and was later nicknamed for his Vatican post as Keeper of the Seals.

• The Assumption of the Virgin — The Assumption of the Virgin is Titian’s great Frari altarpiece showing Mary rising into heaven in a spiraling pose among clouds and cherubim. The title scene also appears in another famous version by El Greco, where the composition is split between the apostles below and angels above.

• The Flaying of Marsyas — The Flaying of Marsyas is the painting of Apollo punishing the satyr Marsyas after their musical contest. Titian made a famous version, and both versions emphasize the grisly punishment and the figure hanging upside down from a tree.

• Pinturicchio — Pinturicchio was a Renaissance painter known for frescoes in the Borgia Apartments, the Piccolomini Library, and other papal commissions. A pupil of Perugino, he is especially associated with ornate narrative decoration in Rome and Siena.

• Vittore Carpaccio — Vittore Carpaccio was a Venetian Renaissance painter known for narrative cycles such as the Legend of Saint Ursula. His works also include Saint George and the Dragon and paintings like The Lion of St. Mark and Saint Augustine in His Study.

• Bellini — The Bellini were a Venetian painting family headed by Jacopo, with the brothers Gentile and Giovanni as the best-known members. Their works include Gentile’s portraiture and processional scenes, and Giovanni’s altarpieces such as the San Giobbe Altarpiece and Saint Francis in Ecstasy.

• Carlo Crivelli — Carlo Crivelli was an Italian Renaissance painter known for highly decorative altarpieces, gilt backgrounds, jewel-like surfaces, and odd still-life details such as cucumbers and flies. His works include The Annunciation with St. Emidius and paintings of saints like Thomas Aquinas.

• Giovanni Bellini — Giovanni Bellini was a Venetian Renaissance painter known for altarpieces such as the Frari Triptych, San Giobbe Altarpiece, and San Zaccaria Altarpiece. He also painted mythological scenes like The Feast of the Gods and works that showcase the influence of Antonello da Messina’s oil technique. His art includes St. Francis in Ecstasy and devotional images with glowing gold backgrounds and carefully arranged saints. Quizbowl clues often note that his brother Gentile worked in Constantinople and that Titian finished or modified some of his paintings.

  • St. Francis in Ecstasy — St. Francis in Ecstasy is a Bellini painting showing Francis in a rocky landscape with his eyes raised heavenward. The work includes emblematic details such as a skull, a Bible or reading table, and Francis’s stigmata.

  • The Feast of the Gods — The Feast of the Gods is Giovanni Bellini’s mythological painting from Alfonso d’Este’s alabaster chamber. It shows the gods at a bacchanal from Ovid’s Fasti, including Priapus, Lotis, Silenus, and a donkey startling the scene.

• Italian Renaissance painting
  • Ferrarese School — The Ferrarese School was a northern Italian Renaissance painting tradition centered in Ferrara and shaped by Venetian and Roman influences in the sixteenth century. Among its leading painters were Ercole de’ Roberti and Dosso Dossi, along with Battista del Dosso.

• Piero di Cosimo — Piero di Cosimo was a Florentine Renaissance painter known for eccentric behavior and for mythological scenes with strange landscapes. His works include The Forest Fire, The Death of Procris, Perseus Freeing Andromeda, and portraits linked to Simonetta Vespucci.

• Pisanello — Pisanello was an early Renaissance Italian painter and medalist, known for highly realistic animal studies in works such as The Vision of Saint Eustace. He also made portrait medals and court portraits, including depictions of John VIII Palaiologos and members of the Este family.

• Luca Signorelli — Luca Signorelli was a Renaissance painter from Cortona best known for the Orvieto Cathedral frescoes on the Last Judgment and the preaching of the Antichrist. His works are notable for their muscular nudes, apocalyptic scenes, and influence on later artists.
  • The Damned Cast into Hell — The Damned Cast into Hell is a 1499 fresco by Luca Signorelli in the Orvieto Cathedral. It depicts armored angels above naked souls being tortured by demons under an archway.

• Andrea del Castagno — Andrea del Castagno was a 15th-century Florentine painter known for dramatic foreshortening and for his Last Supper at Sant’Apollonia. His other notable works include portraits and frescoes such as the equestrian image of Niccolò da Tolentino, and Vasari notoriously accused him of murdering Domenico Veneziano.

• Antonello da Messina — Antonello da Messina was a Sicilian Renaissance painter known for works such as St. Jerome in His Study and the blue-veiled Virgin Annunciate. His art shows strong Flemish influence, especially in careful oil technique and precise detail.

• Antonio del Pollaiolo — Antonio del Pollaiolo was an Italian Renaissance artist best known for the engraving Battle of the Nudes. His work also includes bronze mythological figures such as Hercules and Antaeus, and clues may mention his association with his brother Piero.

• Antonio Pollaiuolo — Italian Renaissance artist and sculptor from Florence, associated with dynamic, muscular figures and violent mythological scenes. His works include the engraving Battle of the Nudes, Hercules and Antaeus, and Judith with the Head of Holofernes. He also made funerary monuments for popes Sixtus IV and Innocent VIII.
  • Hercules and Antaeus — Hercules and Antaeus is an Antonio Pollaiuolo bronze sculpture depicting the struggle between the hero and his adversary. The work shows Hercules lifting Antaeus from the earth to defeat him.

Mannerist and Late Renaissance

• Pontormo (Jacopo da Pontormo) — Italian (Florentine); Mannerism; Deposition from the Cross (c. 1525–1528, Capponi Chapel, Santa Felicita, Florence); bizarre color, serpentine figures, and spatial ambiguity defining early Mannerism. Also known as Jacopo Carucci, he trained under Andrea del Sarto and painted Joseph in Egypt, Lady with a Lapdog, and Vertumnus and Pomona.
  • Vertumnus and Pomona — Vertumnus and Pomona is the lunette painting at Poggio a Caiano showing the two Roman figures as rustic peasants. The scene comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and is associated with Pontormo’s work at the Medici villa.

• Rosso Fiorentino (Giovanni Battista di Jacopo) — Italian (Florentine); Mannerism; Deposition (1521, Pinacoteca di Volterra); Dead Christ with Angels (c. 1524–1527); sharp angularity and emotional intensity; later worked at Fontainebleau. He worked for Francis I at Fontainebleau; Moses Defending the Daughters of Jethro is another familiar work.

• El Greco (Doménikos Theotokópoulos) — Greek-born Spanish; Mannerism; The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586–1588, Santo Tomé, Toledo); View of Toledo (c. 1596–1600); The Disrobing of Christ (El Espolio, 1577–1579); elongated figures, intense color, mystical spirituality; trained in Venice under Titian before settling in Toledo; The Burial of the Count of Orgaz — painted for the church of Santo Tomé — depicts the miraculous descent of Sts. Augustine and Stephen to bury the pious count, with a celestial realm above and a portrait gallery of Toledo’s elite below. Other works include The Opening of the Fifth Seal, Christ Healing the Blind, The Adoration of the Magi, and the portrait of Fray Hortensio Félix de Paravicino.

  • Burial of Count Orgaz — El Greco’s Burial of Count Orgaz shows the title nobleman being lowered into the church of Santo Tomé in Toledo by Saints Stephen and Augustine. The painting strongly separates the earthly and heavenly realms, with Christ, Mary, and John above.

  • A View of Toledo — A View of Toledo is El Greco’s stormy cityscape of his adopted Spanish home, painted in a restricted palette of greens and grays. It is one of his most famous landscapes, with Toledo’s buildings and cathedral arranged in a dramatic, unearthly way.

  • Christ Driving the Money-changers from the Temple — Christ Driving the Money-changers from the Temple is El Greco’s dramatic treatment of the Gospel episode in which Jesus drives traders from the Temple. The painting is known for its crowded Roman-era composition, including self-portrait-like figures and portraits of Renaissance artists along the bottom edge.

  • Modena Triptych — The Modena Triptych is a 1568 altarpiece by El Greco from his Cretan period. Its front panels include scenes such as the Adoration of the Shepherds, the Baptism of Jesus, and Christ crowning a knight, while the reverse shows Mount Sinai.

  • Opening of the Fifth Seal — An El Greco painting depicting the Revelation scene of the opening of the Fifth Seal, with Saint John in blue gesturing upward amid a cluster of distorted nude figures or souls receiving white robes. Its dramatic arrangement of bodies and drapery is often cited as an influence on Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

  • The Burial of Count Orgaz — El Greco’s famous painting of the miraculous burial of the Spanish nobleman Don Gonzalo Ruíz, made for the church of Santo Tomé in Toledo. The composition is split between an earthly funeral scene below and a celestial vision above, with Saints Stephen and Augustine lowering the count’s body while Christ, the Virgin, and John the Baptist appear in a Deësis. It also includes the artist’s self-portrait and his son Jorge Manuel pointing toward the corpse.

  • The Burial of the Count of Orgaz
    • Count of Orgaz — The Count of Orgaz is the Spanish nobleman memorialized in El Greco’s famous painting The Burial of the Count of Orgaz. The work shows Saints Stephen and Augustine assisting at his burial.

  • The Disrobing of Christ — The Disrobing of Christ, also called El Expolio, is El Greco’s painting of Jesus being stripped of his robe before the Crucifixion. Its crowded scene includes armed soldiers, the Three Marys, and the dispute over Christ’s clothing.

  • View of Toledo — El Greco’s dramatic landscape of his adopted Spanish city, showing Toledo beneath stormy skies. It is his only surviving landscape and is notable as an early Spanish landscape; the city’s cathedral and the Alcázar appear in a shifting, tense, dark atmosphere.
    • The View of Toledo — El Greco’s 1597 View of Toledo depicts his adopted home city with a stormy sky, a dramatic skyline, and a highly altered landscape. The Tagus River and the Alcántara bridge appear in the foreground, while the cathedral and Alcázar dominate the distance.
• Parmigianino — Italian; Mannerism; Madonna with the Long Neck (c. 1534–1540); elongated, artificial elegance. He was born Francesco Mazzola and is also associated with works such as Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and The Vision of Saint Jerome.

  • Madonna of the Long Neck — Parmigianino’s Mannerist painting and altarpiece shows the Virgin Mary with an elongated neck and other exaggerated proportions, holding an oversized infant Christ. The composition is crowded with angels, includes a tiny Saint Jerome with a scroll, and places a distant prophet and a striking column in the background; the work is also noted for its distorted, elegant figure style and partly unfinished-looking setting.

  • Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
    • a convex mirror — A convex mirror is the kind of mirror Parmigianino used for his distorted self-portrait. That portrait later inspired John Ashbery’s poem Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.

  • The Vision of Saint Jerome — The Vision of Saint Jerome is Parmigianino’s 1527 painting of Saint Jerome sleeping as Saint John the Baptist points toward the Madonna and Child. It is housed in London’s National Gallery.

  • The Vision of St. Jerome — The Vision of St. Jerome is a Parmigianino painting centered on the vision of the infant Christ with St. John the Baptist and St. Jerome. It is known for its elongated figures and for the title saint reclining in the foreground.
• Agnolo Bronzino — Italian; Mannerism; Allegory with Venus and Cupid (c. 1545); Portrait of Eleonora of Toledo (c. 1545); cool, polished court portraits. Born Agnolo di Cosimo, he was a Florentine Mannerist painter and court artist for the Medici, also known for dense allegories and devotional works.

  • Angelo Bronzino — Bronzino, or Agnolo di Cosimo, was a Mannerist painter who studied under and was later adopted by Pontormo. He is especially known for Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time.

  • Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time — Agnolo Bronzino’s Mannerist painting shows Venus and Cupid embracing while an old man with an hourglass draws back a curtain at the top. Other striking figures include a screaming woman, a childlike figure offering honeycomb, a thorn-stepping boy scattering roses, and two masks on the floor. Painted for Cosimo de’ Medici and sent to Francis I, it is also called Allegory of Love. The work is also known as An Allegory of Venus and Cupid and A Triumph of Venus.

• Paolo Veronese — Italian (Venetian); Late Renaissance; Wedding at Cana (1563); Feast in the House of Levi (1573); sumptuous color and theatrical scenes. He was also called Paolo Caliari and specialized in grand biblical banquets and theatrical architectural settings; The Feast in the House of Levi was originally a Last Supper scene before scrutiny by the Venetian Inquisition led him to change the title.

  • Feast in the House of Levi — Paolo Veronese’s Feast in the House of Levi is the renamed version of his disputed Last Supper painting. The Inquisition objected to its extravagant secular figures, so Veronese retitled it after a biblical feast scene.

  • Paolo Veronese or Paolo Cagliari — Paolo Veronese was a Venetian Renaissance painter also known as Paolo Cagliari. He is associated with grand ceiling cycles and large historical scenes such as The Family of Darius Before Alexander and The Triumph of Venice.

  • The Feast in the House of Levi — Paolo Veronese’s enormous banquet painting, originally intended as a Last Supper and later retitled after church officials objected to its dogs, dwarves, soldiers, servants, and other lively figures. The crowded scene places Christ in a grand architectural setting with giant arches, making the biblical meal resemble a Venetian feast. It now hangs in the Galleria dell’Accademia.

  • The Wedding at Cana — Paolo Veronese’s enormous Renaissance painting depicts the biblical feast where Jesus turns water into wine. It is a huge, crowded banquet scene filled with musicians, nobles, decorative Venetian architecture, and contemporary figures amid the Gospel story. The work is now associated with the Louvre, where it hangs opposite the Mona Lisa, and it is noted for its damaged restoration history, the presence of Veronese himself, and the figure of a butchered lamb.

• Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti) — Italian (Venetian); Mannerism; The Last Supper (1592–1594, San Giorgio Maggiore); Scuola Grande di San Rocco cycle; dynamic, darkly lit compositions. Known as Il Furioso, he also painted The Miracle of the Slave, The Origin of the Milky Way, Finding of the Body of St. Mark, and Paradiso in the Doge’s Palace.

  • Miracle of the Slave — Miracle of the Slave is a Tintoretto painting from 1548 showing Saint Mark intervening to save a condemned Christian captive. The dramatic scene is crowded with figures around a fallen slave and a looming executioner, giving the work its title.

  • The Last Supper

    • The Last Supper by Tintoretto — The Last Supper by Tintoretto is a dramatic late-Renaissance painting of the Eucharistic scene. Its composition includes angels, demons, and passages suggesting Heaven and Hell above the table.

• Il Sodoma — Il Sodoma was the Sienese painter Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, known for works such as The Marriage of Alexander and Roxane and Alexander in the Tent of Darius. Vasari famously maligned him, especially for his reputation for surrounding himself with young male companions.

• Luis de Morales — Luis de Morales was a Spanish Mannerist painter known for religious panels such as Ecce Homo, Pieta, and The Virgin and Child. He was nicknamed El Divino for the devotional intensity of his work.

• Giulio Romano — Giulio Romano was Raphael’s most famous pupil and later the court artist of Mantua’s Gonzaga family. He is best known for the Palazzo del Te, including the Chamber of the Giants and other Mannerist decorations.

Related Works, People, and Context

• Lavinia Fontana — Lavinia Fontana was a Bolognese Renaissance painter known for portraits, altarpieces, and religious and mythological scenes. She worked for Pope Paul V’s court and is often described as an early professional woman artist in Western art.

Northern Renaissance

• Lucas van Leyden — Dutch; Northern Renaissance; Ecce Homo (1510, engraving); The Last Judgment (triptych, 1526–1527); prolific printmaker and painter; contemporary and peer of Dürer.

• Albrecht Altdorfer — German; Northern Renaissance; Battle of Alexander at Issus (1529); Saint George and the Dragon (1510); pioneer of landscape as an independent subject; associated with the Danube School. Albrecht Altdorfer was a Danube School painter and engraver who helped pioneer landscape as an independent subject. He is best known for The Battle of Alexander at Issus and for wooded scenes such as Saint George and the Dragon and Landscape with a Footbridge.

  • The Battle of Alexander at Issus — The Battle of Alexander at Issus is Albrecht Altdorfer’s dramatic painting of Alexander the Great’s victory over Darius III. Its crowded landscape mixes historical battle imagery with a sweeping cosmic setting and a banner identifying the leaders.

  • The Battle of Issus — The Battle of Issus is Albrecht Altdorfer’s huge world-landscape painting of Alexander the Great’s victory over Darius III. Its anachronistic armies, enormous sky banner, and symbolic sun and moon make it one of the best-known works of the Danube School.

• Rogier van der Weyden — Flemish; Early Netherlandish; Descent from the Cross (c. 1435); Last Judgment Altarpiece (c. 1445–1450); psychological intensity and emotional expressiveness. He was also known as Roger van der Weyden and Roger de la Pasture. His mature works include The Descent from the Cross, the Miraflores Altarpiece, and the Granada Altarpiece, and his devotional paintings often use compressed space, luminous color, and intensely expressive figures such as the grieving Mary and St. John; the Prado altarpiece was commissioned by the archers’ guild.

  • Beaune Altarpiece — The Beaune Altarpiece is Rogier van der Weyden’s large Last Judgment altarpiece made for the hospice at Beaune. It is a major Netherlandish painting whose central panel shows Christ above a weighing of souls by St. Michael.

  • Miraflores Altarpiece — The Miraflores Altarpiece is a multi-paneled van der Weyden work associated with a Spanish donation and scenes from the life of Christ. Its notable Berlin version has been argued to be the original, and it shares compositional features with other devotional altarpieces by the same painter.

  • The Braque Triptych — The Braque Triptych is a small devotional altarpiece by Rogier van der Weyden, commissioned by the Braque family of Tournai. Its center shows Christ as Salvator Mundi between John the Evangelist and the Virgin, with dense Latin inscriptions and speech ribbons across the panels.

• Hans Memling — Flemish; Early Netherlandish; Triptych of Jan Crabbe (c. 1470); Shrine of Saint Ursula (1489); portrait refinement. A Bruges-based painter known for serene portraits and elaborate altarpieces, including the Last Judgment; his works often feature delicate devotional scenes, elaborate landscapes, and tightly structured triptychs.

• Hugo van der Goes — Flemish; Early Netherlandish; Portinari Altarpiece (c. 1475–1478); large-scale altarpiece influencing Italian painters. He also painted the Monforte Altarpiece and The Death of the Virgin, and later became associated with a mental breakdown dramatized by Emil Wauters.
  • Portinari Altarpiece — A devotional triptych by Hugo van der Goes commissioned by Tommaso Portinari for the hospital church of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence, associated with the Portinari family chapel. Its central Nativity panel shows the infant Christ on the ground with radiant light; the side panels include donor portraits, and the exterior has Annunciation scenes in grisaille. The nativity scene is noted for detailed still-life symbols including lilies, irises, carnations, and a lamb.
    • Mary and Gabriel — Mary and Gabriel are the figures shown in the Annunciation on the exterior of the Portinari Altarpiece. Mary is the Virgin of the Christian scene, while Gabriel is the archangel who announces the incarnation.
• Hieronymus Bosch — Dutch; Early Netherlandish; The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1490–1510, triptych); The Last Judgment; The Haywain Triptych; fantastical, moralistic imagery. He was a Dutch painter from North Brabant who died in 1516 and was also known as Jeroen van Aken, Jheronimus Bosch, or Jerome Bosch. Other works attributed to him include The Extraction of the Stone of Madness, Ship of Fools, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, St. John on Patmos, and The Conjurer.
  • Allegory of Gluttony and Lust
    • Allegory of Gluttony — Allegory of Gluttony and Lust is the Hieronymus Bosch panel associated with revelers, music, and drunken excess aboard a boat-like scene. It is often discussed alongside Ship of Fools and other moralizing images from Bosch’s larger triptych of vice and folly.

  • Death and the Miser — Death and the Miser is a grisly Bosch painting showing Death entering to confront a wealthy man in bed while demons crowd around him. It was once part of a larger triptych, and its imagery centers on the tension between worldly greed and impending mortality.

  • The Haywain Triptych — A triptych by Hieronymus Bosch that contrasts Eden, earthly folly, and hell across its panels. The central scene shows a gigantic hay wagon crowded with sinners and drawn toward hell, with Christ in heaven above the scene; Bosch’s fantastic demons, including a trumpet-playing creature, and the allusions to greed over the hay are standard details. The outside panels depict a wandering traveler or pilgrim on the path of life.

  • The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things — The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things is a Bosch moral triptych whose exterior shutters and interior roundels depict sins, death, and judgment. Bruegel also used this theme in a series that shows grotesque, crowded scenes of punishment and vice.

  • The Ship of Fools — Hieronymus Bosch’s satirical painting shows drunken revelers aboard a boat-like vessel, with grotesque details such as a monk and nun, a banner with a crescent, and passengers trying to eat food in absurd ways. It survives as a fragment of a larger moralizing triptych and is often linked to Sebastian Brant’s satire; the broader work also included Allegory of Gluttony.

  • van Aeken — Van Aeken was the surname of Hieronymus Bosch. The name appears in questions asking for Bosch’s family name rather than his better-known artistic pseudonym.

  • The Garden of Earthly Delights — Hieronymus Bosch, c. 1490–1510 (Prado, Madrid); triptych whose left panel shows Eden, center panel a fantastical landscape of naked figures and hybrid creatures, right panel a dark hell; the exterior panels show the earth on day three of creation in grisaille. The work is an oil-on-panel triptych in the Prado, Madrid. Its interior teems with bizarre animals, fantastical architecture, and nude figures, and the exterior panels are painted in grisaille.
• Albrecht Dürer — German; Northern Renaissance; Self-Portrait (1500); Melencolia I (1514, engraving); Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513, engraving); Four Apostles (1526); introduced Italian Renaissance ideals to Germany; master printmaker. He signed many works with the initials A.D. Other notable works include The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Adam and Eve, Saint Jerome in His Study, the Rhinoceros, Young Hare, and The Great Piece of Turf; he also made self-portraits from 1498 and 1500.

  • Knight, Death and the Devil — Knight, Death and the Devil is Albrecht Dürer’s 1513 engraving of an armored rider flanked by two allegorical figures. The image is one of Dürer’s master engravings and features a horse, a skull, an hourglass, a dog, and a lizard.

  • Melencolia I — Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 engraving depicts a winged, brooding figure surrounded by tools and symbols of the intellect, including a magic square, a truncated rhombohedron or polyhedron, an hourglass, and alchemical devices. It is commonly read as an allegory of melancholy, creative despair, or intellectual frustration, and is one of Dürer’s most famous master prints. Distinctive details include the bat holding the title banner, the putto drawing nearby, and the coastal town in the background.
    • Melencolia I (“one”) — Melencolia I is Albrecht Dürer’s famous 1514 engraving of a brooding winged figure surrounded by tools, a magic square, and geometric objects. It is one of the best-known Renaissance images of melancholy and artistic frustration.
  • Rhinoceros
    • Dürer’s Rhinoceros — Albrecht Dürer’s famous 1515 woodcut of a rhinoceros he never actually saw. It was based on reports of a rhinoceros intended for Pope Leo X and became an influential model copied in later art and emblems. The image is also noted for anatomical inaccuracies, including armor-like plates and other fanciful details.

  • The Four Apostles — Dürer’s The Four Apostles is a late two-panel painting showing St. John and St. Paul with open and closed books. The work also appears with symbols such as a comet, ladder, bell, hourglass, and scales, and it is often read as a political and religious statement.

  • The Four Horsemen — The Four Horsemen is an engraving by Albrecht Dürer that depicts the apocalyptic riders symbolizing divine judgment. Typical clues identify the bow, sword, scales, and trident, along with the terrified figures below. The same name is also used for a pro wrestling clique and for the nickname given to Notre Dame’s famous 1924 backfield of Crowley, Layden, Miller, and Stuhldreher.

• Lucas Cranach the Elder — German; Northern Renaissance; Venus and Cupid (1509); portraits of Martin Luther; court painter associated with the Reformation. He was a German Renaissance painter and printmaker based in Saxony. He is also known for portraits of Frederick the Wise and for developing chiaroscuro woodcuts, and his works include The Judgment of Paris and The Stag Hunt of the Elector Frederick the Wise.

• Hans Holbein the Younger — German; Northern Renaissance; The Ambassadors (1533, with anamorphic skull); portraits of Henry VIII, Erasmus, Thomas More; supreme draughtsmanship. He also painted portraits of Anne of Cleves and Catherine Howard, illustrated Erasmus and Martin Luther, and made the woodcut series Dance of Death. Other notable works include The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb and the Darmstadt Madonna.

  • The Ambassadors — Hans Holbein the Younger’s 1533 double portrait of Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve. It is famous for its symbolic still-life objects and scientific instruments, including globes, a lute, a book of music, and a broken lute string, and especially for the distorted anamorphic skull across the foreground.

  • The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb — The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb is Hans Holbein the Younger’s stark painting of Christ’s corpse laid out after the crucifixion. It famously shocked viewers for its unidealized realism and is discussed by Dostoevsky and Julia Kristeva as a disturbing meditation on faith and death.

• Pieter Bruegel the Elder — Flemish; Northern Renaissance; Hunters in the Snow (1565); The Peasant Wedding (c. 1567–1568); The Tower of Babel (c. 1563); The Blind Leading the Blind (1568); peasant life and moral allegory. Also known for crowded genre scenes and panoramic landscapes, with works including Children’s Games, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, and The Triumph of Death.

  • Labors of the Months — The Labors of the Months is a series of landscape paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder that depicts seasonal rural activities. Its surviving works include The Hunters in the Snow, The Harvesters, The Gloomy Day, and the other scenes of labor across the year.

  • Landscape with the Fall of Icarus — Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is the Bruegel painting in which the title figure is almost invisible, only his legs splashing in the sea while a plowman, shepherd, and fisherman ignore him. It is often cited for its quiet scene of everyday labor set against the myth of Icarus’ fatal flight.

  • Mad Meg — Mad Meg, also called Dull Gret, is the woman in Bruegel’s apocalyptic painting who marches into the mouth of Hell. The scene shows a chaotic pillaging of the underworld, with women battling demons as the title figure carries off household goods.

  • Peasant Wedding — A 1566 painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder depicting a crowded rural feast. The scene is set in a barn and is famous for its dense grouping of villagers, servants carrying food, observers packed into the doorway, the bride’s paper crown, and the men who use an unhinged door as a serving tray.

  • The Battle Between Carnival and Lent — The Battle Between Carnival and Lent is Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s crowded allegorical painting of the struggle between indulgence and austerity. It sets the rotund Carnival on a beer keg against a gaunt Lent figure outside a church, with both comic street life and pious ritual filling the scene.

  • The Fall of the Rebel Angels — Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Fall of the Rebel Angels shows the archangel Michael driving down grotesque, Bosch-like fallen angels. The scene crowds the canvas with bizarre hybrid creatures and other comic demons in a late medieval apocalyptic battle.

  • the fight between Carnival and Lent — The Fight between Carnival and Lent is Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s allegorical painting contrasting a riotous feast with the sober observance of Lent. Its crowded scene places a corpulent Carnival figure against a gaunt Lent figure armed with fish and a baker’s paddle.

  • The Peasant Wedding — The Peasant Wedding is one of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s best-known genre scenes, showing a rustic feast with food carried on a door and musicians at work. It belongs to his broader interest in peasant life and crowded seasonal celebrations.

  • The Peasant Wedding Feast — The Peasant Wedding Feast is a Bruegel the Elder painting of a rural wedding banquet filled with cooks, drinkers, and musicians. Clues include the unhinged door used as a serving tray, the child at lower left, and the festive Netherlandish peasant setting.

  • Triumph of Death — Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Triumph of Death is the bleak 1562 landscape painting now in the Prado, packed with armies of skeletons, smoke-darkened hills, and a cart of corpses rolling through a ruined world.

  • Hunters in the Snow — Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna); one of six surviving “Months” panels; hunters and dogs trudge through snow toward a village below; celebrated for its panoramic winter atmosphere and bird’s-eye perspective. It is also known as Hunters Returning Through the Snow. The hunters are shown returning with only a fox, and the background includes skaters and a frozen mill.

  • The Tower of Babel — Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1563 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna); depicts King Nimrod overseeing a colossal, unfinished circular tower modeled on the Colosseum; Bruegel painted at least two versions; an allegory of human pride. The subject became a famous allegory of human pride and is often discussed in relation to Bruegel’s various versions and later depictions.

  • The Triumph of Death — Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1562 (Prado, Madrid); panoramic scene of an army of skeletons overwhelming the living; teeming with detail including coffin-shaped shields, a hanged man, and collapsing towns; the most macabre of Bruegel’s major works. It shows a devastated landscape filled with dense incident, including carts, cards, a jester under a table, and a scythe-bearing figure driving people into death’s trap.

• Matthias Grünewald — German; Northern Renaissance; Isenheim Altarpiece (c. 1512–1516); intense suffering and visionary color, departing from Renaissance idealism. He worked in places including Mainz and Halle. His surviving works are rare, and his altarpieces include scenes such as the Crucifixion, the Annunciation, St. Erasmus and Maurice, and the Mocking of Christ. He later became the subject of Paul Hindemith’s opera Mathis der Maler.

  • Isenheim Altarpiece — Matthias Grünewald’s famous early-sixteenth-century German Renaissance triptych, made for a monastery that treated the sick. Its closed wings show a vivid, dramatic Crucifixion; when opened, the panels include the Annunciation, Angel Concert, Resurrection, and the Temptation of St. Anthony.

  • Mocking of Christ

    • Blindfold — A blindfold is the article placed over Christ’s eyes in Matthias Grünewald’s Mocking of Christ. That image helped inspire a similar figure in a triptych with a burnt red background and three amorphous furies.

• Rest on the Flight into Egypt — Rest on the Flight into Egypt is the devotional scene showing Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus resting during their journey. Quizbowl clues often point to Renaissance versions by artists such as Altdorfer and Patinir, or to a division of the composition by an angel or landscape detail.

• Jan van Eyck and Hubert van Eyck
  • Jan and Hubert van Eyck — Brothers of the early Flemish school associated with the Ghent Altarpiece, also known as the Adoration of the Lamb. The altarpiece’s attribution is shared or debated between them, and they were long credited with inventing the oil medium, though that claim is now doubted.
    • Ghent Altarpiece — The Ghent Altarpiece is the large polyptych by Jan and Hubert van Eyck commissioned for St. Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent and housed in Saint Bavo’s Cathedral. Its open panels include the Adoration of the Lamb, Adam and Eve, the heavenly court, donors in illusionistic or trompe l’oeil niches, and angels kneeling around a chalice beneath the sacrificial lamb; the closed panels show donor portraits and the Annunciation. It is also associated with the missing Just Judges panel.
      • Adoration of the Lamb — The Adoration of the Lamb is the bottom-center interior panel of Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece. Its imagery is based on Revelation and centers on the sacrificial Lamb, with saints converging around it.

• van Eyck — Van Eyck is the surname of the Netherlandish painters associated with the Ghent Altarpiece and the Arnolfini Portrait. Clues also point to Hubert and Jan van Eyck, along with related attributions such as the Master of the Shadows and the Hand G in the Turin-Milan Hours.

• Gerard David — Gerard David was a Flemish Renaissance painter known for calm compositions, rich color, and devotional panels such as the Virgin among Virgins and the Baptism of Christ. His works include the Judgment of Cambyses and an influential Head of Christ based on earlier Netherlandish models.

• Joos van Wassenhove — Joos van Wassenhove, also called Joos van Ghent, was a Netherlandish painter active in Urbino and Ghent. He painted the fire-damaged Crucifixion altarpiece and the Communion of the Apostles.

• Petrus Christus — Petrus Christus was a Flemish painter active in Bruges after Jan van Eyck, known for works such as A Goldsmith in His Shop and Portrait of a Carthusian. He helped bring linear perspective to Northern painting and often used tiny trompe l’oeil details like a fly.

• Hieronymus — Hieronymus is the first name of Hieronymus Cock, the printmaker and publisher who helped popularize the Master of the Small Landscapes and issued engravings after his brother Matthys. The name also points to Hieronymus Bosch, whose scenes of madness and moral satire include Extracting the Stone of Madness and the strange fish-filled engraving attributed to another artist.

• Joachim Patinir — Joachim Patinir was a Flemish painter associated with the development of the world landscape, especially scenes of vast craggy terrain rendered in cool aerial perspective. His works include landscapes for religious subjects such as the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, the Penitence of Saint Jerome, and depictions of Charon crossing the Styx.

• Hendrik Goltzius — Hendrik Goltzius was a Dutch Mannerist engraver and painter known for his technical virtuosity despite a deformed right hand. Clues often mention his engravings from an Italian trip, including depictions related to the Farnese Hercules.

• Jan Gossaert — Jan Gossaert was a Netherlandish Renaissance painter who often worked under the name Mabuse. His best-known works include Saint Luke Painting the Virgin, Jean Carondelet Adoring the Virgin and Child, and a monumental Adoration of the Kings.

• Martin Schongauer — Martin Schongauer was an Alsatian engraver and goldsmith whose prints influenced later Renaissance artists, including Michelangelo and Dürer. He is especially associated with The Temptation of Saint Anthony, Christ Carrying the Cross, and other highly detailed devotional engravings.

• Religious art subjects
  • Saint Jerome in His Study — Saint Jerome in His Study is a common Renaissance and Northern Renaissance subject, often shown with a lion, books, and scholarly furnishings. Dürer’s engraving of the scene became especially famous and was later adapted into a painting.

• St. Jerome in His Study — St. Jerome in His Study shows the translator of the Vulgate working at a desk amid books, skulls, a dog, and other memento mori imagery. The scene was painted by artists such as Dürer, Antonello da Messina, and Ghirlandaio, and often includes Jerome’s study as a secluded scholarly interior.

• Reformation art
  • Wittenberg Altarpiece — The Wittenberg Altarpiece is an artwork associated with Lutheran Reformation imagery and Martin Luther’s circle. Its Last Supper panel shows Jesus dining with Germans, and its lower panel places the Crucifixion between a preacher and his audience.
• Holbein family
  • Holbein — A German painter family name associated with Hans Holbein the Elder and Hans Holbein the Younger. The younger Holbein worked in England for Henry VIII and is known for portraits of Henry VIII’s court, including Anne of Cleves and Archbishop Warham, as well as The Ambassadors.

• Bruegel family — The Bruegel family was a Flemish family of painters headed by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. His sons Pieter the Younger and Jan the Elder were also painters, with the family nicknamed for contrasts such as Hell and Velvet.

• Brueghel — Brueghel is the surname of a Flemish painting family including Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, and Jan Brueghel the Elder. Their works include peasant scenes, landscapes, still lifes, and paintings such as Netherlandish Proverbs, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, The Tower of Babel, The Triumph of Death, Dulle Griet, Village Fair, and Rubens collaborations like The Five Senses.

• Pieter Aertsen — Pieter Aertsen was a Dutch Renaissance painter known for market scenes and large still lifes that blend genre painting with biblical imagery. His Meat Stall, Butcher’s Stall, and Egg Dance place religious scenes in the background behind piles of food and household goods.

• Pieter Brueghel the Younger — Pieter Brueghel the Younger was a Flemish painter nicknamed “Hell” for his scenes of fire, damnation, and grotesque imagery. He is known for versions of works such as Census at Bethlehem and Attack on a Snow-Covered Village.

• Quentin Massys — Quentin Massys was a Northern Renaissance painter known for works such as The Moneylender and His Wife and A Grotesque Old Woman. He also collaborated with landscape painter Joachim Patinir and produced religious panels in Antwerp.
  • The Ugly Duchess — The Ugly Duchess is Quentin Matsys’s satirical portrait of an unsightly noblewoman, also known as A Grotesque Old Woman. It is often linked to grotesque female imagery, a Burgundian horned headdress, and speculation that the subject may have had Paget’s disease.
• Hans Baldung Grien — Hans Baldung Grien was a Northern Renaissance artist and pupil of Albrecht Dürer known for expressive, sometimes eerie paintings and engravings. His works include Death and the Maiden and images of witches, nudes, and distorted figures.
  • Death and the Maiden — Hans Baldung Grien’s Death and the Maiden shows a young woman staring into a mirror while Death, holding an hourglass, approaches her. The painting is a 1510 work by the Strasbourg-based pupil of Dürer and is also known by its German title, Die Frau und den Tod.

Baroque and Eighteenth-Century Artists

Distinguish Baroque and eighteenth-century artists through characteristic works.

Baroque

• Georges de La Tour — French; Baroque; The Penitent Magdalene (c. 1640); Joseph the Carpenter (c. 1642); candlelit nocturnes; rediscovered in the 20th century. 17th-century painter known for candlelit interiors and starkly lit religious scenes that echo Caravaggio; his best-known works also include The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs and The Fortune Teller, and he painted Saint Sebastian tended by Saint Irene.

• Italy and the French Baroque
  • Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi) — Italian; Baroque; The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599–1600); Judith Beheading Holofernes (c. 1598–1599); The Supper at Emmaus (1601); pioneered tenebrism (extreme chiaroscuro); realist figures from street life. Other works include The Conversion of Saint Paul, The Entombment of Christ, The Taking of Christ, The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, The Death of the Virgin, The Seven Works of Mercy, and Amor Vincit Omnia.

    • The Calling of Saint Matthew — Caravaggio, 1599–1600 (Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome); a shaft of light from the right (echoing Christ’s outstretched hand) falls across a table of tax collectors, identifying Matthew; the painting that made Caravaggio’s reputation in Rome. It depicts Jesus summoning Matthew from a tavern-like room, with Matthew’s startled self-pointing gesture helping identify him. The scene is rendered in Caravaggio’s dramatic tenebrism and contemporary dress.

    • The Death of the Virgin — The Death of the Virgin is a Renaissance and Baroque religious scene showing Mary on her deathbed, surrounded by the apostles and often marked by dramatic realism. Caravaggio’s version was famously rejected for depicting the Virgin with startling naturalism, and the subject also appears in versions by Petrus Christus and others.

    • Amor Vincit Omnia — Caravaggio’s painting shows a winged Cupid-like boy standing over or leaning across a table strewn with armor, musical instruments, a crown, and other worldly objects. The dark-winged boy clutches arrows and grins, emphasizing earthly love’s triumph over power and learning. It is one of Caravaggio’s best-known works and one of his most famous depictions of a putto-like Cupid figure.

    • Calling of St. Matthew
      • St. Matthew — St. Matthew is the apostle and evangelist depicted in Caravaggio’s Contarelli Chapel paintings, including the Calling and the Inspiration of St. Matthew. In those works he appears as a bearded tax collector or writer receiving divine inspiration while pointing to himself in surprise.

    • Contarelli Chapel — The Contarelli Chapel is the Roman chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi that houses Caravaggio’s Saint Matthew paintings, including The Calling of Saint Matthew. It is one of the standard fine arts clues for Caravaggio and tenebrism.

    • Death of the Virgin — Death of the Virgin is Caravaggio’s controversial painting of Mary’s death, notable for its bare feet, dramatic realism, and rumored use of a prostitute’s corpse as the model. Rejected by the Carmelites, it remains one of his most famous religious works.

    • Madonna of the Rosary — Madonna of the Rosary is a large Caravaggio altarpiece showing the Virgin and Saint Dominic with a crowd of supplicants. It also includes figures such as Thomas Aquinas and Peter Martyr, and is associated with Rubens’s admiration for Caravaggio.

    • Supper at Emmaus — Supper at Emmaus is the biblical scene of Jesus dining with two disciples after the Resurrection. Caravaggio painted famous versions of the scene, including one in Milan’s Brera gallery and an earlier dramatic version with Cleopas and Luke.

    • The Cardsharps — Caravaggio’s The Cardsharps shows a young mark being cheated at cards by two accomplices, one of whom signals to the other while reaching for a hidden object. The painting helped establish Caravaggio’s reputation for dramatic genre scenes of ordinary life and deception.

    • The Conversion of Saint Paul — The Conversion of Saint Paul depicts the biblical moment when Saul is struck down and transformed after encountering divine light. Caravaggio’s version is especially famous for the horse looming over the fallen figure in a stark, dramatic composition.

    • The Entombment of Christ — The Entombment of Christ shows Jesus being lowered into his tomb, often with mourners, Nicodemus, and John the Evangelist. Caravaggio’s version is the best-known quizbowl clue, and the scene is also called the Deposition or Burial of Christ.

    • The Fortune Teller — Caravaggio’s The Fortune Teller shows a young man having his palm read while a gypsy woman quietly steals his ring. The work survives in more than one version and is a classic example of Caravaggio’s early genre scenes.

    • The Supper at Emmaus — Caravaggio’s The Supper at Emmaus shows the resurrected Christ revealing himself to two shocked disciples over a meal. The composition is famous for its fruit basket, the surprised disciples, and the pilgrim identified by a scallop shell.

    • The Taking of Christ — The Taking of Christ is Caravaggio’s dramatic biblical painting of Jesus’ arrest in the garden. Its tenebrist lighting, fleeing St. John, and the lantern-bearing figure often identified as a self-portrait are all classic clues.
  • Artemisia Gentileschi — Italian; Baroque; Judith Slaying Holofernes (c. 1614–1620); one of the first women to achieve prominence in European art; follower of Caravaggio’s style. She is also associated with Susanna and the Elders, Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, and other forceful biblical heroines such as Judith and Mary Magdalene; she worked for the court of Charles I and is often discussed in connection with her trial against Agostino Tassi.
    • Judith Slaying Holofernes — Artemisia Gentileschi’s best-known Biblical subject is Judith Slaying Holofernes, showing Judith and her maid using a sword to behead the Assyrian general Holofernes. Two early Baroque versions differ in details such as Judith’s dress and a bracelet on her arm. The painting is often linked to Gentileschi’s dramatic handling of violence and revenge.

  • Guido Reni — Italian (Bolognese); Baroque; Aurora (ceiling fresco, 1614, Casino Rospigliosi, Rome); Atlanta and Hippomenes (c. 1612); idealized, classicizing religious and mythological compositions. His best-known work is Aurora, the ceiling fresco at the Casino dell’Aurora in Rome showing Apollo’s chariot and the Hours. He also painted Beatrice Cenci and St. Michael defeating a demon, and he studied under Annibale Carracci.

  • Gian Lorenzo Bernini — Italian; Baroque sculpture and architecture; The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–1652, marble); Apollo and Daphne (1622–1625, marble); David (1623–1624, marble); Baldachin in St. Peter’s Basilica; defined the Baroque sculptural ideal.

    • Apollo and Daphne — Apollo and Daphne is Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s marble sculpture of the moment in Ovid when Daphne transforms into a laurel tree while Apollo reaches for her. It is in the Borghese Gallery and is often noted for its extreme realism and the way the viewer sees the metamorphosis unfold around the figures.

    • Ecstasy of St. Teresa
      • The Ecstasy of St. Teresa — The Ecstasy of St. Teresa is Bernini’s Baroque sculpture for the Cornaro Chapel in Santa Maria della Vittoria. It shows Saint Teresa of Ávila in a trance while an angel raises an arrow beneath golden rays.
        • The Ecstasy of St. Teresa of Ávila — The Ecstasy of St. Teresa of Ávila is Bernini’s sculpture in Rome’s Cornaro Chapel. It depicts the Spanish mystic pierced by a divine arrow during a religious vision.

    • Ecstasy of St. Theresa — Bernini’s Baroque marble sculpture depicts Saint Teresa of Ávila being pierced by an angel’s spear. It is installed in the Cornaro Chapel in Santa Maria della Vittoria and is marked by theatrical framing with observers in side balconies and golden rays.

    • The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa — Bernini’s Baroque marble group in the Cornaro Chapel of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome depicts Teresa of Ávila in mystical rapture as an angel pierces her heart with a spear or flaming golden arrow. The scene is known for its hidden lighting, gilded rays, and theatrical side figures watching from the chapel like spectators.

    • The Rape of Proserpina — The Rape of Proserpina is Bernini’s Baroque marble sculpture of Pluto seizing Proserpina. It is admired for its dramatic motion and lifelike handling of the goddess’s body and Pluto’s hands.

    • Tomb of Pope Alexander VII
      • Pope Alexander VII — Pope Alexander VII’s tomb in St. Peter’s Basilica is one of Bernini’s major late works. It includes allegorical figures such as Charity and Truth, along with others representing virtues and death.
    • Triton Fountain — Bernini’s Triton Fountain stands in Piazza Barberini in Rome. It shows a sea god kneeling on a shell supported by dolphins while blowing water upward from a conch.
  • Nicolas Poussin — French; Baroque/Classical; The Rape of the Sabine Women (c. 1637–1638); Et in Arcadia Ego (c. 1637–1638); codified French academic classicism. He was a leading 17th-century French painter and a major figure in classicism. He painted biblical, mythological, pastoral, and ancient Roman subjects, worked much of his career in Rome, and strongly influenced the French Academy. Other major works include The Funeral of Phocion, A Dance to the Music of Time, and the Four Seasons series; his paintings also include Apollo in Helios and Phaeton and the Golden Calf. He is known for carefully ordered classical compositions, philosophical history scenes, and idealized landscape painting.

    • Et in Arcadia Ego — Et in Arcadia Ego is the Latin title shared by famous paintings by Poussin and Guercino that depict shepherds confronting a tomb. The phrase is often read as a meditation on mortality rather than a simple landscape motto. Poussin’s version is especially known for its pastoral figures gathered around an inscription in an idealized landscape.

    • Landscape with the Burial of Phocion — Landscape with the Burial of Phocion is a painting by Nicolas Poussin showing the body of the Athenian statesman being carried toward burial. The work places winding paths, distant hills, and a pastoral foreground around the title scene.

    • The Burial of Phocion — The Burial of Phocion is Nicolas Poussin’s 1648 landscape of the Athenian statesman’s funeral procession, set against a calm, terraced countryside with shepherds and classical architecture. Its foreground shows two men carrying the bier under a large white cloth, making it a classic example of Poussin’s ordered, idealized landscape style.

    • The Seven Sacraments — The Seven Sacraments is one of Poussin’s painted series on the Christian rites, including scenes such as Baptism and Eucharist. Poussin made two separate cycles on the theme, with one version later associated with Chantelou and another preserving the same sacramental set.

  • Claude Lorrain — French; Baroque; Seaport with the Embarkation of Saint Ursula (1641); The Marriage of Isaac and Rebekah (1648); idealized landscape painting influencing Turner. He also kept the Liber Veritatis, a drawing book used to authenticate his paintings and deter forgeries.

    • Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba — Claude Lorrain’s Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba shows a glowing seascape with figures loading a boat in the foreground. The painting is one of Lorrain’s best-known idealized landscapes, often identified by the sunset harbor scene.

    • Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba — Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba is a Claude Lorrain landscape showing the queen’s departure by ship in a luminous classical harbor. The painting is famous for its linear perspective, bright centered sunrise, and architectural framing with Corinthian columns and a distant seaport.

  • Domenichino — Domenichino was an Italian Baroque painter from Bologna and a favorite pupil of Annibale Carracci. He is especially associated with The Last Communion of St. Jerome and with frescoes for the San Gennaro chapel in Naples.

  • Il Guercino — Il Guercino, nickname of the Italian Baroque painter Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, is known for dramatic compositions, strong foreshortening, and a classical sense of composition. His works include The Burial of St. Petronilla, darker versions of Et in Arcadia Ego, Triumph of Aurora, Aurora, and versions of The Return of the Prodigal Son. His cross-eyed appearance is often noted in descriptions of him.

  • Alessandro Algardi — A Baroque sculptor, he created major works including the relief Leo I Meeting Attila and the scene of Sts. Peter and Paul in flight. His career also included bronze and funerary sculpture for patrons in Rome and Bologna.

  • Pierre Puget — Pierre Puget was a French Baroque sculptor known for expressive marble and bronze works in Marseille, Genoa, and Versailles. His best-known sculpture is Milo of Crotona, and he also made St. Sebastian and other dramatic religious pieces.

  • Giovanni Lanfranco — Giovanni Lanfranco was a Baroque painter from Parma and a rival of Domenichino. He is known for dramatic dome frescoes such as the cupola of Sant’Andrea della Valle and mythological works like The Abduction of Ganymede and The Gods of Olympus.

  • Salvator Rosa — Salvator Rosa was a Baroque Italian painter known for wild landscapes, bandits, and proto-Romantic mood. He also painted philosophical self-portraits and allegorical scenes that made him a favorite of later British admirers.

  • Simon Vouet — Simon Vouet was a French Baroque painter who served as first painter to Louis XIII. His work helped shape the grand manner later associated with Le Brun, and he painted allegorical and mythological scenes in a Caravaggesque style.
• The Low Countries: Portraits, Interiors, and Landscapes
  • Peter Paul Rubens — Flemish; Baroque; The Descent from the Cross (1612–1614, Antwerp Cathedral); The Garden of Love (c. 1630–1632); Marie de’ Medici cycle (1621–1625, Louvre); exuberant color, dynamic compositions, fleshy figures. He also served as a diplomat and spent time in Italy before returning to Antwerp, influencing Anthony van Dyck.

    • Horrors of War and Raising the Cross — Horrors of War and Raising the Cross are paintings by Peter Paul Rubens.

    • Marie de’ Medici Cycle — Rubens’s Marie de’ Medici Cycle is the famous set of 24 allegorical paintings celebrating the French queen’s life. The series turns her marriage, travels, reconciliation with her son, and exile into mythological scenes with gods and personifications.

    • Massacre of the Innocents — The Massacre of the Innocents is the biblical scene of Herod’s infanticide, often shown with soldiers attacking mothers and children. The clues here point to a 1611 version that was once attributed to Jan van den Hoecke and later became an especially expensive Old Master at auction.

    • Sir Peter Paul Rubens — Sir Peter Paul Rubens was a Flemish Baroque painter celebrated for energetic compositions, diplomatic success, and lush, fleshy figures. His major works include The Raising of the Cross, The Massacre of the Innocents, and the Marie de’ Medici cycle.

    • The Disembarkation at Marseilles — Rubens’s The Disembarkation at Marseilles is part of the Marie de’ Medici cycle and depicts the queen’s arrival at the French port city. The scene includes sea gods, angels, and Henry IV watching from the shore.

    • The Elevation of the Cross — Peter Paul Rubens’s triptych shows the crucifixion of Jesus, with muscular executioners straining to lift the cross and Christ’s body cutting a strong diagonal through the central panel. It is associated with Antwerp’s Cathedral of Our Lady; its side panels include saints such as Amand, Catherine, Eligius, and Walpurgis, and the scene is marked by dramatic movement and an eclipse. The companion panels were later removed by Napoleon.

    • The Garden of Love — The Garden of Love is a title shared by a Peter Paul Rubens painting and a Blake poem, though the art questions here point to the Rubens work. Rubens’s painting shows an opulent garden scene crowded with amorous figures, putti, and classical statuary.

    • The Hippopotamus and Crocodile Hunt — The Hippopotamus and Crocodile Hunt is a Rubens painting that shows the two animals locked in combat amid hunters on horseback and a struggling shirtless figure. It belongs to Rubens’s energetic hunting scenes, where the title beasts are rendered in dark, forceful motion against a crowded, violent landscape.

  • Anthony van Dyck — Flemish; Baroque; Charles I at the Hunt (c. 1635); court portraitist to the English crown; refined, aristocratic elegance. He is especially associated with aristocratic court portraiture, including Charles I at the Hunt, the triple portrait of Charles I, Charles I on Horseback, Charles I Hunting, and his self-portrait with a sunflower.

    • Charles I in Hunting Dress — Charles I in Hunting Dress is an Anthony van Dyck portrait of King Charles I standing in a wooded landscape and wearing hunting clothes. The figure is shown with a sword, walking stick, and attendants on a rocky hillside under a large oak tree.

    • Portraits of Charles I by Anthony van Dyck — Anthony van Dyck painted a famous series of portraits of Charles I of England, including equestrian, family, and full-length state images. These works emphasize royal display and were influential enough to inspire later artists and sculptural portraits of the king.

    • Sir Anthony van Dyck — Sir Anthony van Dyck was a Flemish Baroque portraitist and court painter to Charles I of England. His elegant likenesses of the Stuart court, especially Charles I on horseback and in hunting dress, helped define aristocratic portraiture in the seventeenth century.

  • Rembrandt van Rijn — Dutch; Baroque; The Night Watch (1642); The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632); Self-Portrait with Two Circles (c. 1665–1669); over 90 self-portraits; masterful use of light and shadow. He was also a printmaker and a central master of the Dutch Golden Age, active in Amsterdam. His oeuvre includes major etchings and scenes such as The Jewish Bride, The Three Crosses, the Hundred Guilder Print, Belshazzar’s Feast, Storm on the Sea of Galilee, Danaë, Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, and The Philosopher in Meditation.

    • Anatomy Lecture of Dr. Nicholaes Tulp — Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lecture of Dr. Nicholaes Tulp depicts a medical professor demonstrating anatomy over a cadaver before seven attentive students. The painting is one of the artist’s famous group portraits from the Dutch Golden Age.

    • Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer — A Rembrandt painting showing Aristotle posed in rich dark dress with a heavy gold chain, gazing reflectively at a marble bust of Homer beside him. It is known for the philosopher’s contemplative hand on the bust and has been discussed in connection with a controversial art purchase and debates over its title and meaning.

    • Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer — Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer is a Rembrandt painting showing Aristotle in dark contemporary dress beside a bust of Homer. It is often discussed in terms of wealth, honor, poetry, and the relationship between worldly success and intellectual achievement.

    • Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee — Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee is Rembrandt’s lone seascape and shows Jesus calming a violent storm from a small boat. The painting was later stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and is one of Rembrandt’s best-known religious history paintings.

    • Hundred Guilder Print — The Hundred Guilder Print is Rembrandt’s famous etching of Christ healing the sick. It often appears alongside Rembrandt’s other works such as The Night Watch, The Jewish Bride, and The Three Crosses.

    • Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rjin — Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was a Dutch Golden Age painter known for portraits, biblical scenes, and large civic group paintings. His works include The Night Watch, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, and Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer.

    • Saskia van Uylenburgh — Saskia van Uylenburgh was Rembrandt’s wife and a favorite model in his portraits and etchings. She appears in works such as Flora and The Prodigal Son in the Tavern, and her early death was later commemorated in painted portraiture.

    • Storm on the Sea of Galilee — Storm on the Sea of Galilee is Rembrandt’s seascape of Jesus calming the waves around a small boat. It was one of the thirteen works stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 and remains missing.

    • The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicholaes Tulp — The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicholaes Tulp is a Rembrandt painting showing a public anatomy demonstration. It is one of his best-known group portraits.

    • The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicholas Tulp — The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicholas Tulp is a Rembrandt painting showing physicians gathered around a cadaver during a public dissection. Its most recognizable details are Dr. Tulp demonstrating the arm’s musculature and an open anatomy book in the foreground.

    • The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp — The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp is Rembrandt’s 1632 group portrait of surgeons gathered around the corpse of Aris Kindt. Dr. Tulp demonstrates the arm muscles with forceps, while the open book of Vesalius and the assembled onlookers frame the anatomical lesson.

      • Aris Kindt — Aris Kindt is the executed corpse shown at the center of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. The painting depicts a public dissection demonstration, with Tulp and other surgeons clustered around the exposed arm.

      • The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolas Tulp — The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp is Rembrandt’s 1632 group portrait of a public dissection. The painting shows Dr. Tulp demonstrating the forearm tendons of an executed criminal to a semicircle of onlookers.

    • The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp — The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp is a Rembrandt group portrait showing the surgeon Dr. Nicolaes Tulp giving a medical demonstration over a corpse. It is often identified by the cadaver of Aris Kindt, the black hat worn by the title doctor, and the open anatomy text placed at the lower left.

    • The Blinding of Samson — The Blinding of Samson is a Rembrandt painting showing Samson being overpowered and blinded after Delilah’s betrayal. It features Delilah with the shears and hair near the tent entrance while soldiers restrain the title figure.

    • The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis — The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis is a Rembrandt painting depicting a Batavian oath under a one-eyed rebel leader. The work was cut down after rejection in Amsterdam and later ended up in Sweden’s Nationalmuseum.

    • The Feast of Belshazzar — The Feast of Belshazzar is Rembrandt’s painting of the biblical banquet at which the mysterious writing appears on the wall. It is now in the National Gallery in London and is identified by the Hebrew words “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.”

    • The Jewish Bride — The Jewish Bride is Rembrandt’s late painting showing a man in gold and a woman in red, now usually identified as Isaac and Rebecca rather than a father and daughter. Its title became common in the nineteenth century, and it has been admired for its intimate handling of love, costume, and rich color.

    • The Night Watch — Rembrandt’s famous militia group portrait shows Captain Frans Banning Cocq in black with a red sash and his lieutenant, Willem van Ruytenburch, in yellow and blue. It is known for its dramatic use of light and shadow, the brightly lit girl with a chicken, the barking dog, and the commissioners’ names on a shield in the background. Although commonly called Night Watch, it is set in daylight; the title became associated with the painting after later dark varnish made it appear nocturnal. The canvas was also trimmed to fit between columns, and it was later damaged by a 1975 knife attack and restored.
      • The Night Watch or The Company of Franz Banning Cocq before that name is read — The Night Watch, also known as The Company of Franz Banning Cocq, is Rembrandt’s famous militia group portrait. It was later trimmed, misnamed for its darkened surface, and widely reproduced in copies and engravings.

    • The Polish Rider — The Polish Rider is the equestrian portrait usually attributed to Rembrandt and named for the rider’s supposed nationality. The painting shows a mounted figure in a red fur-lined cap carrying a quiver and warhammer before a distant citadel.

    • The Return of the Prodigal Son — The Return of the Prodigal Son is Rembrandt’s late religious painting showing the repentant son embraced by his father. Its kneeling, ragged central figure and shadowed, contemplative composition made it a favorite subject for later devotional interpretation.

    • The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild
      • Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild — Rembrandt’s Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild is a late group portrait of cloth inspectors seated around a table with a book of fabric swatches. The work is a famous example of Dutch regents portraiture and is also known as The Sampling Officials or De Staalmeesters.
  • Johannes Vermeer — Dutch; Baroque; Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665); View of Delft (c. 1660–1661); The Milkmaid (c. 1657–1658); domestic interiors with luminous, diffused light; small surviving oeuvre (~34–36 works). Also known as Jan Vermeer; born in Delft in 1632. He was later rediscovered by the art historian Théophile Thoré. Other works associated with him include The Astronomer, The Geographer, The Art of Painting, The Music Lesson, The Little Street, The Procuress, The Allegory of Faith, and The Lacemaker.

    • Allegory of the Art of Painting — Vermeer’s Allegory of the Art of Painting shows an artist painting a model dressed as Clio, the muse of history. The interior includes a map of the Dutch provinces, a curtain, a tiled floor, and a mask on the table.

    • Girl with a Pearl Earring — Johannes Vermeer’s famous painting shows a young woman turning toward the viewer in a blue-and-yellow turban or headscarf and an oversized pearl earring. It is often called the “Mona Lisa of the North” and is frequently discussed as a tronie rather than a conventional portrait. The work became even better known through Tracy Chevalier’s novel and its film adaptation, and it has prompted restoration and authenticity debates over details such as the background color and the earring itself.

    • The Art of Painting — Jan Vermeer’s The Art of Painting, also called The Allegory of Painting or Painter in His Studio, is an interior scene of an artist at his easel with a female figure often identified as Clio, the muse of history. Distinctive details include the oversized map of the Netherlands on the wall, the blue-and-gold curtain, the chandelier topped by a double-headed eagle, and a small mask on the table.

    • The Astronomer — The Astronomer is a Vermeer painting of a scholar in a green robe reaching toward a globe. It is often paired with The Geographer and is thought by some to depict Antoine van Leeuwenhoek.

    • The Astronomer AND The Geographer — The Astronomer and The Geographer are paired Dutch genre paintings by Johannes Vermeer. Both works center on the same model and feature scholarly tools such as a globe, map, and compass.

    • The Concert — The Concert is a Johannes Vermeer painting showing a musician and two women in a tiled interior with a harpsichord and other instruments. It is best known as one of the major works stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 and still unrecovered.

    • The Geographer — The Geographer is a Johannes Vermeer painting of a man studying a map beside a globe and other scholarly instruments. It is often paired with The Astronomer as one of Vermeer’s contemplative interior scenes.

    • The Girl with the Pearl Earring — The Girl with the Pearl Earring is the Vermeer portrait in which the subject looks toward the viewer while wearing a blue-and-yellow headscarf and the title jewelry. The painting is one of the Dutch master’s most famous works.

    • The Lacemaker — Vermeer’s The Lacemaker is a small, intimate genre painting of a woman absorbed in her needlework. The picture is noted for its delicate focus on the threads and the subject’s quiet concentration.

    • The Love Letter — The Love Letter is a Vermeer interior scene in which a maid presents a secret note to a woman holding a lute, while another woman looks on disapprovingly. Its carefully staged room, tiled floor, and wall hangings make it a classic Dutch genre painting.

    • The Milkmaid — The Milkmaid is a Jan Vermeer painting of a servant girl pouring milk at a table with bread, a pitcher, and domestic utensils. Its X-rays reveal changes such as the removal of extra background objects, and it includes the symbolic foot warmer and Cupid tile often discussed in clues.

    • The Music Lesson — Johannes Vermeer’s The Music Lesson, also known as Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman, shows a young woman at a virginal under the gaze of a standing man. A mirror reflects the room, including an easel and a woman seated near a bass viol, while the scene is lit from the left and includes a richly draped table and a white jug.

    • The View of Delft — The View of Delft is Jan Vermeer’s celebrated cityscape of his hometown, showing the harbor and skyline in morning light. Its careful depiction of the Nieuwe Kerk and the city’s waters makes it one of Vermeer’s best-known paintings.

    • View of Delft — View of Delft is Vermeer’s cityscape of his Dutch hometown, showing the harbor, gates, and church towers reflected in water. It is one of the best-known examples of seventeenth-century Dutch urban painting.

    • Woman with a Balance — Woman with a Balance is a Vermeer painting in which a woman weighs something while a large Last Judgment scene hangs in the background. Its symbolism is often read as a meditation on moral judgment and earthly balance.

  • Frans Hals — Dutch; Baroque; The Laughing Cavalier (1624); Banquet of the Officers of the St. George Militia (1616); loose, vivacious brushwork. He was a Dutch Golden Age portrait painter associated with Haarlem; other notable works include Malle Babbe, Catharina Hooft with Her Nurse, and The Merry Drinker, and he also painted militia and civic regent group portraits.

    • Malle Babbe — Malle Babbe is the nickname of Frans Hals’s portrait of a mentally ill woman shown with an owl perched on her shoulder and a beer stein in hand. The same subject appears in a well-known Hals work sometimes mistaken for a tronie rather than a portrait.

    • The Laughing Cavalier — This Frans Hals portrait is better known as The Laughing Cavalier, though its subject is not actually laughing. The work shows a mustached man in elaborate costume and a tilted black hat, and it is the best-known painting by Hals.

  • Jan Steen — Dutch; Dutch Golden Age; The Merry Family (1668); The Doctor’s Visit (c. 1663–1665); comic and moralistic genre scenes of chaotic households; the phrase “a Jan Steen household” entered Dutch idiom. Also known as Jan Havickszoon Steen; his works include The Feast of Saint Nicholas and Children Teaching a Cat to Dance.

  • Pieter de Hooch — Dutch; Dutch Golden Age; Courtyard of a House in Delft (1658); A Woman Drinking with Two Men (c. 1658); mastery of light in domestic interiors; contemporary of Vermeer. He is known for calm domestic genre scenes set in courtyards and interiors, often using doorways and bright sunlight to organize the space. Other works include The Bedroom, Card Players in an Opulent Interior, Musical Party in a Courtyard, The Card Players, and The Pantry.

  • Gerard ter Borch — Dutch; Dutch Golden Age; The Suitor’s Visit (c. 1658); The Swearing of the Oath of Ratification of the Treaty of Münster (1648); refined portraiture and intimate domestic genre.

  • Gerard van Honthorst — A Dutch Utrecht Caravaggist known for dramatic chiaroscuro and illuminated night scenes. His nickname Gherardo delle Notti reflects his fondness for night scenes and artificial light. He painted tenebrist religious and courtly works including The Matchmaker, The Concert, The Banquet, The Beheading of St. John the Baptist, Christ Before the High Priest, and Apollo and Diana.

  • Jacob Jordaens — Jacob Jordaens was a Flemish Baroque painter and tapestry designer associated with Antwerp and influenced by Peter Paul Rubens. He painted lively genre scenes such as The King Drinks and As the Old Sang, So the Young Pipe, alongside mythological and religious subjects.

  • Carel Pietersz Fabritius — Carel Pietersz. Fabritius was a student of Rembrandt and a Delft School painter best known for The Goldfinch and The Sentry. His surviving works are especially notable because many of his paintings were lost in the Delft gunpowder explosion that killed him.

  • Dirck van Baburen — Dirck van Baburen was a Dutch Baroque painter associated with genre scenes such as The Procuress. His works include scenes like The Concert and Prometheus Being Chained by Vulcan, and one of his brothel pictures appears in Vermeer paintings.
    • The Procuress — Dirck van Baburen’s The Procuress is a 1656 Dutch genre painting and one of Vermeer’s only dated works referenced in clue sets. It shows a woman in yellow being propositioned or groped by a man in red, with a coarse-featured older figure nearby, and a version of the title painting appears in the background of Vermeer’s The Concert.

  • Judith Jans Leyster — Judith Jans Leyster was a Dutch Golden Age painter known for lively genre scenes, portraits, and self-portraits, with paintings long misattributed to Frans Hals. Her works include The Proposition, The Carousing Couple, and The Last Drop, and she often depicted musicians, taverns, and domestic scenes. Her name is associated with a star in her monogram, and she was married to the painter Jan Miense Molenaer.

  • Pieter Claesz — Pieter Claesz was a Haarlem still-life painter known for monochrome banquet and breakfast pieces. His vanitas works often pair skulls with books, instruments, and luxurious tableware to evoke mortality.

  • Rachel Ruysch — Rachel Ruysch was a Dutch Baroque painter celebrated for flower still lifes filled with insects, fruit, and lush botanical detail. She was one of the most successful women painters of her era, and her work often reflects the influence of natural history and scientific observation.

  • Meindert Hobbema — Meindert Hobbema was a Dutch landscape painter and a pupil of Jacob van Ruisdael. He is best known for The Avenue at Middelharnis and other wooded scenes and watermill paintings.

  • David Teniers the Younger — David Teniers the Younger was a Flemish Baroque painter famous for genre scenes, monkey paintings, and depictions of alchemists. He also painted Archduke Leopold Wilhelm’s art collection and catalogued it in Theatrum Pictorium. He belonged to a family of painters and is especially associated with inventive, crowded scenes of domestic and courtly life.

  • Aelbert Cuyp — A Dutch Golden Age landscape painter from Dordrecht, known for warm, luminous landscapes with cows, river scenes, and views of Dordrecht. His works include The Maas at Dordrecht, The Negro Page, and The Large Dort, and his light-filled landscapes later influenced British painters such as Constable.

  • Jacob Isaackszoon van Ruisdael — Jacob Isaackszoon van Ruisdael was a major Dutch Golden Age landscape painter and a teacher of Meindert Hobbema. His works include The Jewish Cemetery, View of Haarlem, and The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede.
• Spanish Baroque and Court Painting
  • Diego Velázquez — Spanish; Baroque; Las Meninas (1656); The Surrender of Breda (1634–1635); Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650); court painter to Philip IV; complex spatial and self-referential compositions. He is usually identified as Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez. In Las Meninas, he depicts himself beside the Infanta Margarita and a mirror reflecting the royal couple. The Water Seller of Seville is another major painting.

    • Diego Rodríguez de Silva Velázquez — Diego Velázquez was the leading painter of the Spanish Golden Age, known for Las Meninas, the Rokeby Venus, and the portrait of Pope Innocent X. His work often combines court portraiture with striking illusionism and complex reflections of the viewer.

    • Juan de Pareja — Juan de Pareja was the Morisco painter and former servant of Velázquez whose portrait by Velázquez is famous. He later painted works such as the Portrait of Innocent X and is often mentioned in connection with his own self-portrait marking his freedom.

    • Rokeby Venus — Diego Velázquez’s only surviving female nude shows Venus reclining with her back to the viewer while Cupid holds up a mirror reflecting her face. The 1650 painting was commissioned by the Marquis of Eliche and later took the name Rokeby Venus after an English owner; it was once at Rokeby Park in Yorkshire. It became famous as a suffragette target after Mary Richardson attacked it with a meat cleaver in 1914, and is notable for the blurred reflection of Venus’s face in the mirror.

    • Surrender at Breda — Diego Velázquez’s Surrender at Breda depicts the Dutch surrendering during the Eighty Years’ War, with a prominent cluster of upright lances among the soldiers. The painting is also known for its restrained, almost chivalric treatment of the Spanish victory at Breda under Ambrosio Spinola.

    • The Surrender of Breda — Diego Velázquez’s Hall of Realms painting depicts the Spanish victory scene in which Justin of Nassau hands over the city keys to Ambrosio Spinola after Breda’s capitulation in the Eighty Years’ War. The composition is famous for its dense upright lances and the carefully staged contrast between the two commanders, with a horse in the foreground.

    • The Toilet of Venus — The Toilet of Venus, also called the Rokeby Venus, is Diego Velázquez’s famous nude painting of Venus seen from behind. It is one of the best-known treatments of the goddess in Western art.

    • The Triumph of Bacchus — Diego Velázquez’s The Triumph of Bacchus, also called Los borrachos, shows the wine god mixing with ordinary drinkers in a realist mythological scene. The painting is famous for its contrast between the pale central Bacchus and the earth-toned men around him.

    • The Waterseller of Seville — Diego Velázquez’s The Waterseller of Seville is a Spanish Baroque bodegón-like scene centered on an old water seller handing a drink to a boy. Its cup, jars, and large jugs, sometimes shown with a fig in the glass and varied red-hat details in versions like the Uffizi and Walters copies, are common identifying clues.

    • Las Meninas — Velázquez, 1656 (Prado, Madrid); depicts the Infanta Margarita surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting, a dwarf, and a dog, while Velázquez himself stands at a large canvas and the king and queen are reflected in a background mirror; one of the most analyzed paintings in Western art for its play on viewpoint and representation. It is also known by several alternate titles, including The Maids of Honor and The Ladies-in-Waiting. The background mirror reflects Philip IV and Mariana, and a doorway figure appears at the rear of the room.

      • Infanta Margarita — Infanta Margarita was the daughter of Philip IV and Mariana of Austria, and she appears in Diego Velázquez’s 1656 masterpiece Las Meninas. In the painting, she is the central child figure surrounded by attendants, dwarves, and a dog, while a mirror in the back reflects the king and queen.
  • Francisco de Zurbarán — Spanish; Baroque; Saint Francis in Meditation (1639); stark, austere religious imagery influenced by Caravaggio. He was from Seville and is known for dramatic chiaroscuro and devotional scenes, including The Apotheosis of St. Thomas Aquinas, Martyrdom of Saint Serapion, Agnus Dei, and still lifes such as Pottery Jars and Oranges, Lemons, and a Rose. He is often called the Spanish Caravaggio for his severe tenebrist treatment of saints, monks, and apostles.
    • The Defense of Cadiz Against the English — The Defense of Cadiz against the English is a Zurbarán painting showing a naval battle in the background while noblemen, including the gout-stricken Duke of Fernandina, watch from the foreground.

  • Jusepe de Ribera — Spanish (worked in Naples); Baroque; The Clubfooted Boy (1642); Boy with a Clubfoot; Martyrdom of Saint Philip (1639); tenebrism and unflinching naturalism; known as “Lo Spagnoletto.” He also painted The Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew and Apollo Flaying Marsyas, and often depicted grotesque or intensely naturalistic figures. Archimedes is another familiar philosophical figure in his paintings.

  • Bartolomé Esteban Murillo — Spanish (Seville); Baroque; Immaculate Conception of the Soult (c. 1678); Boys Eating Grapes and Melon (c. 1645–1646); warm, tender religious and genre scenes; dominant painter of the Seville school. Other works include Vision of St. Anthony, The Young Beggars, The Young Beggar, The Little Fruit Seller, Women at the Window (or Two Women at a Window), and The Flight into Egypt.

  • Juan Sánchez Cotán — Juan Sánchez Cotán was a Spanish Baroque painter known for stark still lifes, or bodegones, with fruit, vegetables, and hanging game against black backgrounds. His best-known works include Still Life with Cardoon and Carrots and Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber.

• Annibale Carracci — Italian (Bolognese); Baroque (transition from Mannerism); Farnese Gallery ceiling frescoes (1597–1601, Rome); The Bean Eater (c. 1584–1585); co-founded the Accademia degli Incamminati in Bologna; major bridge from Mannerism to Baroque naturalism.

• Carracci family — The Carracci family was a Bolognese artistic family whose members included Annibale, Agostino, and Ludovico Carracci. They helped launch the Baroque through the Bolognese Academy and major fresco cycles such as the Palazzo Farnese ceiling.

• Flagellated Christ — Flagellated Christ depicts Jesus being whipped at the column, a scene also called Christ at the Column or the Scourging of Christ. The motif appears in Baroque art and devotional sculpture, including works associated with Caravaggio and later imitations.

• Religious art
  • Crucifixion of Jesus
    • Deposition from the Cross — The Deposition from the Cross, also called the Descent from the Cross or Deposition of Christ, is the religious scene of Christ being taken down from the crucifixion after the Crucifixion. It is a standard Christian subject and a common theme in Renaissance and Baroque painting, with famous versions by Rogier van der Weyden and Peter Paul Rubens, including Rubens’s triptych for Antwerp’s Cathedral of Our Lady. Other artists associated with the subject include Pontormo, Fra Angelico, and Perugino; depictions often emphasize mourners, ladders, and the careful lowering of Christ’s body.

• Beatrice Cenci — Beatrice Cenci was a Roman noblewoman executed for patricide and later turned into a tragic artistic subject. She appears in accounts of Caravaggio, later portraiture, and the legend that her ghost returns carrying her severed head.

• Biblical scenes
  • Judith and Holofernes — Judith and Holofernes is the biblical scene in which Judith beheads the Assyrian general after entering his tent. It is especially associated with Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Donatello’s bronze versions.
• Gentileschi family
  • Gentileschi — The Gentileschi were the Baroque painting family of Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, the latter famed for Judith Beheading Holofernes and Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting. Orazio Gentileschi was a Caravaggist painter who worked for Charles I and painted subjects such as Danaë and Susanna and the Elders.

• Jan Brueghel the Elder — Jan Brueghel the Elder was a Flemish painter nicknamed “Velvet” or “Velvet Brueghel” for his delicate style, especially in floral still lifes and flower painting. He also painted lush still lifes, crowded genre scenes, landscapes, animals, and background details for mythological scenes, and collaborated with Peter Paul Rubens on allegories and devotional scenes. His works include Bouquet with Irises, Allegory of Sight, Village Fair, and Latona and the Peasants.

• Peter Lely — Peter Lely was a Dutch-born court portraitist active in Restoration England. He is especially associated with portraits of Charles II’s court, the Windsor Beauties, and the Duchess of Cleveland.

• Sir Godfrey Kneller — Sir Godfrey Kneller was a German-born English portraitist who became the leading painter of Charles II’s court and later painted the Kit-Cat Club. He is also associated with the Hampton Court Beauties and other elegant late-Stuart portraits.

• Dutch Golden Age painting

  • The Jolly Toper — The Jolly Toper is a Dutch Baroque portrait of a smiling drinker holding out a tankard and gazing directly at the viewer. The title is shared by works associated with Judith Leyster and Frans Hals.

  • tronie — A tronie is a Dutch Golden Age character study, usually an unidentified head or half-length figure rather than a formal portrait. It often emphasizes exaggerated expression, costume, or lighting, as in works associated with Vermeer and Frans Hals.

• Pope Innocent X — Seventeenth-century pope who reigned in the mid-1600s as the Pamphili pope. He succeeded Urban VIII, reversed several of Urban’s policies, condemned the Peace of Westphalia, opposed Jansenism, supported the Spanish Habsburgs by refusing to recognize Portuguese independence from Spain, and was associated with the Wars of Castro. He was portrayed by Diego Velázquez in a famous 1650 seated portrait, later echoed in Francis Bacon’s studies, and is shown with the red papal cap and a letter.

• Jacques Callot — Jacques Callot was a French printmaker whose etchings influenced later artists such as Goya. He is especially known for The Miseries of War and for depictions of dwarves, hangings, and other scenes of Baroque violence and satire.

• Dutch genre painting
  • Old Woman Frying Eggs — Old Woman Frying Eggs is the Dutch genre painting showing an old woman with a spoon over a pot while a boy stands nearby. The work is often remembered for its domestic still life details, including the hanging ladles and utensils.

• The Matchmaker — The Matchmaker is a Dutch genre painting that shows a money-holder, a lute player, and a likely go-between arranging a liaison. Thornton Wilder’s play of the same name is a separate and famous comedy about Dolly Levi and Horace Vandergelder.

• vanitas — Vanitas is a still-life genre that uses skulls, decaying fruit, and other fading objects to stress the futility of life. The name comes from the Latin for emptiness and was especially common in seventeenth-century Northern European painting.

  • hourglass — An hourglass is a timekeeping device that measures the passage of time with falling sand. It appears frequently in art as an emblem of Time, mortality, and temperance.

  • human skull — A human skull is a common vanitas symbol in art, appearing as an emblem of mortality in works such as Holbein’s The Ambassadors and Dürer’s Saint Jerome in His Study. The skull is frequently shown in anamorphic or memento mori contexts.

  • Skulls — Skulls are a classic vanitas symbol in art, used to evoke death, mortality, and the transience of life. They appear in Day of the Dead imagery, phrenology, and racial pseudoscience, and in scientific contexts may be called crania. Art references often include Holbein’s The Ambassadors, Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull, still lifes by Cézanne and Zurbarán, and O’Keeffe’s skull paintings. A pile of skulls can also signify war or Mexican calaveras.

• Borghese family
  • Borghese — The Borghese family was a powerful Italian noble family associated with Scipione Borghese, a major patron of Caravaggio and Bernini. Their name also survives in the Galleria Borghese and in famous works such as the Borghese Gladiator and Bernini’s statues collected there.
• Pietro da Cortona
  • Allegory of Divine Providence and Barberini Power — Pietro da Cortona’s Allegory of Divine Providence and Barberini Power is the ceiling fresco of the Palazzo Barberini’s grand salon. The composition glorifies the Barberini family with giant bees, personifications, and allegorical figures such as Time, the Fates, and Rome.

• Palazzo Farnese — Palazzo Farnese is a Roman palace for which Annibale Carracci painted The Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne. The painting was commissioned in connection with the wedding celebrations of Duke Ranuccio of Parma.

• Agostino Tassi — Agostino Tassi was an Italian painter and quadratura specialist best known as the man who raped Artemisia Gentileschi. He is also connected to the architectural setting of Guercino’s Aurora fresco.

• Annibale Carracci — Annibale Carracci was a Bolognese Baroque painter who helped lead the move away from Mannerism and toward a more classical style. He is known for works such as The Choice of Hercules, The Flight into Egypt, Domine, Quo Vadis?, and the Farnese Gallery cycle The Loves of the Gods.

Eighteenth Century

• Jean-Antoine Watteau — French; Rococo; Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera (1717); invented the genre of the fête galante (elegant outdoor entertainment). He was associated with scenes of theater, elegant leisure, and commedia dell’arte figures. His best-known works include The Embarkation for Cythera, Gersaint’s Shop-Sign, and paintings of Pierrot, also called Gilles.

  • Do You Want to Succeed With Women? — Do You Want to Succeed With Women? is a Watteau painting built around flirtation and theatrical costume. It belongs to the artist’s Rococo world of masked figures, romantic mischief, and elegant garden scenes.

  • Gersaint’s Shop Sign — Gersaint’s Shop Sign is Watteau’s last major painting and an important work in the development of the fête galante. It depicts the Paris art dealer’s shop as workers pack away a portrait of Louis XIV.

  • Gilles — Gilles is Antoine Watteau’s painting of the lonely title clown standing in white as if on display. It features Commedia dell’arte figures around him and is sometimes called a portrait of Pierrot during intermission.

  • The Delights of Life — The Delights of Life is a Rococo painting by Jean-Antoine Watteau showing a lute-playing central figure surrounded by figures in a park-like social scene. Its composition includes a cello leaning against a stool and a dog in the right foreground.

  • The Embarkation for Cythera — Antoine Watteau’s fête galante depicts elegantly dressed lovers, cherubs, and a boat associated with the island of Venus/Aphrodite. It is a famous Rococo work noted for its airy pastoral color and romantic melancholy, and it survives in multiple versions, including the Louvre original and a later Berlin version. The scene is often described as either lovers preparing to depart for Cythera or departing from the island.

• François Boucher — French; Rococo; The Triumph of Venus (1740); Reclining Girl (Louise O’Murphy) (1752); light, decorative sensuality favored by Madame de Pompadour. He was also known for elegant mythological and pastoral scenes, including The Interrupted Sleep, The Toilette of Venus, The Rest on the Flight to Egypt, Rinaldo and Armida, The Rising of the Sun, and Vulcan Presenting Venus with Arms for Aeneas, as well as portraits of Madame de Pompadour.
  • The Toilet of Venus — The Toilet of Venus is François Boucher’s Rococo painting of the goddess preparing herself with the help of cherubs and a dove. The title is also used for Velázquez’s Venus at Her Mirror, the famous female nude later attacked by Mary Richardson.
• Jean-Honoré Fragonard — French; Rococo; The Swing (1767–1768); playful, pastel-toned aristocratic scenes. He was a French Rococo painter who also made The Progress of Love, The Bolt, Blind Man’s Bluff, and A Young Girl Reading; his early history painting was Coresus Sacrificing Himself to Save Callirhoe. He trained with Chardin and Boucher, won the Prix de Rome, and later fell from favor as Neoclassicism rose.

  • The Progress of Love — Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Progress of Love is a Rococo series commissioned by Madame du Barry for her villa. Its paintings, including The Meeting, The Lover Crowned, and The Surprise, depict stages of a romantic relationship in lush garden settings.

  • The Progress of Love in the Heart of a Young Woman — The Progress of Love in the Heart of a Young Woman is a Fragonard cycle of paintings depicting stages in a courtship. Its scenes include The Meeting, The Pursuit, and a moment in which the woman crowns her lover.

  • The Stolen Kiss — Fragonard’s The Stolen Kiss is a Rococo painting that shows a young man stealing a kiss from a woman in an elegant interior. The scene is framed by open doors and a flowing garment, emphasizing the concealed, intimate moment.

  • The Swing — Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Rococo painting shows a young woman in a pink dress riding a swing in a lush garden while her hidden admirer looks up her skirt. The playful scene includes a flying slipper, Cupid or a putto gesturing for silence, hidden onlookers, and a statue with a finger to its lips; a small dog appears in some descriptions. It is one of the classic late Rococo masterpieces.

• William Hogarth — British; Rococo/Social Satire; Marriage A-la-Mode series (1743–1745); A Rake’s Progress (1733–1735); moralistic narrative series exposing social vices. An eighteenth-century English artist famous for satirical prints and other moral narrative series, including The Four Stages of Cruelty. He also wrote The Analysis of Beauty, in which he praised the serpentine line, and made works such as The Bagnio and a print showing Time and a jar labeled Varnish, both tied to criticism of fashionable life.

  • A Harlot’s Progress — William Hogarth’s series of engravings follows Moll Hackabout, a country girl who comes to London, is drawn into prostitution, and falls through scenes of arrest and Bridewell Prison to death from syphilis. One scene shows her coffin serving as a tavern bar, and the work is a satirical attack on vice and corruption and one of Hogarth’s best-known moral satires.

  • A Rake’s Progress

    • The Rake’s Progress — William Hogarth’s series traces Tom Rakewell’s rise and ruin through inheritance, fashionable corruption, gambling, debt, vice, dissipation, and madness. The cycle ends in Bedlam, with Sarah Young remaining a sympathetic figure throughout the story.

    • Tom Rakewell — Tom Rakewell is the reckless protagonist of William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress. He rises through vice and gambling before ending up in Bedlam, where Sarah Young tries to comfort him.

  • Gin Lane — Gin Lane is William Hogarth’s engraving attacking the ruin caused by gin consumption in London. It depicts drunken neglect, urban misery, and a grim counterpart to the calmer Beer Street.

  • Marriage A-la-Mode — William Hogarth’s satirical series about an arranged marriage and its disastrous consequences, ending with death, adultery, and scandal. Clues often mention Viscount Squanderfield, the Bagnio, and the final poisoning scene. The six-part series includes the marriage contract, the disorderly breakfast scene, and medical consequences of vice.

    • Earl Squanderfield — Earl Squanderfield is the extravagantly titled nobleman in Hogarth’s Marriage A-la-Mode series who arranges his son’s marriage to a wealthy merchant’s daughter. The son inherits the title and appears amid the series’ satirical portrait of aristocratic vanity and ruin.

    • Silvertongue — Silvertongue is the smooth-talking lawyer in William Hogarth’s Marriage A-la-Mode who conducts an affair with the Countess. He is the figure linked to the Countess’s husband’s death, his escape through the window, and later news of his hanging at Tyburn.

  • Orpin the Parish Clerk — Orpin the Parish Clerk is a painting by William Hogarth, one of his portrait subjects from English art. The title refers to the parish clerk rather than a mythological or literary figure.

  • The Four Stages of Cruelty — William Hogarth’s The Four Stages of Cruelty traces Tom Nero from abusing animals to murder, execution, and dissection. The series is a moralizing set of engravings that uses cruelty as a warning about vice and social collapse.
• Thomas Gainsborough — British; Rococo/Portraiture; The Blue Boy (c. 1770); Mr. and Mrs. Andrews (c. 1750); fluid brushwork in portraiture and landscape. He is an eighteenth-century English painter noted for portraits and elegant rural scenes such as The Blue Boy and Mr. and Mrs. Andrews. His work also includes The Harvest Wagon, The Morning Walk, the portrait of Jonathan Buttall in royal dress, and the royal portrait of George III and Queen Charlotte; later artists such as Yinka Shonibare reimagined his subjects.
  • Mr. and Mrs. Andrews — Thomas Gainsborough’s 1750 double portrait of the newly married Suffolk landowners Robert Andrews and his wife. It is set in a broad, expansive landscape of their estate and is noted for its unfinished space; Robert Andrews holds a rifle while his wife sits on a bench.
    • Andrews — The surname Andrews appears in the title Mr and Mrs Andrews, Gainsborough’s portrait of a young married couple posed beneath a tree in the English countryside. It also belongs to Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, a novel written in imitation of Cervantes and connected to Pamela and Shamela.

  • The Blue Boy — The Blue Boy is Thomas Gainsborough’s famous full-length portrait of a young man in blue costume, traditionally identified as Jonathan Buttall. The figure stands with a hand on his hip and a plumed hat in the other hand, and the painting is often discussed in relation to Gainsborough’s rivalry with Reynolds and the influence of Van Dyck. It now hangs at the Huntington, opposite Pinkie.

  • The Morning Walk — The Morning Walk, or Portrait of Mr. and Mrs. William Hallett, is a Gainsborough conversation piece showing a strolling couple with a small white dog. The painting is remembered for the woman’s elegant dress, the man’s relaxed pose, and the pastoral setting.

  • Thomas Gainesborough — Thomas Gainsborough was an English painter known for portraits such as The Blue Boy, Mrs. Siddons, and Mr. and Mrs. Andrews. His work also includes celebrated landscapes like The Morning Walk and Cattle Crossing a Bridge. He is a standard clue for early English landscape painting and fashionable portraiture in the eighteenth century.

  • The Harvest Wagon — The Harvest Wagon is a genre painting by Thomas Gainsborough showing a rustic scene with a wagon, horses, and figures in a wooded landscape. The title also refers to multiple versions of the same composition.
• Joshua Reynolds — British; Neoclassicism; Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces (1765); first president of the Royal Academy; elevated portraiture to history painting status. He was a leading English portraitist of the Grand Style and painted Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse, Augustus Keppel in an Apollo-like pose, Lord Heathfield, and the child portrait later known as The Age of Innocence.

  • Augustus Keppel — Augustus Keppel was a celebrated British naval officer and a subject of Joshua Reynolds portraiture. Clues often mention the Apollo Belvedere pose, Reynolds’s Grand Style, and portraits such as Augustus Keppel and Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse.

  • Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse — Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse is a 1784 portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds. It depicts the actress Sarah Siddons enthroned as a classical tragic figure, flanked by shadowy allegorical attendants.

  • Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse — Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse is a Joshua Reynolds portrait of the actress Sarah Siddons as Melpomene. The painting uses allegories of Pity and Terror, and Reynolds later made another copy now in the Dulwich Gallery.

• Jacques-Louis David — French; Neoclassicism; Oath of the Horatii (1784); The Death of Marat (1793); Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801); painted the French Revolution and its aftermath; severe, morally charged compositions. He also painted The Death of Socrates, The Coronation of Napoleon, and Roman-history scenes such as The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, as well as portraits like Madame Récamier and the double portrait of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his wife. Later works from his Brussels period include portraits with sharp props and symbolic details such as letters, clocks, and scientific instruments.

  • Andromache Mourning Hector — Andromache Mourning Hector is Jacques-Louis David’s neoclassical painting of Andromache grieving over Hector’s corpse. The composition includes a seated, shrouded Hector and the mourning child of the title figures.

  • Intervention of the Sabine Women — Intervention of the Sabine Women is Jacques-Louis David’s painting of women, children, and families stepping between Romans and Sabines to halt combat. The work is associated with Hersilia and with David’s later neoclassical effort to frame reconciliation after violence.

  • Mars Being Disarmed by Venus and the Three Graces — Mars Being Disarmed by Venus and the Three Graces is Jacques-Louis David’s final painting, completed in exile in Brussels. It depicts Venus and the Graces stripping Mars of his armor and symbols of war in a mythological scene crowded with doves, wreaths, and a reclining god.

  • Napoleon Crossing the Alps — Napoleon Crossing the Alps is Jacques-Louis David’s equestrian portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte leading his army over the Great St. Bernard Pass. The painting is famous for Napoleon’s billowing cloak, the rearing horse, and the names Hannibal and Charlemagne carved on the rocks below.
    • crossing the Alps — Crossing the Alps is the military feat associated with Hannibal and Napoleon, especially in famous paintings and later artistic reimaginings. The clue set points to passage over Alpine routes such as the Great St. Bernard Pass. Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps is the canonical visual reference for the topic. Turner and Delaroche also painted memorable versions of this dramatic crossing.

  • Napoleon Crossing the Alps; or Bonaparte at the Saint-Bernard Pass — Napoleon Crossing the Alps, also known as Bonaparte at the Saint-Bernard Pass, is Jacques-Louis David’s famous equestrian portrait of Napoleon. It shows him dramatically pointing toward the pass while mounted on a rearing horse.

  • Napoleon in His Study — Napoleon in His Study is a Jacques-Louis David portrait of Napoleon at his desk, shown working late by candlelight.

  • Oath of the Horatii
    • Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii — Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii is a neoclassical painting by the French painter Jacques-Louis David. It is one of the standard examples of late eighteenth-century history painting.

  • Paris and Helen — Paris and Helen, also called The Love of Paris and Helen, is a 1788 painting of the Greek lovers seated on a bed in an otherwise empty room. The man holds a harp while Helen rests an arm on his shoulder.

  • Portrait of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and His Wife, Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze
    • Portrait of Atoine-Laurent Lavoisier and His Wife, Marie-Anne Pierette Paulze — Jacques-Louis David’s portrait of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his wife Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze shows the chemist at a writing desk beside glassware from his laboratory. The painting also emphasizes Marie-Anne’s presence and status as both collaborator and subject, with objects arranged to allude to Lavoisier’s scientific work.

  • Portrait of Madame Récamier — Portrait of Madame Récamier is Jacques-Louis David’s neoclassical image of a Parisian society hostess reclining on a chaise longue in a white dress. The pose became influential enough to inspire later versions and parodies, including Magritte’s reinterpretation and Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque.

  • The Coronation of Napoleon — The Coronation of Napoleon is Jacques-Louis David’s grand depiction of the emperor crowning Josephine in Notre Dame. Pope Pius VII, Madame Mère, and a crowd of nobles and clergy appear in the ceremonial scene.

  • The Death of Marat — Jacques-Louis David’s famous painting depicts the murdered French revolutionary journalist and leader Jean-Paul Marat in his bath, immediately after Charlotte Corday’s attack. Marat is shown slumped with a letter and quill nearby; the work is also noted for its wooden block signature and later responses by artists such as Edvard Munch.
    • The Death of Marat or La Mort de Marat — The Death of Marat is Jacques-Louis David’s famous Neoclassical painting of the murdered French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat in his bath. Its clues usually mention Charlotte Corday, the bloodied knife, the letter in Marat’s hand, and the image’s comparison to a revolutionary Pietà.
  • The Death of Socrates — The Death of Socrates is Jacques-Louis David’s neoclassical painting of the philosopher calmly taking the hemlock cup while his students grieve around him. The work features the prison bed, lamp, lyre, shackles, and Socrates pointing upward as he rejects death fearlessly. It is one of David’s best-known history paintings from the French neoclassical tradition.
    • The Death of Socrates or La Mort de Socrates — The Death of Socrates is Jacques-Louis David’s neoclassical painting of Socrates calmly accepting hemlock while his companions react in grief.

  • The Intervention of the Sabine Women — The Intervention of the Sabine Women is Jacques-Louis David’s 1799 history painting about Hersilia separating Romulus from Titus Tatius in the aftermath of the Sabine women’s abduction. It is famous for its frieze-like composition, nudity, and for being displayed at the Louvre with a mirror so viewers saw themselves in the scene.

  • The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons — The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons is Jacques-Louis David’s painting of Lucius Junius Brutus grieving after ordering the execution of his sons. The work contrasts a dark, stern Brutus with a brightly lit group of mourning women and was exhibited in the early Revolutionary period.

  • The Tennis Court Oath — Jacques-Louis David’s unfinished The Tennis Court Oath depicts the dramatic 1789 pledge of the Third Estate to remain united until France had a constitution. The scene centers on Jean-Sylvain Bailly and a throng of revolutionaries in a wind-swept hall, making it one of the signature images of the French Revolution.

  • The Tennis Court Oath at Versailles — Jacques-Louis David’s sketch depicts the Tennis Court Oath, with deputies raising their arms in solidarity during the early French Revolution.
• Antonio Canova — Italian; Neoclassical sculpture; Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss (1787–1793); Perseus with the Head of Medusa (1800–1801); smooth marble idealism. He also made Venus Victrix, the Pauline Borghese portrait, and the tomb of Clement XIV, often working with mythological and funerary subjects.

  • Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker — Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker is Antonio Canova’s neoclassical sculpture of Napoleon in the guise of a Roman god of war. The figure holds a staff and an orb topped by Nike, with a toga-draped body and a contrapposto stance.

  • Pauline Borghese as Venus Victrix — Pauline Borghese as Venus Victrix is Antonio Canova’s marble sculpture of Napoleon’s sister reclining on a Roman sofa. The work alludes to the Judgment of Paris by placing an apple in her hand and was designed to be rotated on its base.

  • Venus Victrix — Venus Victrix is Antonio Canova’s neoclassical sculpture of Pauline Bonaparte reclining nude as Venus and holding an apple. The work was commissioned by Camillo Borghese and depicts the sitter on an ornate bed or divan.

• Katsushika Hokusai — Japanese; Ukiyo-e; The Great Wave off Kanagawa (c. 1831, from Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji); Red Fuji (c. 1831); manga sketchbooks (from 1814); the most internationally recognized Japanese artist; worked into his late eighties. He is also associated with Fine Wind, Clear Morning and other landscapes from Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, and his prints were highly influential beyond Japan.

  • The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife — The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife is Hokusai’s famous erotic woodblock print showing an ama diver entwined with octopuses. It is often cited as a precursor to later tentacle-themed erotic art.

  • The Great Wave — The Great Wave is Hokusai’s famous woodblock print showing a huge wave curling over fishing boats with Mount Fuji in the background. It comes from the series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji and became one of the best-known images of Japanese art.

  • The Great Wave off Kanagawa — The Great Wave off Kanagawa is Hokusai’s famous ukiyo-e woodblock print showing a towering tsunami threatening boats with Mount Fuji in the background. It is the first print in the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji series and is famous for its use of Prussian blue.
    • a wave — A wave is the subject of Hokusai’s famous Great Wave off Kanagawa and related marine imagery in Romantic and Japanese art. Clues often focus on enormous surf, boats in danger, and the print’s place in The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.
  • Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji — Hokusai’s ukiyo-e woodblock print series centered on Mount Fuji. It includes The Great Wave off Kanagawa, Fine Wind, Clear Morning (Red Fuji), scenes such as a rainstorm beneath the summit, the windy view with papers flying from a backpack, bridges, waterfalls, and boats around the mountain, plus images like boats in rough surf and a man working inside a barrel. Later-added views expanded the original thirty-six prints.
    • 36 Views of Mount Fuji — Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji is Hokusai’s famous ukiyo-e series portraying Mount Fuji from many perspectives. Its best-known print is The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
• Francisco Goya — Spanish; Romanticism/Transition; The Third of May 1808 (1814–1815); Saturn Devouring His Son (c. 1819–1823, Black Paintings); The Nude Maja (c. 1797–1800); Disasters of War (etchings, 1810–1820); documented Napoleonic atrocities and personal darkness. He was also known for court portraiture and for works such as Los Caprichos and The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters; later proposals also associate him with The Charge of the Mamelukes and note that he was deafened by illness.
  • Black Paintings — The Black Paintings, or Pinturas Negras, are the late series of dark, disturbing murals Francisco Goya painted on the walls of the Quinta del Sordo. Among the best-known works in the set are Saturn Devouring His Children, Witches’ Sabbath, and Fight with Cudgels.

    • Quinta del Sordo — Quinta del Sordo was the house where Goya painted the Black Paintings, including Saturn Devouring His Son, directly on the walls. The building’s name refers to a former owner who had lost his hearing.

    • Saturn Devouring One of His Sons — Goya’s Saturn Devouring One of His Sons is one of the Black Paintings and now hangs in the Prado. The terrifying image shows the titan Saturn consuming one of his children with a wild, animalistic expression.

  • Charles IV of Spain and His Family — Charles IV of Spain and His Family is Goya’s 1801 royal group portrait, modeled in part on Las Meninas. Its sharply unflattering composition includes Goya himself in the background and presents the Spanish royal family with striking realism.

  • cudgels — Cudgels are the weapons shown in Goya’s Black Paintings scene of two men fighting in the mud. The image is conventionally titled Fight with Cudgels or Fight to the Death with Clubs.

  • Family of Charles IV — The Family of Charles IV is a Goya portrait of the Spanish royal family. It is often noted for echoing the composition of Velázquez’s Las Meninas while presenting the sitters with an almost unflinching realism.

  • Francisco — Francisco Goya was a Spanish painter and printmaker whose works range from The Third of May, 1808 to the caprichos and Black Paintings. He is associated with unsettling images such as The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters and Saturn Devouring His Son. His late art combines political violence, satire, and nightmare imagery.

  • Los Caprichos — Los Caprichos is Francisco Goya’s famous series of eighty aquatint prints, best known for The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. The set satirizes clergy, superstition, and social folly through grotesque images of donkeys, owls, witches, and absurd human behavior.

  • Saturn Devouring His Children — Saturn Devouring His Children is one of Goya’s Black Paintings, showing the titan Saturn tearing apart and eating one of his own children. The work is a grim mythological scene identified by Saturn’s wild expression and the bloody, headless body he holds.

  • The 3rd of May 1808 — Francisco Goya’s 1814 painting depicts the French execution of Madrid insurgents during the Peninsular War, specifically the Spanish uprising against Napoleonic forces on 3 May 1808. It is remembered for the stark firing squad, the lantern-lit division between soldiers and civilians, and the man in yellow with his arms raised before the guns.

  • The Colossus or El Coloso — The Colossus, or El Coloso, is a work traditionally attributed to Francisco Goya and associated with a giant figure striding over a panicked landscape. It is often discussed alongside Goya’s darker images of war and national crisis.

  • The Disasters of War — The Disasters of War is Francisco Goya’s series of 83 engravings on the violence and suffering of the Peninsular War. Its bleak scenes include executions, famine, and grotesque wartime imagery, making it one of Goya’s great responses to the French invasion of Spain.

  • The Family of Charles IV — Francisco Goya’s The Family of Charles IV portrays the Spanish royal family in a famously unsparing, almost satirical group portrait. Goya includes himself in the shadowed background, standing behind the royals as if painting them from a mirror.

  • The Maja Clothed and the Maja Nude — These two Goya paintings depict the same reclining female subject in clothed and nude versions. They were confiscated by the Inquisition in 1815 and led to obscenity charges against the artist.

  • The Maja Dressed, The Maja Clothed, La maja vestida — Goya’s The Maja Dressed portrays a reclining woman in a clinging dress posed in a similar attitude to his more famous nude version. The painting is often linked by tradition to the Duchess of Alba.

  • The Nude Maja — Francisco de Goya’s famous reclining nude portrait shows a woman lying on a couch and staring directly at the viewer. It is often paired with The Clothed Maja, noted for its controversial frankness, and has been linked to Pepita Tudó and the Duchess of Alba; one account also mentions a hidden pulley display for the painting. It was later censored on stamp reproductions and is often cited as a predecessor to Manet’s Olympia.

  • The Second of May, 1808 — Francisco Goya’s painting depicts the violent uprising in Madrid against French troops and Napoleon’s Mameluke cavalry; it is paired with The Third of May, 1808, which shows the executions that followed the revolt, as a memorial to Spanish resistance to Napoleon.

  • The Second of May, 1808 at the Puerta del Sol — This Goya painting depicts the uprising in Madrid against the French occupation, with a man on a white horse being attacked near the Puerta del Sol. Its title gives the date of the events it portrays.

  • The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters — “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” is a Goya Capricho showing the artist asleep at a desk while bats and owls swarm around him. The title reflects Enlightenment ideas and the dangers of abandoning reason, a theme associated with Goya’s satirical print series Los Caprichos.

  • The Third of May, 1808: The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid — The Third of May, 1808 is Goya’s famous execution scene of Spanish civilians by Napoleon’s soldiers. Typical clues include the white-shirted central victim, the lantern-lit firing squad, and its companion piece The Charge of the Mamelukes.

  • The Third of May 1808 — Goya, 1814–1815 (Prado, Madrid); depicts the execution of Spanish civilians by Napoleonic firing squad; the white-shirted central figure’s outstretched arms echo a crucifixion; a founding work of modern political painting, directly inspiring Manet’s Execution of Maximilian and Picasso’s Guernica. Also known by Spanish titles referring to the executions on Príncipe Pío Hill in Madrid; it is dated 1814–1815 and is in the Prado, Madrid.
    • The Third of May — Francisco Goya’s The Third of May, 1808 shows a firing squad executing helpless men under a dark sky, with the victim in a white shirt and raised arms at the center.

  • Saturn Devouring His Son — Goya, c. 1819–1823 (Prado, Madrid); one of the fourteen “Black Paintings” transferred from his house, the Quinta del Sordo; a wild-eyed Saturn clutches and bites a human figure; painted directly on plaster in his home, not intended for exhibition. It depicts the Roman god Saturn devouring one of his children, with the grotesque, wide-eyed figure holding a bloodied corpse.

  • The Black Paintings — Goya, c. 1819–1823; fourteen mural paintings done in oil directly on the walls of Goya’s country house outside Madrid; include Saturn Devouring His Son, Two Old Men, The Witches’ Sabbath, and The Dog; transferred to canvas and acquired by the Prado; among the most psychologically extreme works in Western art. The paintings were made at Goya’s Quinta del Sordo, his country house outside Madrid.

  • Disasters of War — Goya, etching series, 1810–1820 (published posthumously 1863); 82 prints documenting atrocities of the Peninsular War; includes And There Is Nothing to Be Done (plate 15); foundational for modern documentary war art. Its Spanish title is Los desastres de la guerra. The plates were published posthumously in 1863.

• Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal) — Italian (Venetian); Baroque/Veduta; Venice: The Basin of San Marco on Ascension Day (c. 1733–1734); topographically precise views of Venice and London; principal vedutista of the 18th century. Other works include The Stonemason’s Yard, views of the Grand Canal and Rialto, and London scenes. Joseph Smith was an important collector of his work.

• John Singleton Copley (1738–1815) — American (Boston-born); Colonial and British portraiture; Watson and the Shark (1778); Paul Revere (c. 1768); Brook Watson and the Shark is a dramatic history painting depicting a real shark attack in Havana Harbor; after 1774 he lived in London, painting grand history pictures for the Royal Academy. His portraits often feature polished props and theatrical lighting, and his works include Boy with Squirrel and Henry Pelham.

  • Brook Watson and the Shark — Brook Watson and the Shark is John Singleton Copley’s dramatic painting of a boy attacked by a shark in Havana harbor. The work is often noted for its references to Watson’s later status as a baronet and for interpretations involving the Revolutionary War or religious imagery.

  • The Death of Major Peirson — John Singleton Copley’s The Death of Major Peirson portrays the death of the British commander at the Battle of Jersey. The dramatic scene centers on Peirson’s body amid combat, British flags, and the reaction of soldiers and civilians.

  • Watson and the Shark — John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark is a dramatic painting of a shark attack in Havana Harbor. It shows the nude title figure being rescued by men in a boat, while others spear the shark; the scene is known for its theatrical expressions, Morro Castle in the background, and the gruesome missing leg associated with Brook Watson.

• Jean-Marc Nattier — Jean-Marc Nattier was an eighteenth-century French painter known for elegant portraits of Madame de Pompadour in classical roles such as Diana the Huntress. His depictions of her belong to the Rococo world of Louis XV’s court, where portraiture often blended likeness with allegory and self-fashioning.

• Reading
  • reading a book — The clue refers to reading a book, a favorite subject in paintings of women at leisure by artists such as Boucher, Fragonard, and Corot. These works often show a woman absorbed in the activity indoors or in a pastoral setting.
• Rococo art
  • Madame de Pompadour — Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, marquise de Pompadour, was the mistress of Louis XV and an influential patron at the French court. She supported Voltaire, helped shape the Diplomatic Revolution, and is linked with the saying “after us, the Deluge.” She was a major patron of Rococo art and was repeatedly portrayed by François Boucher, Jean-Marc Nattier, Carle van Loo, and others, often in allegorical guises such as Diana or a Turkish lady.

• Rosalba Carriera — Rosalba Carriera was an eighteenth-century Venetian artist who rose from decorating snuff boxes to becoming a celebrated portraitist. She painted European elites such as Charles VI and Louis XV and is associated with refined Rococo portraiture.

• Jean-Baptiste Greuze — Jean-Baptiste Greuze was an 18th-century French genre painter associated with sentimental domestic scenes and moralizing subjects. His best-known works include The Broken Pitcher, The Village Bride, and Young Girl Weeping over Her Dead Bird.

• Hubert Robert — Hubert Robert was a French painter associated with capricci and dramatic views of ruins, especially Roman ruins. He painted imaginative scenes of the Louvre and other buildings crumbling or transformed into picturesque wrecks, earning him the nickname “Robert of the Ruins.”

• Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin — Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin was an eighteenth-century French painter known for still lifes and quiet, intimate domestic genre scenes. His art is marked by subdued light, earthy color, and careful attention to everyday objects and activities. Works associated with him include The Ray, Boy with a Top, Saying Grace, and paintings using motifs such as bubbles, a surprised cat, and a dead fish. Other works include The House of Cards, The Governess, and Soap Bubbles.
  • The House of Cards — The House of Cards is a Chardin painting showing Monsieur Le Noir’s son carefully building a fragile card structure. The work belongs to the artist’s domestic genre scenes and survives in multiple versions.
• Joseph Wright of Derby — An English painter from Derby, noted for candlelit scenes of scientific demonstration and industrial labor. His best-known works include A Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, The Air Pump, and The Orrery, along with moonlit landscapes, scenes of volcanic eruption, industrial life, and a dramatic depiction of a glowing phosphorus experiment.

  • An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump — An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump is Joseph Wright of Derby’s famous 1768 painting of a scientific demonstration. It is noted for the candlelit central scene and the crowd of spectators reacting to the air pump and the bird.

  • An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump — An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump is Joseph Wright of Derby’s dramatic candlelit painting of a scientific demonstration. A bird is shown inside the air pump while worried onlookers react around the scene. The work is famous for its Enlightenment contrast between experiment, spectacle, and emotion, and it has inspired later theatrical and literary references.

  • The Experiment with an Air Pump — The Experiment with an Air Pump is Joseph Wright of Derby’s famous scene of a public scientific demonstration, set around a table with a bird in a glass jar at its center. It is often remembered for its dramatic lighting and for contrasting curiosity, experimentation, and unease.

• Thomas Rowlandson — Thomas Rowlandson was a British artist best known for caricatures and satirical watercolor scenes rather than successful landscape painting. His works include the Dr. Syntax series, along with illustrations for Goldsmith and Smollett.

• Alexander Cozens — Alexander Cozens was an eighteenth-century British watercolor landscapist best known for his “blot” method of composing scenes from abstract stains. He explained the technique in A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape.

• Adelaide Labille-Guiard — Adélaïde Labille-Guiard was a French portrait painter and rival of Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. Her best-known self-portrait shows her at an easel with two pupils, emphasizing her professional status as an artist.

• Angelica Kauffmann — Angelica Kauffmann was a Swiss-born eighteenth-century painter associated with Neoclassicism and one of the first female founding members of London’s Royal Academy. She worked in England and Italy. Her works include the history painting Cornelia Presenting Her Children as Her Treasures, the allegorical painting The Artist in the Character of Design Listening to the Inspiration of Poetry, a portrait of Johann Joachim Winckelmann that helped establish her reputation, and self-portraits contrasting or hesitating between Music and Painting.
  • Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi, Pointing to her Children as her Treasures — Angelica Kauffman’s painting Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi, Pointing to her Children as her Treasures depicts the Roman matron Cornelia proudly presenting her children as her true wealth. It is one of Kauffman’s best-known works and shows a woman in red offering jewelry to Cornelia.

• Gilbert Stuart — Gilbert Stuart was an American portrait painter best known for his images of George Washington, especially the unfinished Athenaeum portrait used on the one-dollar bill. His work also includes the Lansdowne portrait and The Skater, and he was active in both England and the United States. He also painted the first five U.S. presidents.

• Hyacinthe Rigaud — Hyacinthe Rigaud was a leading French portrait painter of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, associated with Louis XIV’s 1701 state portrait. He is especially known for grand, polished court portraits, including his famous image of Louis XIV in ceremonial dress during the era of the Sun King.

• Johan Zoffany
  • The Tribuna of the Uffizi — The Tribuna of the Uffizi is Johan Zoffany’s painting of the Uffizi’s octagonal gallery packed with famous canvases and sculptures.

• Johann Zoffany — Johann Zoffany was a German neoclassical painter known for The Tribuna of the Uffizi and group portraits connected to the Royal Academy. His works also include theatrical conversation pieces of David Garrick in character.

• Mary Moser — Mary Moser was one of the two women founders of the Royal Academy, alongside Angelica Kauffman. She is commonly clued through Zoffany’s group portrait of the Academy and through Kauffman’s allegories of painting and music.

• Sarah Siddons — Sarah Siddons was a famed eighteenth-century actress often painted by Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough. She is especially remembered in Reynolds’s portrait of her as the tragic muse, Melpomene, and in later images emphasizing her dramatic presence and aristocratic pose.

• Sir Thomas Lawrence — Sir Thomas Lawrence was a leading British portrait painter and a president of the Royal Academy after Benjamin West. He is especially remembered for grand manner portraits such as Pinkie and The Red Boy.

• Thomas Lawrence — Thomas Lawrence was an English portrait painter best known for works such as Pinkie and The Red Boy. He succeeded Joshua Reynolds as Painter-in-Ordinary to the King, and his larger canvases include Satan Summoning Up His Legions and Kemble as Hamlet.
  • Pinkie — Pinkie is Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of Sarah Barrett Moulton, usually identified by its nickname. The painting is often paired with Gainsborough’s Blue Boy at the Huntington Library, and the two works are among the most famous chromatically titled portraits in English art.

• Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun — Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun was an eighteenth-century French portrait painter and official artist to Marie Antoinette, known for elegant portraits of the queen and her circle, as well as many self-portraits. Her sitters and subjects included Madame du Barry, Emma Hamilton, Catherine the Great’s family, and Lord Byron, and her works included Peace Bringing Back Abundance. She was admitted to the French Academy with royal support, and her memoirs, Souvenirs, describe her life at court; her royal connections also led to exile after the French Revolution.

• Benjamin West — Benjamin West was an American-born history painter who became second president of the Royal Academy in London. He is best known for The Death of General Wolfe, as well as dramatic neoclassical scenes such as Death on the Pale Horse and Archangel Michael Binding the Devil.

  • Death of General Wolfe — The Death of General Wolfe is Benjamin West’s famous painting of the British general’s death at the Battle of Quebec. The dramatic battle scene places Wolfe among officers and Indigenous figures on the Plains of Abraham.

  • Death on the Pale Horse — Death on the Pale Horse is Benjamin West’s dramatic apocalyptic painting with the mounted figure of Death at the center. The title also connects to Albert Pinkham Ryder’s later painting known as The Race Track.

  • The Death of General Wolfe — Benjamin West’s The Death of General Wolfe depicts the dying British commander at the Battle of Quebec in a controversial contemporary style rather than in classical dress. The painting includes Simon Fraser, a Native American figure in a thinking pose, and the wounded Marquis de Montcalm in the background. It became one of the best-known historical paintings of the eighteenth century.

  • The Death of Wolfe — The Death of Wolfe is Benjamin West’s famous painting of General James Wolfe dying after the Battle of Quebec. The arrangement of the figures recalls Renaissance depictions of the deposition of Christ and became important for treating a contemporary historical event with unusual realism.

• Anton Raphael Mengs — Anton Raphael Mengs was an eighteenth-century German painter and an early leader of Neoclassicism. He is associated with works such as Parnassus, the Villa Albani fresco praised by Winckelmann, and the Madrid palace ceiling painting Apotheosis of Trajan.

• Le Brun — Le Brun is the surname of Charles Le Brun, Louis XIV’s chief painter and organizer of Versailles decoration. It is also the married name of Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, the portraitist famous for paintings of Marie Antoinette.

• George Stubbs — George Stubbs was a British painter best known for his anatomically precise horse portraits, especially Whistlejacket. He also published a pioneering study of horse anatomy and became famous for painting racehorses and sporting scenes. His work extended to other animals as well, including a dingo and a rhino, but he is chiefly remembered as the great equine painter of eighteenth-century Britain. Quizbowl clues often link him to the National Gallery and to studies based on dissected animals.

• French Directoire portraiture
  • Madame Récamier — A French socialite and salon hostess of the French Directoire period, famous for Jacques-Louis David’s portrait showing her reclining in a white Empire dress on a chaise longue or sofa. François Gérard also painted her reclining on a divan, and her image inspired later depictions by Ingres, including La Grande Odalisque, and René Magritte’s surreal version with her body replaced by a coffin.
• Giovanni Battista Piranesi
  • Imaginary Prisons — Imaginary Prisons is a series of sixteen etchings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi showing vast subterranean vaults and elaborate machinery. Its staircases and impossible spaces famously influenced later artists such as M. C. Escher.
• Giovanni Battista Tiepolo — Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was a Venetian Rococo painter famous for monumental frescoes full of light, allegory, theatrical movement, and illusionism. His works include Apollo and the Continents at Würzburg, The Apotheosis of Spain, The Banquet of Cleopatra, The Arrival of the French Ambassador (1735), and palace decorations in Venice and at the Würzburg Residenz for patrons such as Charles III and Balthasar Neumann.

  • Apollo and the Continents — Apollo and the Continents is a major ceiling fresco cycle by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, the great Venetian Rococo painter. Clues often point to his Würzburg Residence decorations, the Palazzo Labia series, and paintings such as Scipio Africanus Freeing Massiva and The Apotheosis of Spain.

  • The Apotheosis of Spain — The Apotheosis of Spain is one of the grand ceiling allegories painted by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, the Venetian master of late Baroque and Rococo frescoes. Questions about him often also mention the Würzburg Residence, Apollo and the Continents, and other mythological-celebratory compositions.

• Kitagawa Utamaro — This Japanese ukiyo-e artist was a master of bijin-ga, especially portraits of beautiful women. He is known for works like Three Beauties of the Present Day and for arrest after depicting Toyotomi Hideyoshi surrounded by concubines.

• Maja — A maja was a fashionable lower-class Spanish woman, often depicted by Goya in both nude and clothed versions. The best-known examples are The Nude Maja and The Clothed Maja, works that help identify this social type and style of dress.

• Spanish social types
  • majas — Majas are elaborately dressed Spanish lower-class women often depicted by Goya. They appear in works such as the paired nude and clothed portraits of the same woman and in scenes like The Parasol.

Nineteenth-Century Artists

Follow nineteenth-century artists through changing subjects and techniques.

Nineteenth Century: Romanticism and Realism

• Romanticism, Landscape, and History Painting
  • Eugène Delacroix — French; Romanticism; Liberty Leading the People (1830); The Death of Sardanapalus (1827); Women of Algiers (1834); vivid color and dramatic movement against Neoclassical restraint. He is also known for The Massacre of Chios, The Barque of Dante, and Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi; a North African trip influenced his later style.
    • Death of Sardanapalus — Eugène Delacroix’s dramatic Romantic painting based on Byron’s story of the doomed Assyrian ruler Sardanapalus. It shows the king reclining on a huge red bed while destruction unfolds around him: servants, concubines, slaves, treasures, and animals are being destroyed or killed as the Medes ravage the palace and household. The work is famous for its chaotic composition, vivid red color, tangled bodies, and scenes of sensuous, exoticized violence.
      • Death of Sardanapulus — The Death of Sardanapalus is Delacroix’s dramatic Romantic painting of the doomed Assyrian king, inspired by Byron. The work is famous for its diagonals, luxuriant chaos, and the king reclining while destruction unfolds around him.

    • Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople — Delacroix’s The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople is an 1840 painting of the Fourth Crusade’s sack of the city. The scene shows mounted crusaders before the Bosporus with civilians and casualties filling the foreground.

    • Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople on 12 April 1204 — Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople on 12 April 1204 is a Delacroix painting from 1840. It depicts the sack of Constantinople, with a foreground procession of Baldwin VI of Flanders amid the devastation.

    • Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi — Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi is Eugène Delacroix’s allegorical painting about the destruction of the Greek town by Ottoman forces. The title figure stands above the ruins, and the work is often paired with Delacroix’s Massacre at Chios in clues about Greek independence. Its imagery includes the dead insurgent’s hand and a sorrowful, personified Greece.

    • Ovid Among the Scythians — Ovid Among the Scythians is a late Eugène Delacroix painting showing the poet Ovid in exile among nomads near the Black Sea. Its foreground includes a mare being milked, while Ovid sits in blue robes amid the surrounding figures.

    • Scenes of the Massacre at Chios
      • Scenes of the Massacre at Chios: Greek Families Awaiting Death or Slavery — Delacroix’s Scenes of the Massacre at Chios shows Greek families awaiting death or slavery during the Greek War of Independence. The work is known for its dramatic light, crowded foreground, and the artist’s revisions to the background after seeing Constable’s The Hay Wain.

    • The Barque of Dante — Eugène Delacroix’s early painting based on the Inferno shows Dante and Virgil crossing the waters of hell in a boat, surrounded by damned souls attacking or struggling in the water. It is also known for its dramatic scene, with Dante shown in a white coat and smoke rising from a burning city behind him.

    • The Massacre of Chios — The Massacre of Chios is Eugène Delacroix’s painting of the slaughter of the inhabitants of the Greek island of Chios during the Greek War of Independence. The canvas shows mounted Turkish attackers, burning buildings, and civilians gathered in terror under a smoky sky.

    • The Women of Algiers in Their Apartment — Eugène Delacroix’s Orientalist painting of women and a servant woman in a North African harem interior, notable for its rich fabrics, seated figures, hookah, and richly decorated setting. It later inspired Picasso’s Cubist series of variations, and Delacroix also made a darker sequel to the composition.

    • Women of Algiers — Women of Algiers is Eugène Delacroix’s 1834 orientalist painting of women in a harem interior. The work is often discussed alongside his earlier The Death of Sardanapalus as part of his fascination with exoticized North African scenes.

    • The Massacre at Chios — Eugène Delacroix, 1824 (Louvre, Paris); large canvas (417 × 354 cm) depicting Greek civilians awaiting death or enslavement after the Ottoman massacre of Chios in 1822; shown at the 1824 Salon alongside Constable’s The Hay Wain; Gros reportedly called it “the massacre of painting” for its unfinished-looking technique; a founding work of French Romantic history painting. The crowded foreground includes doomed captives, a mounted soldier, and scenes of death and destruction.

    • Liberty Leading the People — Delacroix, 1830 (Louvre, Paris); allegorical figure of Liberty, bare-breasted and carrying the tricolor, strides over barricade bodies after the July Revolution; the figure in a top hat may be Delacroix himself; the painting became an enduring symbol of French republicanism. It depicts armed figures advancing behind Liberty, including a boy carrying pistols, and is often associated with the Trois Glorieuses of 1830.
      • Lady Liberty — Lady Liberty is the personified female figure of liberty shown in Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, where she carries the French tricolor and leads the July Revolution. Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi also used her as the model for the Statue of Liberty, making her a recurring symbol in art and patriotic imagery.
  • Théodore Géricault — French; Romanticism; The Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819); Epsom Derby (1821); intense, documentary-style drama. He is also known for The Charging Chasseur, Wounded Cuirassier, Officer of the Imperial Guard, and a series of portraits of the insane, including studies of a kleptomaniac and a gambling addict.

    • Jean Louis Theodore Gericault — Jean-Louis Théodore Géricault was a French Romantic painter best known for The Raft of the Medusa. His other famous subjects include dramatic horses, cavalry scenes, and portraits made from studies of asylum patients and people of African descent.

    • The 1821 Derby at Epsom — Géricault’s The 1821 Derby at Epsom depicts a horse race with strangely elongated horses, capturing the motion of the title event rather than a realistic crowd scene. Like much of his work, it reflects his interest in dramatic movement and anatomically unusual figures.

    • The Derby at Epsom — The Derby at Epsom is Géricault’s racing scene with horses frozen in impossible motion, all four legs extended in the air. The painting shows the Derby race and is a famous early example of the artist’s interest in speed and movement.

    • The Epsom Derby — The Epsom Derby is the British horse race depicted in Géricault’s painting of elongated horses and stormy skies. The canvas emphasizes the chaotic title event with several horses racing across the scene.

    • The Wounded Cuirassier — The Wounded Cuirassier is a 1814 painting by Théodore Géricault showing an injured cavalryman limping away from battle. Its dark, dramatic mood anticipates the artist’s later work The Raft of the Medusa.

    • The Raft of the Medusa — Géricault, 1818–1819 (Louvre, Paris); monumental canvas (491 × 716 cm) depicting survivors of the 1816 wreck of the French frigate Méduse on a makeshift raft; Géricault interviewed survivors and studied corpses in preparation; shown at the 1819 Salon, it became a scandal attacking the government. Its pyramidal composition rises from corpses to a man signalling the distant rescue ship.

  • J.M.W. Turner — British; Romanticism; The Fighting Temeraire (1839); Rain, Steam, and Speed (1844); Slave Ship (1840); luminous, atmospheric dissolution of form; proto-Impressionist. Joseph Mallord William Turner was the English Romantic painter whose full name was Joseph Mallord William Turner. His work includes The Slave Ship and several dramatic classical and maritime scenes, and his late style often dissolves forms into light and atmosphere.

    • Dido Building Carthage — J. M. W. Turner’s 1815 painting of the mythical founding of Carthage. It centers on a waterway, with a bright sun over the water, classical buildings, and figures divided between construction on one bank and Queen Dido on the other.

    • Hannibal Crossing the Alps — Hannibal Crossing the Alps is Joseph Mallord William Turner’s painting of Hannibal’s Alpine crossing during the Punic Wars. The canvas includes elephants, a central red-clad figure, and a snowy mountain backdrop.

    • Joseph Turner — Joseph Mallord William Turner was the English painter whose dramatic storms and light effects helped anticipate Impressionism. His works include Slave Ship and Rain, Steam and Speed. He is also known for paintings such as Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth and for provoking critics with his increasingly atmospheric style. Clues often stress his influence on Manet and Van Gogh.

    • Rain, Steam, and Speed — Rain, Steam, and Speed is J. M. W. Turner’s atmospheric painting subtitled The Great Western Railway. It is the famous railway scene with a locomotive rushing over Maidenhead Bridge, often linked to a rabbit in the foreground.

    • Rain, Steam, and Speed: The Great Western Railway — Rain, Steam, and Speed: The Great Western Railway is J. M. W. Turner’s dramatic 1844 painting of a train crossing the Maidenhead Railway Bridge through mist and rain. Its blend of landscape and industrial motion is often identified by the small rabbit, the bridge over the Thames, and the central locomotive rushing toward the viewer.

    • Slave Ship — An 1840 seascape by J. M. W. Turner about the Zong massacre and the slave trade. It is an abolitionist painting dominated by storm light and a dramatic sunset, showing slaves thrown overboard during a storm.

    • Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps — Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps is J. M. W. Turner’s dramatic painting of the Carthaginian general crossing the Alps. A swirling storm and hazy orange sun dominate the canvas while Hannibal’s troops struggle through the mountains.

    • The Burning of the Houses of Parliament — J. M. W. Turner painted The Burning of the Houses of Parliament after witnessing the 1834 fire from the Thames. He produced several versions of the scene, each dominated by orange flame and smoke over the river.
      • Burning of the Houses of Parliament — The Burning of the Houses of Parliament is the scene Turner painted after the 1834 fire that destroyed much of the Palace of Westminster. His versions emphasize the blaze’s reflections on the Thames and the spectacle of the crowd watching across the river.

    • The Fighting Temeraire — The Fighting Temeraire is J. M. W. Turner’s painting of an old warship being towed to be broken up at sunset. The work contrasts the age of sail with industrial steam power.

    • The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up — The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up is J. M. W. Turner’s famous painting of an aging warship being towed away by a black steamboat at sunset. The ship had served at Trafalgar before being scrapped, and the work is often treated as a lament for the passing of an era.

    • The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838 — J. M. W. Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire shows an aging warship being towed to its last berth to be broken up. The painting has become one of Turner’s most famous late works, with its sunset imagery underscoring the end of the ship’s service after Trafalgar.

    • The Slave Ship — J. M. W. Turner’s seascape depicts a storm-tossed vessel, with figures and debris in the water and a blazing sky. It is associated with the Zong massacre, the Middle Passage, and slave-trade insurance fraud, and was championed by John Ruskin despite its shocking reception. The painting inspired later responses including David Dabydeen’s verse novel and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, and is now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

    • Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus — Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus is a Turner painting based on the Odyssey. It shows Ulysses taunting the blinded Polyphemus as his ship escapes into the distance.
  • John Constable — British; Romanticism; The Hay Wain (1821); Flatford Mill (1816–1817); naturalistic landscape painting influencing the Barbizon School and Impressionists.⁵ He was the English Romantic landscape painter of The Hay Wain and many views of Salisbury Cathedral, Dedham Vale, and the River Stour. His paintings are noted for luminous skies, close observation of weather, and scenes of rural Suffolk.
    • The Hay Wain — John Constable’s The Hay Wain shows an ox-drawn cart crossing the River Stour near Willy Lott’s cottage, with a small dog in the foreground and rural laborers in the distance. The title also overlaps with Bosch’s Haywain Triptych, making the painting a common cross-art clue set.
  • Caspar David Friedrich — German; Romanticism; Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (c. 1818); The Sea of Ice (c. 1823–1824); solitary figures in sublime landscapes; spiritual contemplation of nature. Major German Romantic painter known for eerie, symbolic landscapes. His works include Monk by the Sea, The Polar Sea, Men Observing the Moon, The Abbey in the Oakwood, and the Tetschen Altarpiece.

    • The Abbey in the Oakwood — Caspar David Friedrich’s The Abbey in the Oakwood shows monks carrying a coffin toward a ruined abbey amid bare trees and mist. The painting is a classic example of his meditative Romantic landscapes and of Rückenfigur-style composition.

    • The Cross in the Mountains — Caspar David Friedrich’s controversial altarpiece, originally made for the Tetschen altar in a Bohemian chapel. It depicts a crucifix set among rocks and a fir forest, turning a religious crucifixion scene into a landscape composition; it is an early major work by the artist of The Sea of Ice and Chalk Cliffs on Rügen.

    • The Sea of Ice — Caspar David Friedrich’s painting shows the wrecked remains of an Arctic expedition trapped among crushing, towering slabs of ice. It was inspired by William Edward Parry’s polar voyages, and one version originally included a sinking ship named Hope, underscoring the work’s warning about explorers driven into the far north.
      • Polar Sea — This Caspar David Friedrich painting depicts a wrecked ship trapped in sea ice and reflects news of a failed Arctic expedition.

    • The Stages of Life — Caspar David Friedrich’s The Stages of Life is an allegorical painting built around five figures on a shore, with five ships in the distance corresponding to the stages of life. It includes a self-portrait of the artist as an old man, children with a Swedish flag, and a small overturned boat.

    • Wanderer above the Sea of Fog — Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is Caspar David Friedrich’s best-known Romantic painting, showing a man seen from behind standing on a rocky height and looking out over a mist-filled landscape. The composition is famous for its Rückenfigur, with the figure’s back turned to the viewer. It is one of Friedrich’s signature meditative landscapes.
  • Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli) (1741–1825) — Swiss-British; Romanticism/Neoclassicism; The Nightmare (1781, Detroit Institute of Arts); Thor Battering the Midgard Serpent (1790); the iconic figure of a demon crouching on a sleeper’s chest in The Nightmare became one of the most parodied images in Western art; Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy. His literary subjects draw on Shakespeare and Milton, including Lady Macbeth and Silence.

    • The Nightmare — The Nightmare is Henry Fuseli’s famous painting of a sleeping woman oppressed by an incubus, with a horse’s head emerging from behind the curtains. Quizbowl clues often mention the multiple versions of the painting and its place in Romantic-era dream imagery and eroticized fear.

    • The Nightmare or The Incubus — The Nightmare, also called The Incubus, is Henry Fuseli’s famous dream painting of a woman in white under the weight of a goblin while a horse peers in from the dark. Its dramatic curtains, bedside objects, and eerie sleep-paralysis scene made it one of the most recognizable images of Romantic-era horror.

  • Washington Allston — Washington Allston was an early American romantic painter and the teacher of Samuel Morse. He wrote poetry and prose as well as paintings such as Belshazzar’s Feast, Moonlit Landscape, and Uriel in the Sun, and he is sometimes credited with coining “objective correlative.”

  • Francesco Hayez — Francesco Hayez was a leading Italian Romantic painter best known for The Kiss, a Risorgimento-era image of passion and political symbolism. His other works include scenes of betrayal, revenge, and patriotic history, often treated with dramatic color and theatrical composition. He also painted pro-Carbonari subjects such as The Conspiracy of Lampugnani.

  • John Martin — John Martin was an English Romantic painter known for apocalyptic scenes like The Great Day of His Wrath and Belshazzar’s Feast. His dramatic works influenced later cinema and often feature monumental architecture, lightning, and collapsing cities.

  • Antoine-Jean Gros — French painter associated with the Romantic movement and shaped by David’s studio, known for dramatic Napoleonic scenes and portraits of Napoleon. His best-known works include Napoleon at Arcole, Napoleon at Eylau, Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-Stricken at Jaffa (also given as Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa / Napoleon Visiting the Plague House at Jaffa), The Battle of Aboukir, and The Battle of Eylau; he also painted battle scenes of Aboukir, the Pyramids, and Jaffa, helping shape the visual mythology of Napoleon.

  • Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky — Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky was a Russo-Armenian painter best known for dramatic seascapes. His best-known works include The Ninth Wave and depictions of the Battle of Navarino and other maritime scenes.

  • Jan Matejko — Jan Matejko was a major Polish history painter known for large nationalist canvases such as The Prussian Homage. His works also include depictions of Copernicus and other scenes from Poland’s past.
• Realism, Rural Life, and Social Observation
  • Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot — French; Barbizon/Romanticism; Souvenir of Mortefontaine (1864); The Bridge at Narni (1826); plein-air landscape painting bridging Neoclassicism and Impressionism; enormously influential on the Impressionists. He is also associated with the Barbizon School and Barbizon realism, and painted lyrical scenes from Ville-d’Avray, Mortefontaine, and Italy. Other works attributed to him include The Little Shepherd, Hagar in the Wilderness, and The Nymph of the Seine. Many of his paintings were later forged because of his reputation.
    • The Bridge at Narni — The Bridge at Narni is a landscape by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot showing the ruins of a bridge at Narni. The scene was inspired by the artist’s 1825 trip and later drew criticism and praise from commentators such as Kenneth Clark.
  • Honoré Daumier — French; Realism/Caricature; The Third-Class Carriage (c. 1862–1864); thousands of lithographs satirizing bourgeois and political life. Also known as Honoré-Victorin Daumier, he was a painter, caricaturist, and printmaker whose lithographs attacked Louis-Philippe; notable works and subjects include Gargantua, Nadar Elevating Photography to Art, The Laundress, Don Quixote illustrations, and The Wandering Saltimbanques.

    • The Third-Class Carriage — Honoré Daumier’s painting depicts poor passengers crowded into a railway carriage, including a nursing mother, an elderly woman with a basket, and a sleeping child. Its foreground family group and somber mood make it a classic image of class segregation in modernizing Paris and one of Daumier’s best-known sympathetic views of working-class life.

    • Third Class Carriage — Honoré Daumier’s Third Class Carriage depicts cramped railway passengers, including a sleeping boy, a nursing woman, and a woman holding a basket. The painting is also known in French as Troisième Classe.

  • Gustave Courbet — French; Realism; A Burial at Ornans (1849–1850); The Stone Breakers (1849–1850); The Origin of the World (1866); rejected academic idealization in favor of contemporary, unidealized subjects. He also painted The Painter’s Studio and the self-portrait The Desperate Man, promoted realism through his Pavilion of Realism, and was noted for depicting ordinary laborers and contemporary life. Politically radical, he was forced into exile in Switzerland near the end of his life.

    • Burial at Ornans — Gustave Courbet’s Burial at Ornans is the monumental country-funeral painting whose title locale also appears in his earlier work about stonebreakers. Its long frieze of mourners, including the artist’s sisters, made it famous enough to draw comments about its Greek-like composition.

    • Gustav Courbet — Gustave Courbet was a French realist painter known for The Stone Breakers, The Burial at Ornans, and scandalous works such as The Sleepers. His art often focused on ordinary laborers, peasants, and bluntly physical scenes.

    • Inside the Artist’s Studio — Inside the Artist’s Studio, or The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory, is Gustave Courbet’s 1855 painting. The large canvas was rejected by the World’s Fair, leading Courbet to organize the Realist Pavilion to display it.

    • The Artist’s Studio: A Real Allegory of a Seven Year Phase in my Artistic and Moral Life — Gustave Courbet’s huge allegorical self-portrait shows him painting a landscape at the center of a crowded studio. The canvas contrasts ordinary social types with a cluster of intellectual or symbolic figures and friends such as Baudelaire and Champfleury; Alfred Bruyas and a nude model are also present. Courbet titled it The Artist’s Studio: A Real Allegory of a Seven Year Phase in my Artistic and Moral Life, with the subtitle “a real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life.”

    • The Origin of the World — Courbet’s controversial painting The Origin of the World shows only the lower torso of a nude woman, with the genitals prominently centered. It was commissioned by Khalil Bey, later owned by Jacques Lacan, and became notorious for censorship before being openly exhibited at the Musée d’Orsay.

    • The Stone Breakers — The Stone Breakers is Gustave Courbet’s realist painting of two laborers quarrying rock for road work. It was famous for its unidealized treatment of working-class figures and was destroyed during the bombing of Dresden in World War II.

    • The Stonebreakers — Gustave Courbet’s realist painting depicts two laborers breaking rocks along a road, one young and one old, as a bleak image of rural work. It was shown at the Salon of 1850 and later destroyed in the bombing of Dresden.

    • A Burial at Ornans — Courbet, 1849–1850 (Orsay, Paris); monumental canvas (314 × 663 cm) depicting a real village funeral in Franche-Comté with life-size peasant figures; rejected academic hierarchy by treating an ordinary subject at history-painting scale; a founding document of Realism. Also known as L’Enterrement à Ornans and Un Enterrement à Ornans, it shows mourners gathered around an open grave, with a crucifix and clergy present, and is noted for its dark palette. Its 1851 Salon reception helped make it a landmark of Realism.

  • Jean-François Millet — French; Realism/Barbizon; The Gleaners (1857); The Angelus (1857–1859); dignified portrayals of peasant labor. Other notable works include The Man with the Hoe and scenes of sowers, harvesters, and prayerful farm couples.

    • L’Angelus — L’Angelus is Jean-François Millet’s famous painting of two peasants pausing in prayer in a field. Salvador Dalí later made surreal reinterpretations of it, including works titled Archeological Reminiscence of Millet’s Angelus.

    • The Angelus — The Angelus is Jean-François Millet’s painting of peasants pausing for evening prayer in a field. It became famous through Salvador Dalí’s obsessive interpretations and later inspired other artworks and poems.

  • Charles-Francois Daubigny — Charles-François Daubigny was a Barbizon-school landscape painter known for river scenes and for painting from his studio boat, Le Botin. Van Gogh admired him and painted his garden at Auvers-sur-Oise, linking him to the transition toward Impressionism.

  • Rosa Bonheur — A French painter and naturalist celebrated for animal scenes, especially horses. She is best known for The Horse Fair and Ploughing in the Nivernais. Bonheur painted animals with extraordinary realism and was notable for wearing trousers to study her subjects more easily.

    • Ploughing in the Nivernais — Ploughing in the Nivernais is a Rosa Bonheur painting showing twelve oxen working across a pastoral field. The work was inspired by rural French life and is one of Bonheur’s best-known realist animal scenes.

    • The Horse Fair — Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair is a huge painting of market horses bucking and being led for sale on a Paris boulevard. It was bought by Cornelius Vanderbilt, donated to the Met, and is often paired with her earlier success Ploughing in the Nivernais.

  • Jules Dupré — Jules Dupré was a French Barbizon School painter. He painted landscapes such as Evening and River Scene.

  • Théodore Rousseau — A leading painter of the Barbizon school, associated with wooded landscape scenes and repeated rejection by the Paris Salon. His landscapes include Under the Birches, Evening, and Plain of Montmartre.

  • Adolph Menzel — Adolph Menzel was a 19th-century German artist known for wood engravings on Frederick the Great and for scenes of Prussian life. His best-known paintings include The Iron Rolling Mill and Flute Concert of Frederick the Great at Sanssouci.
• Pre-Raphaelite, Symbolist, and Academic Traditions
  • Gustave Moreau — French; Symbolism; Salome Dancing Before Herod (c. 1876); Jupiter and Semele (1894–1895); richly encrusted mythological and biblical scenes. Known for works such as Oedipus and the Sphinx and The Apparition, with classical and biblical figures rendered in ornate detail and dreamlike color.
    • Jupiter and Semele — Jupiter and Semele is Gustave Moreau’s mythological painting of the parents of Dionysus. The densely symbolic scene shows Semele with Jupiter enthroned above her, surrounded by personifications, animals, and decorative detail.
  • James Ensor — Belgian; Symbolism/Expressionism; Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (1888); The Intrigue (1890); masks, skeletons, and sardonic carnival imagery; precursor of Expressionism and Surrealism. Born in Ostend in 1860, he was also a printmaker; works such as Two Skeletons Warming Themselves by a Stove, Skeletons Fighting over a Pickled Herring, and Skeletons Fighting for the Body of a Hanged Man are associated with his macabre imagery.

    • Baron James Sidney Ensor — Baron James Sidney Ensor was a Belgian painter and founding member of Les XX. He is known for fantastical, often masked and religious imagery, especially Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 and The Tribulations of Saint Anthony.

    • Christ’s Entry into Brussels — James Ensor’s famous 1888 satirical painting shows Christ’s entry into Brussels as a carnival-like procession through the Belgian city, with the title figure nearly hidden amid masks, skeletons, banners, and a caricatured modern crowd. It is often read as a self-image of Ensor, features the banner reading “Vive la Sociale,” was rejected by Les XX, and is now associated with the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu.

    • Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889 — James Ensor’s huge satirical painting depicts Christ riding through a noisy modern crowd in a parade-like procession crowded with masks, banners, grotesque figures, and political imagery. It is dated 1889 but was painted in 1886, and it was too shocking to be exhibited during Ensor’s lifetime.

    • Entry of Christ into Brussels, 1889 — Entry of Christ into Brussels, 1889 is James Ensor’s chaotic painting of a Mardi Gras-like procession entering a European capital. The work includes caricatured faces, a huge banner reading ‘Vive la Sociale,’ and a self-portrait of Ensor as Christ riding at the center.

    • My Portrait in 1960 — My Portrait in 1960 is an 1888 etching by James Ensor that imagines him as a reclining skeleton with a spider nearby. The work treats the title year as a grotesque self-portrait of the artist’s future state.

    • The Vile Vivisectors — This James Ensor painting attacks animal experimentation by showing grotesque vivisection imagery, including frogs, birds, and a monkey disembowelment. Its carnival of doctors, butchers, and other absurd figures makes it a satirical protest piece.

  • Ford Madox Brown — Ford Madox Brown was a Pre-Raphaelite painter known for historical and social scenes such as Work, The Last of England, and the Manchester Murals. His art often combines dense narrative detail with industrial, scientific, or emigrant subjects.
    • The Last of England — The Last of England is Ford Madox Brown’s Pre-Raphaelite painting of an emigrant couple leaving Britain for Australia with their baby. The work is known for the White Cliffs of Dover in the background, the windblown umbrella, and the tondo format of its versions. Brown said he painted it while in a difficult state of mind, and the composition stresses stoic departure.
  • John William Waterhouse — This Pre-Raphaelite painter is known for richly finished depictions of literary women, especially multiple versions of The Lady of Shalott. He also painted Consulting the Oracle, Ophelia studies, and other romantic Victorian scenes.
    • John Waterhouse — John Waterhouse is a painter associated with Pre-Raphaelite subjects, including The Lady of Shalott, Miranda, and La Belle Dame Sans Merci. His work often drew on literary and mythic female figures rendered in lush, romantic scenes.
  • John Everett Millais — Sir John Everett Millais was a leading Pre-Raphaelite painter known for Ophelia, Christ in the House of His Parents, The Blind Girl, and later popular Victorian works such as Bubbles. His paintings often combined meticulous realism with literary and biblical subjects, and Christ in the House of His Parents drew harsh criticism from the press; Dickens also attacked the harshness of his early style.

    • Christ in the House of His Parents — Christ in the House of His Parents is John Everett Millais’s controversial Pre-Raphaelite painting of the young Jesus in Joseph’s workshop. It is marked by the wounded hand, the child carrying water, the sheep in the background, and the criticism it drew from Charles Dickens.

    • John Everett Millais (“mill-AY”) — John Everett Millais was a Pre-Raphaelite painter associated with Ophelia and other highly finished Victorian subjects. His works include Christ in the House of His Parents and paintings of Effie Gray and Edward Trelawny.

    • Sir John Everett Millais — Sir John Everett Millais was a co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and painted Ophelia and Christ in the House of His Parents. His other notable works include The Blind Girl and Bubbles. Dickens famously mocked Millais’s treatment of the Holy Family as grotesquely realistic. He also illustrated Trollope and Tennyson and was born in 1829.

  • Edward Burne-Jones — Pre-Raphaelite painter known for Arthurian, medieval, and mythological subjects, with elongated figures, ornamental patterning, and dreamlike compositions. His best-known works include The Beguiling of Merlin, King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, The Golden Stairs, The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon, and the Briar Rose series. He also illustrated William Morris’s publications and worked in stained glass and illustration.

    • King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid — King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid is an Edward Burne-Jones painting showing the king seated and gazing up at the beggar maid. The scene is based on the old ballad of Cophetua, a king who falls in love with a poor woman.

    • The Beguiling of Merlin — The Beguiling of Merlin is an Edward Burne-Jones painting from the Pre-Raphaelite circle. It shows Merlin trapped by a woman reading from a magic book amid hawthorn branches, with Maria Zambaco often cited as the model.

  • Elizabeth Siddal — Elizabeth Siddal was a Pre-Raphaelite model and painter/artist associated with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais. She posed for Millais’s Ophelia and Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix. She married Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who later exhumed her coffin to recover poems he had buried with her.

  • Pierre Puvis de Chavannes — Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was a French Symbolist painter known for large, subdued mural cycles that imitate frescoes. He painted works such as Hope, The Sacred Grove, and The Poor Fisherman, and decorated sites including the Boston Public Library and the Sorbonne. He also helped found the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and became closely associated with decorative public painting in Paris.

  • Frederic Leighton — Frederic Leighton was a British academic painter known for Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna and Flaming June. His work often features idealized, classical figures and rich color, as in scenes of religious procession and sleeping women in orange drapery.
    • Flaming June — Flaming June is Frederic Leighton’s famous painting of a sleeping woman in a translucent orange dress against a seaside backdrop. It is often identified by the curled pose, the overhanging fruit, and the nearby oleander.

  • Lawrence Alma-Tadema — Lawrence Alma-Tadema was a Dutch-born Victorian painter famous for sumptuous scenes of ancient Roman and Greek life. His works include The Roses of Heliogabalus, The Women of Amphissa, and The Coign of Vantage. Other works include The Tepidarium and Antony and Cleopatra.

  • William Holman Hunt — William Holman Hunt was a Pre-Raphaelite painter known for The Light of the World, The Awakening Conscience, The Scapegoat, and The Hireling Shepherd. His works often feature moral symbolism, vivid detail, and religious or allegorical scenes.

    • The Awakening Conscience — William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience shows a woman suddenly rising from her lover’s lap in a morally charged interior scene. The painting is packed with symbolic details, including a cat stalking a bird, neglected objects, and references to chastity and lost innocence.

    • The Hireling Shepherd — The Hireling Shepherd is a painting by William Holman Hunt showing a shepherd and a country girl in a wheat field. A death’s-head hawkmoth is one of its key symbols, and the flock drifting away from the title figure is a common clue.

    • The Light of the World — The Light of the World is William Holman Hunt’s Pre-Raphaelite allegory of Christ knocking on a door overgrown with roots and thorns. The lantern, moonlit halo, and emphasis on Revelation make it one of the movement’s best-known religious images.

    • The Scapegoat — The Scapegoat is a William Holman Hunt painting showing the animal standing on the shores of the Dead Sea. Its bleak setting and sacrificial subject make it one of the key Pre-Raphaelite religious images.

  • Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
    • Rossetti — The Rossettis were a literary and artistic family associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and The Germ. Members included Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who painted Proserpina and wrote The Blessed Damozel, Christina Rossetti, who wrote Goblin Market and In the Bleak Midwinter, and also William Michael Rossetti and Maria Francesca Rossetti.
      • Beata Beatrix — Beata Beatrix is Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting of Elizabeth Siddal as Dante’s idealized Beatrice at the moment of mystical death. Its symbolic details include a sundial pointing to nine and a bird bringing poppies, echoing Rossetti’s obsession with La Vita Nuova and mourning.
  • Symbolist painters
    • Arnold Böcklin — Arnold Böcklin was a Swiss Symbolist painter best known for The Isle of the Dead and related works of mythic and funereal atmosphere. His art often uses cypresses, boats, skeletons, and secluded landscapes to evoke death and solitude.

      • Isle of the Dead — Isle of the Dead, or Toteninsel, is Arnold Böcklin’s famous symbolist painting of a boat approaching a bleak island. The title was later borrowed for a musical work whose 5/8 rhythm was meant to evoke waves lapping at the shore.

      • The Isle of the Dead — The Isle of the Dead is Arnold Böcklin’s Symbolist painting of a small rocky island ringed by cypresses and approached by a boat carrying a shrouded figure and coffin. It inspired Rachmaninoff’s symphonic poem of the same name.

      • The Isle of the Dead or Toteninsel — The Isle of the Dead, or Toteninsel, is the title shared by Arnold Böcklin’s symbolic painting series and a famous tone poem by Rachmaninoff. Böcklin’s image shows a coffin-bearing boat approaching a rocky island, while the Rachmaninoff work is noted for its 5/8 opening figure.

    • Franz von Stuck — Franz von Stuck was a German Symbolist painter associated with Jugendstil and the Munich Art Nouveau milieu. His best-known painting is The Sin, and he also painted works such as The Wild Chase and The Guardian of Paradise.

  • Ferdinand Hodler — Ferdinand Hodler was a Swiss painter known for Alpine landscapes and for a Symbolist style he called Parallelism. His best-known work, Night, shows sleeping figures haunted by a dark, ominous form.

  • Richard Dadd — Richard Dadd was a Victorian painter whose fantastical fairy scenes were produced in and around confinement at Bethlem and Broadmoor after he murdered his father. His best-known work is The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, and he became a major figure in fairy painting.
    • The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke — The Fairy-Feller’s Master-Stroke is Richard Dadd’s famously intricate and unfinished fairy painting. It shows the title figure poised with an axe over a chestnut and is now associated with Tate Britain after Sigfried Sassoon’s gift.
  • William-Adolphe Bouguereau — William-Adolphe Bouguereau was a French Academic painter known for polished classical scenes and idealized figures. Clues include The Birth of Venus, Nymphs and Satyr, The Young Shepherdess, and his opposition to the Impressionists.
• Düsseldorf School
  • Düsseldorf — Düsseldorf is the capital of North Rhine-Westphalia in western Germany. Its art academy helped inspire the Düsseldorf School of painting and was studied by Albert Bierstadt; the city is also associated with the Düsseldorf School of Photography, including the Bechers and Andreas Gursky, as well as the photorealist work of Gerhard Richter.
• Orientalist art
  • odalisques — Odalisques are Ottoman harem attendants or concubines who became a favorite subject of Orientalist painting and sculpture. Ingres’s Grande Odalisque is especially famous for its elongated back, while Matisse, Leighton, and others also painted variations on the theme.
• Rückenfigur
  • facing away from the viewer — A figure facing away from the viewer is shown from behind, often as a Rückenfigur in Romantic and surrealist painting. Caspar David Friedrich made the pose famous in works such as Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog and Monk by the Sea.
• John Leech
  • Jack Leech — Jack Leech was an English caricaturist and illustrator who worked on The Comic History of Rome and was the first illustrator of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. His work belongs to the world of Victorian and early comic-book-style illustration.
• satirical art

  • Caricatures — Caricatures are drawings or prints that exaggerate a subject’s features for comic or satirical effect. The form was famously developed by artists such as Honore Daumier, Thomas Rowlandson, and James Gillray, and it became closely associated with satirical magazines like Le Charivari.

  • singerie — Singerie is a satirical genre of painting or decoration that depicts monkeys behaving like humans, often in human clothing. It is associated with Flemish and Dutch art and was popularized by painters such as David Teniers the Younger.

• James McNeill Whistler — American; Aestheticism; Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (“Whistler’s Mother,” 1871); Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (c. 1875); tonal harmony over narrative. He spent much of his career in London and was a major proponent of art for art’s sake. He also wrote The Gentle Art of Making Enemies and delivered the Ten O’Clock Lecture, signed some works with a butterfly-and-stinger monogram, and used musical titles such as Symphony in White. The Peacock Room and portraits of Joanna Hiffernan are other familiar works; Ruskin’s attack on his nocturne led to a libel suit.
  • Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 — James McNeill Whistler’s portrait of his mother, seated in profile against a sparse interior. It was first exhibited in 1872, is known for its severe composition, dark dress, framed picture in the background, and dark curtain, and is one of the best-known images in American art.

    • Anna McNeill Whistler — Anna McNeill Whistler was the mother of painter James McNeill Whistler. She is the sitter in Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, better known as Whistler’s Mother.

    • his mother — This clue refers to the artist’s mother, who appears in Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, also known as Whistler’s Mother. The same relationship is the subject of another Whistler portrait with the sitter in profile and a white bonnet. It also appears in Ginsberg’s poem Kaddish, which memorializes Naomi Ginsberg.

  • James MacNeill Whistler — James McNeill Whistler was an American-born painter active in Britain, famous for Nocturnes, the Peacock Room, and his libel suit against John Ruskin. His best-known work is Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, the portrait of his mother.

  • Nocturne in Black and Gold — Nocturne in Black and Gold, also called The Falling Rocket, is James Whistler’s famous fireworks scene. It became notorious after a criticism that he had flung a pot of paint in the public’s face, which led to the work’s role in an aesthetic controversy.
    • The Falling Rocket — The Falling Rocket is the subtitle of James McNeill Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold, his famous nocturne of fireworks over the river. The painting became notorious after John Ruskin attacked it, leading to the libel suit that ended in only a ceremonial one-pound penalty.

  • Portrait of Whistler’s Mother — Portrait of Whistler’s Mother is James McNeill Whistler’s famous 1871 portrait of his mother seated in profile in a black dress and white bonnet. The composition is often noted for the black curtain and the small landscape painting on the wall.

  • Symphony in White, No. 1 — James McNeill Whistler’s portrait of Joanna Hiffernan shows her in a white dress, holding a lily and standing on a wolf skin before a matching curtain against a pale ground. It is the first painting in Whistler’s Symphony in White series and became famous at the Salon des Refusés, where it drew criticism for its provocative harmony of color and composition.

  • The Gentle Art of Making Enemies — Whistler’s The Gentle Art of Making Enemies is a book of essays and recollections, including his account of the Ruskin libel trial. It also contains his lecture “Ten O’Clock” and defends art for its own sake against moralized criticism.

  • The Nocturne in Black and Gold Libel Trial — The Nocturne in Black and Gold libel trial was the lawsuit in which John Ruskin criticized James McNeill Whistler’s painting The Falling Rocket. Whistler won only a farthing in damages, and the case helped inspire his later essay collection The Gentle Art of Making Enemies.

  • The Peacock Room — James McNeill Whistler’s famous blue-green, gilded interior decorated for Frederick Leyland, now housed at the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C. It contains The Princess from the Land of Porcelain and Art and Money, and is known for its peacock motif and imagery of decorative rivalry.

  • The Woman in White — The Woman in White, also known as Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl, is a Whistler painting that scandalized viewers at the Salon des Refusés. It shows a central woman in white before a curtain, holding an upside-down lily.

  • Nocturnes
    • James Whistler’s Nocturnes — James Whistler’s nocturnes are his moody twilight paintings, often rendered in dark blues and silvers and named for their musical, night-like atmosphere. Famous examples include Nocturne in Black and Gold, The Falling Rocket, along with views such as Old Battersea Bridge and St. Mark’s, Venice.
  • Symphony in White — Symphony in White is James McNeill Whistler’s series of paintings centered on Joanna Hiffernan in a white setting. The series includes images such as The White Girl and related works featuring lilies, mirrors, and Japanese motifs.
• Auguste Rodin — French; Realism/Impressionism in sculpture; The Thinker (modeled c. 1880, enlarged cast 1902); The Kiss (1882–1889); The Gates of Hell (modeled 1880–1917); The Burghers of Calais (1884–1889); Balzac (1898); broke with smooth academic finish; The Thinker was originally conceived as Dante. He also worked in bronze and marble on expressive, often deliberately unfinished surfaces, and produced portraits and public monuments for figures such as Balzac and Victor Hugo. Other associated works include The Age of Bronze, The Walking Man, and Man with a Broken Nose, and he is closely linked with Camille Claudel.

  • Balzac — Balzac is Auguste Rodin’s controversial sculpture of Honoré de Balzac, the French author of The Human Comedy. It was commissioned by the Society of Men of Letters and rejected for its standing nude depiction.

  • Gates of Hell — The Gates of Hell is Rodin’s monumental doorway planned for a decorative arts museum that was never built, and it takes much of its subject matter from Dante’s Inferno. It includes figures such as The Thinker, The Crying Girl, The Centauress, and The Three Shades.

  • I am Beautiful — I am Beautiful is Rodin’s sculpture on The Gates of Hell showing a man carrying a crouched woman in midair. The title comes from a satirical reading of Baudelaire’s poetry and the work is also known as Je suis belle.

  • Monument to Balzac — Rodin’s Monument to Balzac is the sculptural tribute to Honoré de Balzac, author of works such as The Lily of the Valley and The Country Doctor. The work was controversial, rejected by its commissioners, and later cast in bronze after long delay.

  • St. John the Baptist Preaching — St. John the Baptist Preaching is a nude bronze statue by Rodin showing the saint striding forward and gesturing as he speaks. Clues about it often note its unusually large scale and Rodin’s use of the work to avoid accusations of surmoulage.

  • The Age of Bronze — Auguste Rodin’s life-sized bronze nude of a man with one hand raised to his head. It was first exhibited as The Vanquished and is also known as L’Age d’Airain / L’Age d’airain and The Bronze Age. The sculpture drew controversy because critics falsely believed it had been cast directly from a living model rather than sculpted traditionally.

  • The Gates of Hell — Auguste Rodin’s monumental sculptural doorway inspired by Dante’s Inferno. It was populated with figures and groups later associated with separate works, including The Thinker, The Kiss, and The Three Shades, as well as scenes of Paolo and Francesca and Ugolino and his sons/children.

  • The Kiss or Le Baiser — The Kiss, or Le Baiser, is Rodin’s sculpture of Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta embracing. It began as part of The Gates of Hell and became one of the best-known sculptural images of forbidden love.

  • The Man with the Broken Nose — The Man with the Broken Nose is an early sculpture by Auguste Rodin showing a battered Roman head with a fractured nose and a stark, unsmoothed realism. It was initially rejected by the Salon, then later accepted under the more classical title Portrait of a Roman.

  • The Old Courtesan — The Old Courtesan is a Rodin sculpture from The Gates of Hell, also known by Villon-inspired alternate titles about a woman who has aged into ruin. Clues commonly emphasize the slumped nude figure’s backward hand gesture and its connection to The Gates of Hell and Paolo and Francesca.

  • The Thinker — Auguste Rodin’s seated bronze sculpture of a man resting his chin on his hand, originally conceived as part of The Gates of Hell and first appearing there as The Poet. It is closely associated with Dante and the Inferno, often identified with Dante contemplating his poem, and was recast many times before becoming a stand-alone emblem of intellectual reflection.

  • The Three Shades — The Three Shades, or Les Trois Ombres, is a Rodin sculpture mounted atop The Gates of Hell. It shows three figures bending inward and reaching out, and one of them looks down toward The Thinker.

  • The Walking Man — The Walking Man is Rodin’s famous headless, armless figure in motion, derived from Saint John the Baptist Preaching. The same title also belongs to later sculptures by Alberto Giacometti, making it a recurring clue for modern sculpture.

  • The Burghers of Calais — Auguste Rodin, 1884–1889 (Calais, Northern France; many later casts); a bronze group of six figures, several with nooses around their necks, depicting the leaders of Calais surrendering to England’s King Edward III to lift the siege of their city during the Hundred Years’ War; identified figures include Eustache de Saint-Pierre, Jean d’Aire (holding the keys to the city), and Pierre de Wissant; Rodin rejected the heroic monument tradition, showing the men in anguish, and wanted the work placed at ground level so spectators could “penetrate the heart of the subject,” though it was initially set on a high pedestal against his wishes. Also known as Les Bourgeois de Calais, it memorializes six barefoot citizens of Calais who offered themselves as hostages during the Hundred Years’ War. The figures’ loose robes, grim expressions, and rope nooses emphasize its anguished, anti-heroic treatment of sacrifice.

• Edwin Landseer (1802–1873) — British; Victorian Romanticism; The Monarch of the Glen (1851); Dignity and Impudence (1839); The Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner (1837); celebrated for sentimental and heroic animal paintings; designed the four bronze lions at the base of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square (1867). He was also associated with Man Proposes, God Disposes and Laying Down the Law, and his animal subjects—especially dogs and stags—helped popularize the image of St. Bernard dogs carrying brandy barrels.

  • Man Proposes, God Disposes — “Man Proposes, God Disposes” is Edwin Landseer’s grim Victorian painting of two polar bears amid the wreckage of Sir John Franklin’s Arctic expedition. The title also echoes a devotional phrase from The Imitation of Christ, often given in English or Latin as “Man proposes, God disposes” or “Homo proponit, sed Deus disponit.”

  • The Monarch of the Glen — The Monarch of the Glen is Edwin Landseer’s famous stag painting, later used in advertising by Pears soap and by whisky brands. Its title is slightly inaccurate, since the stag has twelve antler points rather than a royal crown.

• Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres — French; Neoclassicism; La Grande Odalisque (1814); The Turkish Bath (1862); Portrait of Monsieur Bertin (1832); meticulous line over color. He was a student of Jacques-Louis David and became known for formal portraits and idealized female nudes with elongated anatomy. Other associated works include The Apotheosis of Homer, The Vow of Louis XIII, The Valpinçon Bather, The Source, and Madame Moitessier; he is often contrasted with Eugène Delacroix. Oedipus and the Sphinx is another familiar work.

  • Apotheosis of Homer — The Apotheosis of Homer is Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s grand neoclassical painting glorifying Homer. Homer is crowned by Victory before the Parthenon, surrounded by figures from antiquity and the arts.

  • Jupiter and Thetis — Jupiter and Thetis is an 1811 painting by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. It shows Thetis pleading with Jupiter on behalf of her son Achilles, with the god enthroned and the composition emphasizing their contrasting drapery and gestures.

  • La Grande Odalisque — Ingres’s Orientalist nude depicts a reclining Turkish concubine/odalisque viewed from behind, famous for its elongated back and other stylized distortions of anatomy. The composition includes a peacock-feather fan, a hookah, and rich drapery, and it became widely known enough to inspire modern reinterpretations and parody images.
    • Le Grande Odalisque — Le Grande Odalisque is Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s famous reclining nude of a Turkish concubine. The elongated back and peacock-feather fan make it one of the best-known neoclassical paintings of the odalisque theme.

  • Louis-François Bertin — Louis-François Bertin was the newspaper founder depicted by Ingres in the famous 1832 portrait of a stocky man leaning forward with hands on his knees. That work is one of the standard clues for Ingres portraits of prominent nineteenth-century French patrons.

  • The Apotheosis of Homer — The Apotheosis of Homer is Ingres’s Neoclassical celebration of the Greek epic poet, showing Homer crowned by Nike and surrounded by great writers and artists. The painting includes figures such as Dante, Shakespeare, Molière, and Pindar, and was originally intended for the Louvre ceiling.

  • The Death of Leonardo da Vinci — Ingres’s The Death of Leonardo da Vinci depicts the artist dying in the arms of Francis I. The painting presents Leonardo as a historical figure honored at the end of his life.

  • The Grand Odalisque — Ingres’s 1814 The Grand Odalisque depicts a reclining nude harem woman on a blue-and-gold divan, with an impossibly elongated back, a hookah nearby, and a peacock-feather fan in hand; the work became an important source image for later parodies and feminist reinterpretations, including the Guerrilla Girls poster asking whether women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum, which replaces the odalisque’s head with that of an ape and highlights the underrepresentation of women artists in museum holdings.

  • The Turkish Bath — The Turkish Bath, or Le Bain turc, is Ingres’s erotic Orientalist painting of nude women in a hammam. It was altered from a rectangle to a tondo and includes the famous back-turned central figure inspired by the Valpinçon Bather.

• Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson — French proto-Romantic painter and student of Jacques-Louis David. Noted for The Sleep of Endymion, The Funeral of Atala/The Burial of Atala, The Dead Christ Mourned by the Virgin, the portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley, Ossian Receiving the Ghosts of French Heroes, and the idealized Pygmalion and Galatea.

• Antoine-Charles Horace “Carle” Vernet — Antoine-Charles Horace, called Carle Vernet, painted large battle scenes admired by Napoleon. His best-known works include The Battle of Marengo and Morning of Austerlitz.

• Death on a Pale Horse — Death on a Pale Horse is a common title for paintings of Death riding or looming over the world, including works by Benjamin West, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Turner, and Blake. The title often alludes to the apocalyptic horseman from Revelation.

• Hippolyte-Paul Delaroche — French history painter known for dramatic, highly finished historical scenes, especially subjects from English history. His best-known works include The Execution of Lady Jane Grey and The Princes in the Tower, and he also produced the monumental Hemicycle at the École des Beaux-Arts, helping define nineteenth-century academic history painting.

• Théodore Chassériau — Théodore Chassériau was a French painter trained by Ingres who tried to combine neoclassical precision with Romantic color and exotic subjects. He is associated with murals such as War and Peace and works like The Tepidarium and orientalist scenes after a trip to Algeria.

• Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida — Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida was a Spanish painter known for luminous beach scenes and social-realism works set in Valencia. He painted Sad Inheritance!, showing children bathing under the supervision of a priest, and also produced a portrait of William Howard Taft.

• Johann Friedrich Overbeck — Johann Friedrich Overbeck was a German Nazarene painter and a leading figure in that revivalist school. His works in these clues include Joseph Sold by His Brothers, The Triumph of Religion in the Arts, and The Incredulity of St. Thomas.

• Philipp Otto Runge — Philipp Otto Runge was a German Romantic painter associated with color theory, The Times of Day, and The Hülsenbeck Children. He also illustrated fairy tales for the Grimms and painted Morning as part of his planned cycle of symbolic landscape works.

• Gustave Doré — Gustave Doré was a prolific nineteenth-century French engraver, illustrator, and artist known for dramatic, often grotesque fantasy imagery. He became one of the most famous print artists of his era through lavish engraved editions of works including Dante’s Inferno and The Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, the Bible, Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, Milton’s Paradise Lost, The Raven, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Perrault’s Fairy Tales, and London: A Pilgrimage. He also produced engravings and sculptures such as Geraint and Enid Ride Away and Poem of the Vine.

• Hablot Knight Browne — The illustrator best known by the pseudonym Phiz, especially for his work with Charles Dickens. He illustrated The Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, Bleak House, and A Tale of Two Cities.

• John Tenniel — This Punch cartoonist was head caricaturist for most of the Victorian era and was the first cartoonist knighted. He is especially remembered for illustrating Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, including the engraved images of Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

• Augustus Egg — Augustus Egg was a Victorian painter associated with The Clique and with moralizing narrative subjects. He is best known for the triptych Past and Present and also painted works such as The Travelling Companions and Queen Elizabeth Discovers She is No Longer Young.

• Sir Edwin Landseer — British Victorian painter and sculptor best known for animal scenes, especially dogs, horses, and stags such as The Monarch of the Glen. His other works include Laying Down the Law and the animal-and-polar scene Man Proposes, God Disposes, and he designed the lions in Trafalgar Square.

• Jean-Léon Gérôme — Jean-Léon Gérôme was a French Academic painter known for polished historical and Orientalist scenes. His best-known works include The Snake Charmer, The Slave Market, Prayer in the Mosque of ‘Amr, Pollice Verso, Phryne Before the Jury, Phryne Before the Areopagus, and Diogenes in his tub; his Roman subjects and the gladiator image in Pollice Verso are especially associated with his work.
  • The Snake Charmer — The Snake Charmer is Jean-Léon Gérôme’s well-known Orientalist painting of a figure with a snake before a tiled wall. The title also applies to Henri Rousseau’s jungle scene, making it a recurring name in 19th-century French art.

• Elihu Vedder — Elihu Vedder was an American symbolist painter and illustrator best known for his illustrations of Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. His work also includes symbolic scenes such as The Keeper of the Threshold and Corrupt Legislation.

• Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin — Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin was a Russian realist painter known for stark military scenes and exoticist details. His best-known works include The Apotheosis of War, with its pyramid of skulls, and paintings such as The Doors of Tamerlane and At the Door of a Mosque.

• Vasily Vereshchagin — Vasily Vereshchagin was a Russian realist painter known for severe war scenes and Orientalist subjects. His best-known works include The Apotheosis of War and a series on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.
  • The Apotheosis of War — The Apotheosis of War is Vasily Vereshchagin’s famous painting showing a pyramid of skulls with crows above it outside Samarkand. It belongs to his Turkestan series and is one of the starkest antiwar images in nineteenth-century art.

• Walter Sickert — Walter Sickert was an English Impressionist painter whose early works were signed “pupil of Whistler.” He painted Ennui and La Hollandaise and later became a frequent suspect in Jack the Ripper theories. He was associated with the Camden Town Group.

• Anselm Feuerbach — Anselm Feuerbach was a German painter associated with the influence of Thomas Couture and with Italian Renaissance models. His works include Iphigenia, Judgement of Paris, and portraits of his mistress Nanna Risi.

• hunt — Hunt is a surname shared by several figures in the arts and politics, including the Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt. It also titles works about pursuit and the painted and literal hunt, from Brueghel to tapestry cycles and modern public figures.

• Viktor Hartmann — Viktor Hartmann was a Russian artist whose work inspired Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. He is especially associated with the pieces The Great Gate of Kiev, The Old Castle, and Gnomus.

Impressionism

• Impressionism
  • Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas — Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas were close Impressionist associates whose friendship included portraits and collaborative artistic exchange. Degas painted Cassatt at the Louvre and in a mirror study, while Cassatt is tied to Little Girl in a Blue Armchair.
• Édouard Manet — French; Realism/Pre-Impressionism; Olympia (1863); Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863); A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882); shocked the Salon with confrontational modern subjects; bridge between Realism and Impressionism. He also painted The Fifer, The Balcony, The Railway, and scenes of Parisian leisure and urban life. His paintings helped scandalize the Salon des Refusés, and Victorine Meurent appears repeatedly in his work.
  • A Bar at the Folies-Bergère — Édouard Manet’s 1882 painting and last large canvas depicts the barmaid Suzon standing before a mirror in the Paris nightclub Folies-Bergère, with bottles of Bass Pale Ale, oranges, and the barroom foreground set against a bustling reflected background. The work is especially known for its puzzling mirror reflection, unsettling perspective, and ambiguity about spectatorship and the dehumanizing effect of the setting.

    • A Bar at the Folies-Bergeres — A Bar at the Folies-Bergère is Édouard Manet’s late painting of a barmaid standing before a mirror in a Parisian nightclub. The work is known for its deadpan central figure, reflected scene, and still life of bottles and fruit.

    • Crossing the Bar at the Folies-Bergere — Crossing the Bar at the Folies-Bergere combines a reference to Tennyson’s poem on death with Manet’s final masterpiece. The painting centers on a woman standing behind a counter at the Folies-Bergère.

  • Music in the Tuileries — Music in the Tuileries is an early painting by Édouard Manet showing fashionable Parisians gathered in a garden to listen and talk. It reflects Manet’s interest in modern leisure and is associated with the Tuileries Gardens in Paris.

  • Music in the Tuileries Gardens — Music in the Tuileries Gardens is Édouard Manet’s crowded scene of fashionable Parisians listening to an unseen band in the Tuileries. The painting includes figures such as Baudelaire, Offenbach, and Manet himself, and it is often linked to his later modern-life works.

  • The Execution of Emperor Maximilian — The Execution of Emperor Maximilian is Édouard Manet’s painting of the Mexican emperor’s execution by firing squad. Manet made several versions of the scene, and one was cut into pieces by the Manet family before later restoration efforts.

  • The Fifer — Manet’s The Fifer shows a boy in uniform standing alone against a plain background while playing a flute. The painting was rejected by the Salon and is notable for its flattened, near-abstract treatment of the figure.

  • Olympia — Manet, 1863 (Orsay, Paris); a nude woman reclines and gazes directly at the viewer while a Black servant holds a bouquet; the pose echoes Titian’s Venus of Urbino but the directness of the gaze and the unidealized body caused scandal at the 1865 Salon. The model is often identified as a prostitute, and the bouquet is brought by a Black servant; a cat is at her feet. The painting was shown at the 1865 Salon and became notorious with conservative critics.

    • Laure — Laure is the name of the Black maid who appears in Manet’s Olympia. Later art historians and artists have returned to her as a figure erased or marginalized in the painting’s reception.

    • Olympia (by Édouard Manet) — Olympia is Édouard Manet’s controversial reclining nude, first shown at the 1865 Salon. Later artists echoed or reworked the image, including Cézanne and Gauguin.

  • Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe — Manet, 1863 (Orsay, Paris); a nude woman sits in a woodland with two clothed men; rejected by the official Salon, it was shown at the Salon des Refusés; the composition quotes Raphael and Titian but the modern dress of the men heightened the scandal. Édouard Manet’s 1863 painting is also known as Luncheon on the Grass and The Luncheon on the Grass. It features Victorine Meurent among the figures and has been linked to possible allusions to prostitution; one of the men wears a Turkish hat, and versions of the scene include a picnic basket in the foreground and a bathing figure in the background. The work later inspired responses by Monet and Picasso.
• Claude Monet — French; Impressionism; Impression, Sunrise (1872, gave movement its name); Water Lilies series (c. 1896–1926); Haystacks series (1890–1891); Rouen Cathedral series (1892–1894); captured transient light effects. He was a leading French Impressionist painter; other series include the Saint-Lazare station, railway scenes, and repeated views of the Thames and the Houses of Parliament, and his later works also depict Venice and his flower garden at Giverny.

  • Claude Oscar Monet — Claude Monet was a leading Impressionist painter known for capturing changing light in repeated views of the same scene. His best-known series include Impression, Sunrise, the Rouen Cathedral, haystacks, poppies at Argenteuil, and the water lilies at Giverny.

  • haystacks — Monet’s Haystacks series depicts stacks of grain in changing light and weather across different seasons. The paintings are among Monet’s major late series, alongside his works on Rouen Cathedral and the Houses of Parliament.

  • Monet Painting in his Garden at Argenteuil — Monet Painting in his Garden at Argenteuil shows a friend and more famous painter standing at the right at a canvas in a garden setting. The title location is Argenteuil, one of the places associated with Monet’s outdoor painting.

  • Rouen Cathedral — Rouen Cathedral is the Gothic church in Normandy famous as the subject of Claude Monet’s series of paintings showing its façade in different light. Its towers, spire, and crypt are notable landmarks, and the cathedral also appears in works by Pissarro and in claims about Richard the Lion-Heart’s heart.

  • Water Lilies — This series by Claude Monet depicts the water lily pond at Giverny, including the Japanese bridge and later increasingly abstract views shaped by the artist’s cataracts. Many of the paintings were gathered in the Musée de l’Orangerie, whose oval rooms house the monumental cycle. The French title is Nymphéas.
    • the Water Lilies series — The Water Lilies series is Claude Monet’s famous sequence of more than 250 Impressionist paintings of his pond at Giverny. Late works in the series became increasingly abstract as Monet’s cataracts worsened, and major examples were installed in the Orangerie.
  • Gare Saint-Lazare — Gare Saint-Lazare is the Paris train station painted by Monet in a famous series and depicted in works by Manet and Cartier-Bresson. It is one of the key Impressionist urban subjects associated with steam, glass roofs, and waiting travelers.
• Pierre-Auguste Renoir — French; Impressionism; Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880–1881); Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (1876); Bathers (1884–1887); warm, sociable scenes. He later continued painting despite rheumatoid arthritis by tying a brush to his hand. Other works include The Umbrellas, Two Sisters, A Girl with a Watering Can, Madame Charpentier and Her Children, and Woman with a Fan; he also painted portraits and figure paintings.

  • A Girl With a Watering Can — A Girl with a Watering Can is a Renoir painting showing a young girl in a blue dress holding the title object in a garden. It is one of Renoir’s best-known Impressionist works and was painted after some of his other canvases received poor reception.

  • Ball at the Moulin de la Galette — Ball at the Moulin de la Galette is Renoir’s lively depiction of a Paris dance garden in Montmartre, rendered as a festive social scene. The painting captures outdoor dancers and crowded conviviality rather than the rougher reputation of the venue.

  • Girl with a Watering Can — Girl with a Watering Can is an 1876 Renoir painting of a young girl standing in a garden. The figure wears a blue dress with a red bow and holds flowers and a watering can.

  • La Moulin de la Galette — La Moulin de la Galette is Renoir’s painting of a lively Montmartre dance scene with sunlight, couples, and figures gathered around the outdoor dance floor.

  • Le Moulin de la Galette — Le Moulin de la Galette is Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s painting of a lively weekend dance at a Montmartre outdoor venue. The crowded scene shows working-class couples, friends of the artist, and figures gathered around tables under trees and lamps.

  • Luncheon of the Boating Party — Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Impressionist painting depicts friends gathered for a convivial meal and socializing on the terrace or balcony of the Maison Fournaise along the Seine. The crowded scene includes Gustave Caillebotte, Aline Charigot, and the actress Ellen Andree among the models, with a striped awning, wine, fruit, and a small dog in the foreground.

  • Madame Charpentier and Her Children — Madame Charpentier and Her Children is a 1878 Renoir portrait of a woman with her daughters. The painting is associated with Pierre-Auguste Renoir and was praised in relation to the Salon.

  • Moulin de la Galette — Moulin de la Galette is a famous Renoir painting depicting a lively Paris dance garden. It shows a crowded outdoor scene with dancers and onlookers, making it one of the best-known Impressionist works.

  • Pink and Blue — Pink and Blue is a Renoir portrait of the sisters Alice and Elisabeth Cahen d’Anvers. The painting is named for the girls’ dresses and is housed in the São Paulo Museum of Art.

  • The Umbrellas — The Umbrellas, or Les Parapluies, is a Renoir painting of a crowded rainy street scene. Its mix of sharper linear forms and Impressionist figures makes the canvas a familiar identification target.

• Edgar Degas — French; Impressionism; The Ballet Class (c. 1874); L’Absinthe (1876); The Tub (1886); bronze sculpture The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer (1881); movement, unusual viewpoints, pastel and monotype techniques. He was also known for paintings of dancers, racehorses, theaters, cafes, music halls, and other scenes of modern Parisian life, including works such as Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando, Ballet Rehearsal, The Absinthe Drinker, A Glass of Absinthe, The Bellelli Family, and Cotton Exchange at New Orleans. He was born in Paris in 1834 and was an avid collector of Japanese prints.

  • Little Dancer of Fourteen Years — Edgar Degas’s Little Dancer of Fourteen Years is the wax sculpture of a young ballerina modeled by Marie van Goethem. It was first shown in a glass case, and the original included real hair, a linen bodice, satin slippers, and a muslin tutu.

  • L’Absinthe — L’Absinthe is Edgar Degas’s painting of a despondent woman and a man seated in a Paris café with a glass of absinthe between them. The work was criticized for its bleak subject matter and became associated with urban alienation and vice.

  • The New Orleans Cotton Exchange — An Edgar Degas painting depicting merchants and businessmen in a Louisiana cotton brokerage office, with raw cotton stacked around the room. Degas painted it during a visit to family in the United States, and several of his relatives appear among the seated figures. One figure reads a newspaper while others inspect figures and sales information. It was an early work from his New Orleans period and was criticized by Émile Zola for its crowded, newspaper-like realism.

  • The Star — The Star is an Edgar Degas pastel of a dancer seen from above, with a darkened crowd receding into the background. The title also matches the seventeenth Major Arcana card associated with hope and optimism.

• Berthe Morisot — French; Impressionism; The Cradle (1872); Summer’s Day (1879); one of the few women central to the Impressionist circle. She was Édouard Manet’s sister-in-law and studied under Corot. Her paintings often depict women in domestic or outdoor settings, and other works attributed to her include The Harbor at Lorient, Woman at Her Toilette, On the Balcony, The Lecture, and Villa at the Seaside.

• Mary Cassatt — American; Impressionism; The Child’s Bath (1893); In the Loge (1878); depicted women’s domestic life; associated with Degas; introduced Impressionism to American collectors. She spent most of her life in France and also made prints influenced by Japanese woodcuts.

  • The Boating Party — The Boating Party is an Impressionist painting by Mary Cassatt showing a rowboat scene with a woman and child. Its flattened composition and Japanese-influenced design are typical of Cassatt’s mature work.

  • The Child’s Bath — Mary Cassatt’s The Child’s Bath depicts a mother washing or tending a little girl’s feet in a basin in an intimate domestic interior. The scene features patterned fabrics, a bowl with a colored rim, and Cassatt’s interest in Japanese-inspired decoration. It is one of her best-known works and hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago.

• Alfred Sisley — British/French; Impressionism; Flood at Port-Marly (1876); Snow at Louveciennes (1878); landscapes with atmospheric light. His work also includes The Bridge at Argenteuil and views of the Thames, as well as scenes such as Regatta at Molesey.

• Camille Pissarro — French (b. St. Thomas); Impressionism/Post-Impressionism; Boulevard Montmartre series (1897); The Red Roofs (1877); elder statesman of the Impressionist group. He is often called the father of Impressionism and the only artist to exhibit in all eight Impressionist exhibitions. He also taught or encouraged younger painters such as Renoir, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Cassatt, and later worked in a pointillist mode.

• Victorine Meurent — Victorine Meurent was the model for Manet’s Olympia and Luncheon on the Grass, and she was also a painter in her own right. Her work and identity are often recalled through Olympia, Palm Sunday, and other paintings that reframe her as both subject and artist.

• Renoir — The surname Renoir points to both the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and his filmmaker son Jean Renoir. The painter is associated with Impressionist scenes like Le Moulin de la Galette and The Luncheon of the Boating Party, while the son directed The Rules of the Game.

• ballet
  • ballet dancers — Classically trained stage performers associated with tutus, pointe shoes, pirouettes, and rehearsal at the barre. Edgar Degas repeatedly painted them in rehearsal rooms, resting, in motion, and onstage, making ballet dancers one of his signature subjects; they also appear in later art, film, and photography, where their costume and movement are often used for experimentation.

• William Merritt Chase — William Merritt Chase was an American Impressionist associated with the Ten and known for portraits, still lifes, and beach scenes. He founded the New York School of Art, later known as Parsons The New School for Design, and taught artists such as Charles Demuth and Georgia O’Keeffe.

• Frederick Childe Hassam — Frederick Childe Hassam was an American Impressionist painter and a member of The Ten. He was known for New England seascapes, urban scenes, and patriotic flag paintings, especially his Flag Series; notable works include Avenue in the Rain, Washington Arch, Spring, and Allies Day, May 1917. He often depicted New York street life.

• Frédéric Bazille — Frédéric Bazille was a French Impressionist painter who studied in Gleyre’s studio alongside Monet, Renoir, and Sisley. His career was cut short when he died in the Franco-Prussian War, and his best-known works include Family Reunion and The Artist’s Family.

• Gustave Caillebotte — Gustave Caillebotte was a French Impressionist painter and patron known for realistic depictions of modern Paris, especially elevated urban scenes with precise perspective. His best-known works include Paris Street; Rainy Day, The Floor Scrapers, Young Man at His Window, and Man at His Bath, along with views of bridges, streets, and rainy boulevards. He also helped organize the first Impressionist exhibition with Degas, Monet, and Renoir, and his collection later helped seed the Musée d’Impressionnisme. Man on the Balcony, Boulevard Haussmann is another familiar work.

  • Gustave Caillebotte (“kye-BUTT”) — Gustave Caillebotte was a French Impressionist known for scenes of modern urban life painted with unusually sharp realism. His best-known works include Paris Street; Rainy Day, The Floor Scrapers, and The Bridge of Europe.

  • The Floor Scrapers — Gustave Caillebotte’s The Floor Scrapers is an 1875 realist painting of three shirtless workers planing a Paris apartment floor amid wood shavings. It is known in French as Les raboteurs de parquet and is often described in muted browns, grays, and beiges.

• John Singer Sargent — American expatriate portraitist and muralist born in Florence and trained in Paris under Carolus-Duran. Known for dazzling brushwork and scandalous society portraits, including Madame X, The Wyndham Sisters, El Jaleo, and Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. He also painted Robert Louis Stevenson and the Boston Public Library murals, including Triumph of Religion.

  • Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose — Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose is John Singer Sargent’s painting of two girls lighting lanterns in a garden at twilight. Its title comes from a song, and the work is admired for its impressionistic handling of dusk, flowers, and Chinese lanterns.

  • Edward Darley Boit — Edward Darley Boit was the Boston patron whose daughters appear in John Singer Sargent’s famous large interior portrait. The painting’s spacious composition and Japanese vases make it one of Sargent’s most discussed works.

  • El Jaleo — El Jaleo is John Singer Sargent’s large painting of a flamenco dancer, now in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The work shows a dramatic Spanish dance scene with musicians, a sleeping spectator, and the central dancer holding up her skirt. It was inspired by Sargent’s travels in Spain and later influenced his related painting Spanish Dancer.

  • Gassed — John Singer Sargent’s “Gassed” depicts World War I soldiers blinded by mustard gas as they file along a duckboard toward a dressing station. Its frieze-like composition, tent ropes, and the distant soccer players help make it one of Sargent’s major war paintings, now at the Imperial War Museum.

  • Lady Agnew of Lochnaw — Lady Agnew of Lochnaw is a portrait by John Singer Sargent of Gertrude Vernon, the wife of a Scottish aristocrat. The painting is known for her languid pose, mauve sash, and richly colored decorative background.

  • Madame X — John Singer Sargent’s 1884 portrait of the Paris socialite Virginie Gautreau, better known as Madame Pierre Gautreau. It is one of his most famous society paintings and is identified by the sitter’s black evening dress and strikingly pale, purplish complexion; the Paris Salon scandal was fueled by the originally painted slipping shoulder strap.

  • Portrait of Madame X — Portrait of Madame X is John Singer Sargent’s scandalous portrait of Virginie Gautreau, whose black dress and slipping shoulder strap shocked Paris at the Salon of 1884. The painting later became one of Sargent’s most famous works and is now associated with the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  • The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit — The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit is John Singer Sargent’s portrait of four sisters in a Paris apartment, arranged among oversized Japanese vases. The painting is now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

• Maurice Prendergast — Maurice Prendergast was an American postimpressionist associated with The Eight. He is known for bright, decorative scenes of parks, beaches, and public gatherings rendered in watercolor and mosaic-like color. Other works include The Picnic and The Spanish Steps.

• Old Battersea Bridge — Old Battersea Bridge was the wooden Thames crossing shown in Whistler’s nocturne and in Pissarro’s misty London scenes. It is the bridge whose tall, atmospheric silhouette appears in works that emphasize the river and fireworks behind it.

• The Bathers — A title used for major works by Renoir and Cézanne showing nude figures in a natural setting. The Cézanne version is a large later work of figures by a river, often identified by its group of reclining and standing bathers arranged in a triangular composition and by clustered bodies with trees framing a pool. Renoir’s late canvas is a hazier scene of women at rest.

Post-Impressionism

• Paul Cézanne — French; Post-Impressionism; The Card Players (c. 1894–1895); Mont Sainte-Victoire series; The Large Bathers (1906); analyzed form through geometric planes; direct precursor to Cubism. He is also known for still lifes, bathers, and repeated studies of apples, trees, and geometric form, and for works such as Pyramid of Skulls and Modern Olympia.

  • A Modern Olympia — A Modern Olympia is Cézanne’s response to Manet’s Olympia, depicting a nude woman on a bed with a seated man nearby. The painting exists in more than one version and foregrounds a red table and silver vase.

  • Mont Sainte-Victoire
    • Mont Saint-Victoire — Mont Sainte-Victoire is the mountain near Aix-en-Provence famously painted again and again by Paul Cézanne. It appears in works that emphasize changing light, fractured form, and Cézanne’s late move toward abstraction.

  • Mt. Sainte-Victoire — This mountain in Provence was a favorite subject of Paul Cézanne, who painted it repeatedly from different angles and in changing weather. The Croix de Provence stands atop it, and its name is especially associated with Cézanne’s landscape studies.

  • Rideau, Cruchon et Compotier — Rideau, Cruchon et Compotier is a still life by Cézanne, showing a curtain, pitcher, and fruit bowl against a gray background. The painting was sold at Sotheby’s in 1999 for $60.5 million, then later resold at a loss.

  • The Large Bathers — Paul Cézanne’s The Large Bathers is the unfinished painting of nude figures gathered by water, often identified with the Philadelphia Museum of Art version. It is known for its triangular arrangement of trees framing the scene and for the artist’s unfinished treatment of the figures.
• Vincent van Gogh — Dutch; Post-Impressionism; The Starry Night (1889); Sunflowers series (1887–1889); The Night Café (1888); Bedroom in Arles (1888); Wheatfield with Crows (1890); thick impasto, expressive color; died by suicide at 37. He also painted The Potato Eaters, self-portraits including one with a bandaged ear, and cypress scenes; his life in Arles and Saint-Rémy and his relationship with his brother Theo are central to his biography.

  • A Pair of Shoes — A Pair of Shoes is the Van Gogh still life that Heidegger uses to discuss the being of equipment in The Origin of the Work of Art. Derrida later challenged readings of the painting in an essay on restitution and truth, making the work a classic example of philosophical interpretation of art. The image is usually invoked simply as a pair of worn shoes, rather than as a portrait of any particular owner.

  • At Eternity’s Gate — At Eternity’s Gate is a Vincent van Gogh painting of an elderly man sitting with his head in his hands. It is also known as Sorrowing Old Man and was based on studies related to the work Worn Out.

  • Bedroom in Arles — Bedroom in Arles is Vincent van Gogh’s depiction of the room in the Yellow House where he stayed in Arles. The painting survives in multiple versions and was later remade by Roy Lichtenstein.

  • Irises — Irises is a Van Gogh painting made while he was staying at Saint-Rémy and working from the asylum garden. He associated the work with keeping his illness at bay, and its flowing floral forms reflect the Japanese print influence often noted in his late paintings.

  • Portrait of Dr. Gachet — Portrait of Dr. Gachet is a late Van Gogh portrait of the physician seated with his head in his hand, often shown with flowers and, in one version, two yellow books. It became famous for its record-breaking sale price and for its connection to Van Gogh’s final months at Auvers-sur-Oise.
    • Dr. Paul Ferdinand Gachet — Dr. Paul Ferdinand Gachet was a French physician and art patron, and a friend of Vincent van Gogh. He is best known as the sitter for Van Gogh’s famous 1889 portrait at Auvers-sur-Oise, showing him with his head resting on one arm beside foxglove; that painting later set auction records. Gachet also treated many artists, amassed a major collection of Impressionist art, and appears in works by other Post-Impressionists, including depictions of his house and garden.

  • Roulin family — The Roulin family was painted repeatedly by Vincent van Gogh during his Arles period, especially in the winter of 1888. Its best-known members include postman Joseph Roulin, his wife Augustine, and their son Camille.

  • Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear — Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear is a self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh. It refers to the artist’s injury and is one of his best-known self-depictions.

  • self-portraits by Vincent van Gogh — Vincent van Gogh’s self-portraits trace his changing appearance, from bandaged-ear images to later works without a beard. These paintings were often produced at Saint-Rémy and are among the best-known self-representations in modern art.

  • Starry Night over the Rhone — Starry Night over the Rhone is a Vincent van Gogh painting showing the night sky reflected in the Rhône at Arles. Its foreground includes boats and a couple on the riverbank, with the lights of the town visible across the water.

  • The Church at Auvers — The Church at Auvers is a late painting by Vincent van Gogh showing the church in Auvers-sur-Oise. The building is framed by two roads and a dark sky, with the composition reflecting the artist’s personal symbolism.

  • The Night Café — Vincent van Gogh’s 1888 painting of an Arles café interior, with a billiard table, hanging lamps, a clock reading 12:15, and a sickly green-yellow or harsh red-and-green palette. It includes the proprietor Joseph-Michel Ginoux, sleepless or slumped patrons, and a lone drinker or man in yellow/white standing by the pool table; Van Gogh said he wanted to express terrible passions through red and green.

  • The Potato Eaters — Vincent van Gogh’s early dark painting shows five peasants gathered around a table eating potatoes under a single hanging lamp. Its Dutch interior details, including the clock, teapot, and bonneted woman pouring tea, and its cramped, rough perspective and earthy palette reflect van Gogh’s aim to portray peasant life and rural laborers realistically and honestly.

  • The Starry Night — Vincent van Gogh’s painting of the view from his Saint-Rémy asylum or sanatorium window after dark, showing a swirling blue night sky over the village below with a crescent moon, bright stars, a cypress tree, and a church spire. It is one of his most recognizable works, has sometimes been compared to a spiral galaxy, and is often contrasted with Starry Night Over the Rhône.

  • The Yellow House — The Yellow House is Vincent van Gogh’s residence in Arles, a place identified with green shutters, railway bridges nearby, and the Bedroom at Arles. It is also the setting of the quarrel with Paul Gauguin that preceded Van Gogh’s self-mutilation, and the title was later reused by Paul Klee and others.

  • Wheatfield with Crows — A late Vincent van Gogh landscape from July 1890 showing a yellow-golden wheat field beneath a dark, turbulent blue sky with crows overhead; its winding paths and circling birds are often linked to his final months and troubled last period.
• Paul Gauguin — French; Post-Impressionism/Symbolism; Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897–1898); The Vision After the Sermon (1888); Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892); left Europe for Tahiti; bold flat color and primitivist themes. He was also associated with Brittany and with Symbolist and Nabi artists, and his style used flattened shapes, unmodulated color, and highly subjective expression. Other works linked to him include The Yellow Christ, When Will You Marry?, Nevermore, and Yellow Christ.

  • Manao tupapau — A Paul Gauguin painting from his Tahitian period depicting a nude young woman lying on a bed or couch while an ominous ghostly figure or idol watches nearby. The title refers to Tahitian beliefs about ghosts or spirits of the dead, and the work is one of Gauguin’s best-known paintings.

  • The Green Christ — Paul Gauguin’s 1889 painting The Green Christ shows a Breton woman in the foreground beside a green crucifixion statue, with the coast of Brittany in the background. It is also subtitled The Breton Calvary, and its symbolism mixes the rural Breton landscape with the figure of Christ taken down from the cross.

  • The Vision of the Sermon: Jacob Wrestling the Angel — The Vision of the Sermon: Jacob Wrestling the Angel is Paul Gauguin’s religious painting of Breton women imagining Jacob’s struggle with the angel. It is one of his best-known Symbolist works.

  • The Yellow Christ — Paul Gauguin’s Symbolist crucifixion painting set in Brittany, with the title figure rendered in vivid yellow. It shows a Breton landscape with peasant women in the foreground and red-brown trees around the scene; the figure is based on an older chapel image from Tremalo. It is often paired with Gauguin’s Green Christ and associated with his Pont-Aven period before his move to Tahiti.

  • When Will You Marry? — Paul Gauguin’s When Will You Marry? shows two Tahitian women in contrasting dress, with the title posed as a question in the image. The painting sold in 2015 for a record price and is one of Gauguin’s best-known Tahiti works.

  • Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? — Paul Gauguin’s Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? is a Tahitian allegory of life, death, and human destiny. Its crowded scene includes a blue idol, a fruit-picking figure, an old woman, and a baby, and it is read from right to left.

• Georges Seurat — French; Post-Impressionism/Pointillism; A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–1886); The Circus (1890–1891, unfinished); invented divisionism/pointillism (juxtaposed pure color dots). He also painted Bathers at Asnières and Le Chahut, and his technique is sometimes called chromoluminarism. He developed pointillism with Paul Signac.

  • A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte – 1884 — Georges Seurat’s pointillist masterpiece A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte – 1884 depicts Parisians relaxing beside the Seine. Quizbowl clues center on the woman with a parasol and monkey leash, the reclining man with a pipe, the rowers at the left, and Seurat’s later border additions to the canvas.

  • Bathers at Asnières — Bathers at Asnières is Georges Seurat’s 1884 painting of men relaxing along the Seine opposite the island later shown in A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Its clues include the red trunks, the boy with the red hat, and the pointillist monumental scale associated with Seurat’s early work.

  • George Seurat — Georges Seurat was the Post-Impressionist painter who developed pointillism and painted A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. He is also the subject of Sunday in the Park with George, the musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine. Clues may mention his armchair still life or his watercolor manual Jongkind.

  • The Circus — Georges Seurat’s late pointillist painting The Circus depicts a woman in a yellow tutu balancing atop a white horse, with a clown and musicians in the scene. It was left unfinished at Seurat’s death and is his last major work, using the tiny dots of color characteristic of his technique.

  • The Models — This Seurat painting shows three nude models in a studio and belongs to the pointillist circle around A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. A reproduction of La Grande Jatte appears on the wall, and one figure is dressing while another stands with her back turned.

  • A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte — Seurat, 1884–1886 (Art Institute of Chicago); monumental Pointillist canvas depicting Parisians on an island in the Seine; composed of millions of tiny dots of unmixed color (divisionism); introduced at the final Impressionist exhibition in 1886. Commonly described as Seurat’s best-known work of Neo-Impressionism, it is often noted for the woman with a parasol and monkey, the seated man smoking a pipe, and its influence on later popular culture, including the musical Sunday in the Park with George.

    • A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte — A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte is Georges Seurat’s famous pointillist painting of Parisians relaxing by the river. Its memorable details include the woman with the monkey on a leash, the dogs in the foreground, and the child walking with her mother under an umbrella.

    • Isle of La Grande Jatte — The Isle of La Grande Jatte is the Seine-side island made famous by Georges Seurat’s pointillist Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. It also appears in later works that echo Seurat’s scene, including paintings by Signac and Albert Gleizes.

    • Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte — Georges Seurat’s pointillist masterpiece depicts people relaxing by the water on a Sunday afternoon at La Grande Jatte. The crowded scene includes parasols, a monkey on a leash, rowers, and figures such as the man with a cane near the shore.

• Paul Signac — French; Post-Impressionism/Pointillism; The Port of Saint-Tropez (1899); codified pointillist theory with Seurat; D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme (1899, treatise). He was also associated with Divisionism, and many of his paintings depict bright seascapes and harbor scenes. He painted Portrait of Félix Fénéon, showing Fénéon with a flower and top hat.

• Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec — French; Post-Impressionism; At the Moulin Rouge (1892–1895); Jane Avril Dancing (c. 1892); lithographic posters of Montmartre nightlife; influenced graphic design. He was born into the aristocracy, suffered severe physical disability after childhood accidents, and died in 1901. His works often depict performers and dancers such as Jane Avril and La Goulue, and he also created posters for Le Divan Japonais and other Paris cabarets.
  • At the Moulin Rouge — At the Moulin Rouge is a Toulouse-Lautrec painting of a Paris cabaret scene filled with performers, dancers, and night-life figures. It features La Goulue, Jane Avril, and the artist himself amid the mirrored, green-lit interior of the famous Montmartre venue.
• Henri Rousseau — French; Post-Impressionism/Naïve; The Sleeping Gypsy (1897); The Dream (1910); Tiger in a Tropical Storm (1891); a self-taught customs officer whose flat, dreamlike jungle scenes were admired by Picasso and the Surrealists. He is often called Le Douanier, a nickname tied to his work at the Paris Customs House; he was admired by Picasso and the Surrealists and also painted The Snake Charmer, along with later jungle scenes such as The Dream and The Sleeping Gypsy.

  • Henri Rosseau — Henri Rousseau, often called Le Douanier, was the French naivist painter of The Snake Charmer and The Sleeping Gypsy. He is a common clue answer for his dreamlike jungle scenes and self-taught style.

  • Sleeping Gypsy — Sleeping Gypsy is a Henri Rousseau painting of a lion approaching a resting woman on a desert dune. Its dreamlike details include a moon with a face, faint stars, a red vase, and a mandolin, and the figure’s patterned dress matches the blanket behind her.

  • The Dream — Henri Rousseau’s The Dream is a lush jungle painting with a reclining nude woman, animals, and a mysterious musician in the foliage. The work, painted in 1910, hangs in the Museum of Modern Art and is one of Rousseau’s best-known surreal jungle scenes.

  • The Sleeping Gypsy — Henri Rousseau’s painting shows a sleeping woman in striped clothes lying in a moonlit desert beside a mandolin or lute and a water jug, while a lion stands nearby, even sniffing her head in one description. The work is noted for its dreamlike desert setting and naive style.

• Maurice Denis — Maurice Denis was a French painter associated with Les Nabis and the Ateliers d’Art Sacré. His work emphasizes flat color and decorative composition, and he is known for Homage to Cézanne and other symbolist canvases.

• Theo van Gogh — Theo van Gogh was Vincent van Gogh’s art dealer brother and the recipient of most of the artist’s surviving letters. He helped support Vincent in Paris and Montmartre, where the two were connected to the sale of Japanese prints and to the artist’s early circle.

• Odilon Redon — Odilon Redon was a French Symbolist painter known for his noirs, dreamlike pastel works, and images such as The Cyclops and several versions of The Birth of Venus. His art moves from dark lithographs to colorful flowers, Buddhist scenes, and other fantastical visions.

• Paul Ranson — Paul Ranson was a French Nabi painter associated with Les Nabis and the circle around Paul Sérusier. His work includes Nabi Landscape, and his home was jokingly called ‘Le Temple’ because of his esoteric interests.

• Paul Sérusier — Paul Sérusier was a French painter associated with Les Nabis, and his brightly colored The Talisman became a touchstone for the movement. The work was made under Paul Gauguin’s guidance and is linked to a Breton landscape painted on a cigar box lid.

• Suzanne Valadon — Suzanne Valadon was a French painter and former circus acrobat and model who became the first woman admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. She is known for bold modern portraits, nudes, and self-portraits, including The Blue Room, and for works featuring her son Maurice Utrillo and her lover André Utter.

American Artists across the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Follow landscape, portraiture, realism, and modernism in American art. Learn artists before their paintings and recurring subjects.

American Traditions: Landscape, Realism, and Modernism

• John James Audubon — American (b. Haiti); Naturalist illustration; The Birds of America (1827–1838, double-elephant folio); life-size watercolor studies of North American birds; founding document of American natural history illustration. He was a French-American naturalist and painter; later he lived in the United States and also produced The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America. Related figures in the production and reception of The Birds of America include Robert Havell and William MacGillivray, and a bird-conservation society bears his name.
  • The Birds of America — The Birds of America is John James Audubon’s monumental elephant-folio bird book, issued in parts with accompanying text in Ornithological Biographies. It is famous for its vivid watercolor plates and life-size depictions of North American birds.
• George Caleb Bingham — American; Frontier Realism; Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (1845); The Jolly Flatboatmen (1846); documented mid-19th century Missouri River life with Luminism-influenced light. He is especially known for Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, whose prow scene is often discussed for the animal’s identity, and for Stump Speaking and The County Election, political scenes tied to his election series and depictions of midwestern civic life.
  • Fur Traders Descending the Missouri — Fur Traders Descending the Missouri is George Caleb Bingham’s famous genre painting of two fur traders drifting in a canoe. The work is known for its cat at the prow, the father-and-son pairing, and its earlier title, French Trader, Half-Breed Son.
• Henry Ossawa Tanner — American; Realism/Impressionism; The Banjo Lesson (1893); The Annunciation (1898); first prominent African American painter to receive international recognition; worked largely in Paris. Born in Philadelphia, he studied with Thomas Eakins before moving to France to develop his career. He was the first African American to gain full membership in the National Academy of Design.
  • The Banjo Lesson — The Banjo Lesson is Henry Ossawa Tanner’s 1893 genre painting of an elderly Black man teaching a boy to play the banjo. Its warm interior light and quiet domestic setting made it one of Tanner’s best-known depictions of African American life.

• Thomas Hart Benton — American; Regionalism; America Today (mural series, 1930–1931); A Social History of Missouri (1936); sweeping, muscular murals of rural and industrial American life; early teacher of Pollock. His works often include *Achelous and Hercules* and the Missouri State Capitol mural; he was an early teacher of Jackson Pollock.

• Charles Sheeler — American; Precisionism; American Landscape (1930); Classic Landscape (1931); industrial scenes rendered with geometric clarity; also an influential photographer. His work includes views of Ford’s River Rouge plant and other machine-age scenes.

• Ben Shahn — Lithuanian-American; Social Realism; The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1931–1932); Miners’ Wives (1948); visual advocacy for labor and civil liberties. He also wrote The Shape of Content and made paintings such as Blind Accordion Player and Death of a Miner, along with series on Tom Mooney and the Lucky Dragon.
  • The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti — The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti is a Ben Shahn painting about the two Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. It depicts their execution and surrounding public reaction in a heavily symbolic courtroom scene.

• Horace Pippin — American; Self-taught/Folk; John Brown Going to His Hanging (1942); Holy Mountain series; African American experience and Civil War history through a direct, flat style.

• Norman Rockwell — American; Illustration/Figurative; Freedom from Want (1943, Four Freedoms series); Triple Self-Portrait (1960); The Problem We All Live With (1964); Saturday Evening Post covers for nearly five decades. He studied at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League, worked for Boys’ Life, and also illustrated Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.

  • the Four Freedoms — Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms are a set of paintings inspired by FDR’s 1941 speech and published in the Saturday Evening Post. The series illustrates freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear, with the famous Thanksgiving turkey scene belonging to freedom from want.

  • The Problem We All Live With — Norman Rockwell’s 1964 painting The Problem We All Live With depicts six-year-old Ruby Bridges being escorted to William Frantz Public School by U.S. Marshals. The wall behind her is scarred by racist graffiti and a thrown tomato, making the work a famous image of school integration.

  • Willie Gillis Jr — Willie Gillis Jr. is Norman Rockwell’s recurring comic soldier, the subject of a series of Saturday Evening Post paintings from the 1940s. The sequence follows his wartime service from an early care-package scene through his eventual discharge.

  • Freedom from Want — Freedom from Want is one of Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms paintings, also known as The Thanksgiving Picture. It depicts a family gathered around a large turkey, and it was paired with an essay by Carlos Bulosan.

• Washington Crossing the Delaware — Emanuel Leutze, 1851 (Metropolitan Museum, New York); monumental oil on canvas (379 × 648 cm) depicting George Washington standing in a boat crossing the icy Delaware River on the night of December 25–26, 1776, before the Battle of Trenton; painted in Düsseldorf, Germany; a defining image of American patriotism and Revolutionary mythology. Later versions and parodies appeared in works by Jacob Lawrence, Grant Wood, Robert Colescott, and others. The composition is especially known for Washington standing in the boat with an anachronistic American flag as ice floes crowd the river.

• The Hudson River School — American landscape painting movement, c. 1825–1875; first major American art movement; characterized by luminous, panoramic views of the American wilderness and Manifest Destiny themes; key figures include Cole, Church, Bierstadt, and Durand. Named for the Hudson River, its artists painted romanticized scenery of the American wilderness.

• Thomas Cole — American; Hudson River School; The Oxbow (1836); The Course of Empire (1833–1836, five-painting series); The Voyage of Life (1840, four-painting series); founder of the Hudson River School; depicted the American wilderness as morally and spiritually significant. His paintings often contrast wilderness, civilization, and ruin, and include symbolic canvases such as The Titan’s Goblet and The Architect’s Dream. He is associated with monumental American landscapes.

  • Destruction — Destruction is the penultimate painting in Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire series. It depicts a city under attack, with fires, collapsing architecture, and a looming monumental statue emphasizing the violence of imperial decline.

  • The Architect’s Dream — Thomas Cole’s The Architect’s Dream shows an architect reclining on books while envisioning an idealized sequence of Gothic, Greek, Roman, and Egyptian styles. The painting contrasts these architectural fantasies with dramatic lighting, drapery, and a receding pyramid in the background.

  • The Course of Empire — The Course of Empire is Thomas Cole’s five-painting series charting the rise, triumph, destruction, and ruin of a civilization. Its panels include The Savage State, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, The Consummation of Empire, Destruction, and Desolation.

  • The Oxbow — The Oxbow is Thomas Cole’s Hudson River School landscape showing the Connecticut River bend from Mount Holyoke. It contrasts wilderness and cultivation, includes a tiny self-portrait of the artist, and is tied to storm clouds, a blasted tree, and the wilderness-versus-civilization theme.

  • The Titan’s Goblet — Thomas Cole’s The Titan’s Goblet is a Surreal-looking landscape hidden inside a colossal goblet or fountain. The vessel contains ships, water, ruins, a Greek temple, and a tiny civilization, making it a classic “picture within a picture.”

  • The Voyage of Life — The Voyage of Life is Thomas Cole’s allegorical four-part series showing Childhood, Youth, Manhood, and Old Age as a journey down a river. Its paintings feature an angel guiding the boat, an hourglass, and the final approach to eternity and heaven.

  • Voyage of Life — Thomas Cole’s Voyage of Life is a four-part allegorical painting series made up of Childhood, Youth, Manhood, and Old Age. It follows a boat ride watched over by an angel, with the central figure progressing through danger and maturity as the series advances.

• Frederic Edwin Church — American; Hudson River School; Niagara (1857); The Heart of the Andes (1859); Icebergs (1861); most celebrated student of Cole; panoramic canvases of spectacular natural scenery in the Americas and the Arctic. He also painted The Andes of Ecuador, Cotopaxi, and Twilight in the Wilderness, and lived at Olana. He was among the most financially successful American landscape painters of the nineteenth century.

  • Frederic Church — Frederic Edwin Church was a Hudson River School painter and a student of Thomas Cole. He became famous for sweeping landscapes such as Niagara and for works inspired by the Andes, including The Heart of the Andes. He also painted dramatic seascapes such as The Iceberg and The Wreck.

  • The Heart of the Andes — The Heart of the Andes is Frederic Edwin Church’s large Hudson River School landscape of South America. It shows a lush jungle foreground with a waterfall and the Andes mountains in the background, including Mount Chimborazo. The painting is a classic example of ambitious nineteenth-century American landscape art.

• Albert Bierstadt — American; Hudson River School/Luminism; Among the Sierra Nevada, California (1868); The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak (1863); large-scale, grandiose depictions of the American West; accompanied surveying expeditions to the Rockies. He was known for sweeping light effects and dramatic wilderness panoramas, and his best-known works also include scenes of Yosemite and the Rockies.

• The Ashcan School — American urban realist movement, c. 1900–1913; centered on Robert Henri and painters John Sloan, George Luks, William Glackens, and Everett Shinn (the “Philadelphia Four”); depicted gritty New York street life; rejected genteel academic subjects. It is also associated with the earlier circle called The Eight and with artists such as George Bellows; some accounts use The Ashcan School and The Eight interchangeably.

• Robert Henri — American; Ashcan School; Laughing Child (1907); Snow in New York (1902); leader of the Ashcan School; organized the landmark 1908 exhibition of “The Eight” at the Macbeth Gallery. He was also known as Robert Henry Cozad. He painted urban scenes and portraits with a direct, lively style, championed vigorous modern realism, wrote The Art Spirit, and mentored artists such as Edward Hopper.

• Edward Hopper — American; Realism; Nighthawks (1942); Gas (1940); Early Sunday Morning (1930); Automat (1927); solitary figures in urban and coastal settings; the defining painter of American loneliness and alienation. He is also known for Chop Suey and New York Movie, and his paintings often place isolated figures in sharply lit interiors or on empty city streets, such as a woman in a blue dress facing away from a theater or a lone diner scene.

  • Chop Suey — Edward Hopper’s Chop Suey shows two women seated in a small restaurant beneath a red sign for the title Chinese-American dish. The painting is known for its nearly paired figures and has been parodied as Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

  • Drug Store — Drug Store is an Edward Hopper painting from 1927. It depicts the interior of a pharmacy and is among Hopper’s scenes of urban isolation.

  • Early Sunday Morning — Edward Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning shows a row of storefronts on Seventh Avenue in the bright emptiness of early morning, with no people visible. Its long shadows, barber pole, and fire hydrant are among the details often cited in questions, along with speculation that it was influenced by a stage backdrop or the Flatiron Building area.

  • Jo Hopper — Jo Hopper, also known as Josephine Nivison Hopper, was Edward Hopper’s wife and frequent model. She appears in discussions of works like Four Lane Road and Chop Suey, and she was also painted by Robert Henri in The Art Student.

  • offices — Offices are a favorite subject in Edward Hopper paintings, especially works like Office at Night and Office in a Small City. Clues often point to isolated clerks, windows onto city streets, and the uneasy stillness of modern workplace interiors.

  • House by the Railroad — “House by the Railroad” is an Edward Hopper painting of a Victorian house standing beside a railroad line. It was the first work the Museum of Modern Art acquired, and its lonely setting later helped inspire the look of Psycho and Days of Heaven.

  • Nighthawks — Edward Hopper, 1942 (Art Institute of Chicago); four figures in a brightly lit late-night diner at a corner intersection; no visible door; archetypal image of American urban isolation; possibly set on Greenwich Avenue in New York. It shows three customers and a server in a late-night diner seen through a glass window, with a curved triangular counter and coffee urns visible inside. The painting’s lonely urban mood made it one of the most recognizable images of American realism and inspired parodies such as Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

• Grant Wood — American; Regionalism; American Gothic (1930); Daughters of Revolution (1932); Young Corn (1931); ironic and iconic imagery of the rural Midwest. He was Iowa-born, and his best-known painting, American Gothic, depicts his sister and dentist posed as farm figures in front of the Dibble House. Other works associated with him include Parson Weems’ Fable, Fall Plowing, Spring Turning, and The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover.

  • Daughters of Revolution — Grant Wood’s Daughters of Revolution is a satirical painting of three stern women posed before a reproduction of Washington Crossing the Delaware. Its mock-patriotic title and patriotic imagery fit Wood’s broader American regionalist style.

  • Daughters of the Revolution — Daughters of the Revolution is a satirical painting by Grant Wood showing three women posed before a reproduction of Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware. The work mocks patriotic grandiosity by placing the figures in stiff, mannered contrast with the famous historical scene.

  • Parson Weems’ Fable — Grant Wood’s Parson Weems’ Fable satirically retells the George Washington cherry tree legend, with the title figure pulling back a curtain to reveal the scene. Its geometric style and staged symbols make it one of Wood’s best-known regionalist works.

  • Stone City — Stone City is a Grant Wood painting of an Iowa town with buildings and a bridge over a river. Wood also founded an art colony there during the Great Depression, on the Wapsipinicon River.

  • American Gothic — Grant Wood, 1930 (Art Institute of Chicago); a farmer holding a pitchfork and a younger woman (his daughter, not wife) stand before a Gothic-windowed house; the models were Wood’s sister and his dentist; became an enduring icon of rural America and a subject of endless parody. The work is a famous Regionalist painting by Grant Wood and is closely associated with the artist’s sister and dentist as models and with its location in the Art Institute of Chicago.

    • a pitchfork — A pitchfork is the farm tool held by the man on the right in Grant Wood’s American Gothic. In that painting, it helps emphasize the couple’s rural identity and visually divides the composition.
• Andrew Wyeth — American; Realism; Christina’s World (1948); Wind from the Sea (1947); Winter Fields (1942); spare, melancholy tempera and watercolor of Pennsylvania and Maine landscapes. His best-known work is Christina’s World, and his later fame also came from the Helga Testorf paintings and works like Winter 1946.
  • Helga paintings — Andrew Wyeth’s Helga paintings, also called The Helga Pictures, depict Helga Testorf in a long series of works made in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Clues often mention the secretive circumstances of their creation and titles such as Braids and Refuge.
    • Helga Testorf — Helga Testorf was Andrew Wyeth’s German model and caretaker, the subject of the large hidden series often called the Helga paintings. The series includes nude and clothed studies such as Lovers, Overflow, In the Orchard, and Sheepskin.
  • Christina’s World — Andrew Wyeth, 1948 (MoMA, New York); a woman lies in a dry field looking toward a distant farmhouse; the model, Anna Christina Olson, had a degenerative muscular disorder; painted in dry-brush tempera. The work is associated with Olson’s disability, the Olson house in Cushing, Maine, and the dry-brush realism that made it a signature American painting.

• Cornelius David Krieghoff — Cornelius Krieghoff was a 19th-century Canadian painter known for winter scenes and rural life in Quebec. His works include The Toll Gate, The Habitant Farm, The Blacksmith’s Shop, and several scenes around Laval and Longue-Pointe.

• Edward Hicks — Edward Hicks was a Quaker minister and American folk painter known for The Peaceable Kingdom. His repeated versions of that scene, with lions lying down with lambs and calves, made him a classic example of naive art.
  • The Peaceable Kingdom — The Peaceable Kingdom is Edward Hicks’s series of Quaker paintings inspired by Isaiah’s vision of a world where predators and prey live peacefully together. Common clues mention children leading lions, lambs, leopards, and other animals, along with references to Penn’s Treaty and the Inner Light.
• Frederic Sackrider Remington — Frederic Sackrider Remington was an American painter, sculptor, and photographer best known for vivid scenes of the American West and the Old West. His works frequently depict horses, cowboys, horsemen, and frontier action, and his best-known pieces include The Bronco Buster (Bronco Buster), The Scalp, Cavalry in an Arizona Sandstorm, A Dash for the Timber, and Shotgun Hospitality. He is especially associated with dramatic bronze sculptures that made him famous as a Western artist.
  • The Bronco Buster — Frederic Remington’s The Bronco Buster is a bronze sculpture of a cowboy struggling to stay on a rearing horse. The piece became closely associated with Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders, who gave him a cast of it in 1898.

• George Catlin — George Catlin was an American painter who specialized in portraits and scenes of Native American life. He traveled widely across North America, assembled an Indian Gallery, and painted works such as Portrait of Buffalo Bull’s Back Fat.

• John Kane — John Kane was a self-taught Pittsburgh painter associated with industrial scenes and landscapes. He was an early untrained artist accepted into a major American exhibition and painted works such as Scene of the Scottish Highlands.

• John Trumbull — John Trumbull was an American artist known for Revolutionary subjects such as the Declaration of Independence and The Battle of Bunker Hill. He also painted the portrait of Alexander Hamilton used on the ten-dollar bill and other Capitol rotunda scenes.
  • Signing of the Declaration of Independence — John Trumbull’s painting Signing of the Declaration of Independence appears on the back of the two-dollar bill. The work depicts the pivotal 1776 event of the Declaration’s signing.

• Martin Johnson Heade — Martin Johnson Heade was an American Luminist painter known for luminous seascapes and landscapes such as Thunder Storm on Narragansett Bay. He also painted tropical birds and flowers after trips to Brazil and other parts of Central and South America.

• Maxfield Parrish — Maxfield Parrish was the American illustrator and painter known for fantastical landscapes, luminous figures, and the intense cobalt-blue tint associated with his name. His best-known image is Daybreak, a hugely reproduced print showing a girl and a reclining woman between rocky pillars, and he also painted works such as The Lantern Bearers and The Dinky Bird. Parrish later focused on landscapes and used dynamic symmetry in his compositions, even joking that he was finished with “girls on rocks.” He also produced decorative advertising art, including a commission for Edison Mazda Lamp Company.

• Peale — The Peale family were prominent American artists, including Charles Willson Peale and his sons Raphaelle and Rembrandt. They are especially associated with portraits of George Washington and with the Artist in His Museum.

• Thomas Eakins
  • Max Schmitt in a Single Scull — Thomas Eakins’s Schuylkill River rowing scene shows Max Schmitt sculling in the Schuylkill River Navy Regatta, with bridges and other rowers in the background. Eakins included himself in the picture. It is one of his best-known early realist paintings and begins his long series of rowing scenes.
    • Max Schmitt — Max Schmitt was a friend of Thomas Eakins who appears in the painting Max Schmitt in a Single Scull. Eakins also painted him rowing on the Schuylkill River after a race victory, with the artist visible in the background.

  • The Agnew Clinic — This Thomas Eakins painting depicts a surgical theater with Dr. Agnew overseeing a mastectomy, and it was commissioned to honor his retirement from teaching. It is often paired with The Gross Clinic as one of Eakins’s major medical scenes.

  • The Gross Clinic — The Gross Clinic is Thomas Eakins’s 1875 painting of Dr. Samuel Gross performing surgery before a crowded lecture hall in Philadelphia. It is famous for the bloody scalpel, the recoiling woman, the self-portrait of the artist, and its initial rejection by the Centennial Exhibition jury. A later companion piece is The Agnew Clinic.
    • Gross Clinic — Thomas Eakins’s Gross Clinic depicts Dr. Samuel Gross performing surgery before medical students at Jefferson Medical College. The painting was controversial for its brutal realism and is now associated with Philadelphia and Eakins’s medical subjects.

  • The Swimming Hole — The Swimming Hole is Thomas Eakins’s famous nude bathing scene, originally titled The Old Swimming Hole. Its clues include the commissioned but rejected status, the use of photographs instead of a live model, the Dove Lake setting, and the pose modeled on the Dying Gaul.

  • Thomas Eakins (“AY-kinz”) — Thomas Eakins was an American realist painter known for athletic scenes, portraits, and anatomical exactitude. His works include The Gross Clinic, The Swimming Hole, Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, and Salutat. He also worked as a photographer and made studies of motion and nude figures, which recur in clues about his art and teaching.

• Thomas Eakins — American realist painter and photographer known for frank depictions of anatomy, surgery, rowing, swimming, and other athletic scenes. His best-known works include The Gross Clinic, The Agnew Clinic, The Swimming Hole, Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, and The Chess Players. He also photographed nudes and studied human motion, and his art often connects painting with scientific observation.

• Thomas Moran — Thomas Moran was a Rocky Mountain School painter best known for dramatic western landscapes, especially the Yellowstone and Grand Canyon regions. His canvases include Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and The Chasm of the Colorado, inspired by travel with John Wesley Powell.

• Charles Marion Russell — Charles Marion Russell was the Montana cowboy painter often called America’s Cowboy Artist. He painted western scenes such as Lewis and Clark Meeting the Flathead Indians and worked in Montana after moving there as a teenager.

• Charles Willson Peale — Charles Willson Peale was an early American painter and naturalist who founded one of the first U.S. museums in Philadelphia. He painted George Washington and several famous family portraits, and he is also associated with the discovery and celebration of mastodon bones.
  • Charles Wilson Peale — Charles Wilson Peale was an early American painter and museum founder best known for Washington at the Battle of Princeton and The Artist in His Museum. Other clues include The Staircase Group, Exhuming the Mastodon, and his sons named Rembrandt, Raphael, and Titian.
    • The Artist in His Museum — The Artist in His Museum is Charles Wilson Peale’s self-portrait showing him drawing back a curtain to reveal his natural-history collections. He was also an early American painter and museum founder, and his family included artist sons named Rembrandt and Titian.

  • The Exhumation of the Mastodon — Charles Willson Peale’s The Exhumation of the Mastodon depicts the 1801 excavation of a mastodon on his farm near Newburgh-on-Hudson. The painting combines natural history and family portraiture, with Peale and several notable observers gathered around the dig site and its great waterwheel.

  • The Staircase Group — The Staircase Group is one of Charles Willson Peale’s illusionistic paintings from the early American republic. Peale also founded a museum in Philadelphia and painted George Washington at the Battle of Princeton.
• Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze — Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze was a German-American painter associated with the Düsseldorf School. He is best known for Washington Crossing the Delaware and historical canvases such as Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way. His dramatic, historical canvases were later echoed or reworked by other artists.

  • George Washington Crossing the Delaware — George Washington Crossing the Delaware is Emanuel Leutze’s famous Revolutionary War painting of Washington leading his troops across the river. It later inspired parody and homage works, including Grant Wood’s Daughters of Revolution and Robert Colescott’s satirical version.

  • George Washington Crossing the Delaware River — George Washington Crossing the Delaware River is Emanuel Leutze’s famous Revolutionary War painting showing Washington crossing the river before Trenton. The image is notable for its dramatic arrangement of Washington in the boat and for later being cited in art-history questions about other depictions of the same event.

  • Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way — Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way is Emanuel Leutze’s massive Capitol painting about westward expansion and manifest destiny. Its pioneers, wagons, flags, and border portraits make it one of the most iconic images of nineteenth-century American expansion.

• Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives — Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives were the famous American lithographers behind a huge run of hand-colored prints. Their prints covered popular nineteenth-century subjects such as frontier life and sporting scenes.

• William Sidney Mount — William Sidney Mount was an early American genre painter known for scenes such as Bargaining for a Horse and The Bone Player. His art often depicted everyday rural life and Black-white social tensions in antebellum America.

• Aaron Douglas — Aaron Douglas was a Harlem Renaissance painter known for stylized silhouettes, murals, and illustrations for James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones. His Aspects of Negro Life series includes works like Song of the Towers and From Slavery Through Reconstruction.

• Abbot Handerson Thayer — Abbot Handerson Thayer was an American painter known for religious and allegorical works such as angel scenes and the Stevenson Memorial. He is also remembered for developing an early theory of camouflage based on naturalistic observation.

• Albert Pinkham Ryder — Albert Pinkham Ryder was an American symbolist painter known for moody seascapes and biblical scenes such as The Flying Dutchman, Jonah, and The Forest of Arden. His best-known canvas is The Race Track, or Death on a Pale Horse, whose cracked surface reflects his heavy use of thick paint and unusual additives like asphaltum and tar.

• Jacob Lawrence — Jacob Lawrence was a Harlem Renaissance painter best known for The Migration Series, a sequence depicting African Americans moving north after World War I. His work often uses bright color blocks and stylized figures, and other common clues include the series on Harriet Tubman and his dynamic cubist style.
  • Migration Series — Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series is a cycle of sixty paintings on the Great Migration, each paired with a sentence-long caption that tells a multigenerational story. Its first panel shows crowds sorting through doorways labeled with different American cities, and the series made Lawrence famous after a 1941 exhibition.

• William H. Johnson — William H. Johnson was a Harlem Renaissance painter known for works such as Swing Low Sweet Chariot, Chain Gang, Mount Calvary, and Girl in a Red Dress.

• Constantino Brumidi

  • The Apotheosis of George Washington — The Apotheosis of George Washington is Constantino Brumidi’s Capitol fresco depicting Washington raised toward the heavens and surrounded by allegorical figures. It is a common answer when clues mention Mercury, Ceres, Victoria, or Liberty on the rotunda ceiling.

  • The Apotheosis of Washington — The Apotheosis of Washington is the large fresco on the U.S. Capitol dome by Constantino Brumidi. It depicts George Washington being elevated to divine status amid allegorical figures and historical symbolism.

• Charles Demuth — Charles Demuth was a Precisionist painter known for industrial scenes, Lancaster imagery, and the celebrated painting I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold based on a William Carlos Williams poem. His other works include My Egypt and poster-like views of grain elevators, smokestacks, and buildings.

  • I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold — I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold is Charles Demuth’s Precisionist painting based on William Carlos Williams’s poem about a speeding firetruck. Its urban scene is built from fractured lines, rain, shop signs, and the numeral 5 rendered as a glowing design.

  • I Saw the Figure Five in Gold — I Saw the Figure Five in Gold is Charles Demuth’s precisionist painting inspired by William Carlos Williams’s poem. It shows the number five repeated amid a stylized fire-truck scene with billboard lettering and geometric motion effects.

  • My Egypt — My Egypt is Charles Demuth’s celebrated painting of a grain elevator in Pennsylvania, despite its reference to an African country in the title. The image features a large white grain elevator beside a dark smokestack and nearby rust-colored industrial buildings.

  • The Figure 5 in Gold — Charles Demuth’s The Figure 5 in Gold is an iconic precisionist painting inspired by William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Great Figure.” The work centers on the stylized numeral 5 rushing through an urban night scene in gold, red, and black.

• Marsden Hartley — Marsden Hartley was a modernist painter associated with Maine, especially Mount Katahdin and coastal scenes. He is also known for Portrait of a German Officer, with its stark use of military insignia and abstracted symbolism.
  • Portrait of a German Officer — Portrait of a German Officer is Marsden Hartley’s abstract wartime tribute to Karl von Freyburg. Clues emphasize the flags, initials Kv.F., the number 24, and the painting’s memorial character.

• Romare Bearden — Romare Bearden was a major African-American artist known for collage works that depict Black life through Cubist, muralist, and abstract influences. His works include The Prevalence of Ritual, The Block, and The Calabash, and he is also associated with the 306 Group in Harlem.

• Charles Ephraim Burchfield — Charles Ephraim Burchfield was an American watercolorist known for hallucinatory landscapes and atmospheric depictions of rain, wind, and nature. He was a friend of Edward Hopper and later worked in Buffalo after an early period that included design work and industrial scenes.

• George Inness — George Inness was an American landscape painter associated with Tonalism and with a mystical interest in Swedenborg. His paintings include The Lackawanna Valley, Peace and Plenty, and hazy late landscapes around Montclair, New Jersey.

• John Steuart Curry — John Steuart Curry was a Kansas-born Regionalist painter associated with dramatic scenes of storms, farm life, and John Brown. His best-known works include Tornado Over Kansas, Baptism in Kansas, and Tragic Prelude, which made him one of the major painters of the American Midwest.

• C. M. Coolidge

  • Dogs Playing Poker — Dogs Playing Poker is the popular name for C. M. Coolidge’s painting A Friend in Need. It shows a group of dogs gathered around a card table, with one dog secretly passing an ace to a partner.

  • Dogs Playing Poker — Dogs Playing Poker is the familiar title for C. M. Coolidge’s comic series of canine gambling paintings. The series includes works such as A Friend in Need and A Bold Bluff, and it became a pop-culture visual joke in television and advertising.

• James Montgomery Flagg — James Montgomery Flagg was the illustrator best known for the World War I recruiting poster showing Uncle Sam pointing and declaring “I Want You.” He also created a self-portrait for the image, wrote Roses and Buckshot, and painted portraits such as one of Jack Dempsey.

• Rembrandt Peale — Rembrandt Peale was an American portraitist and museum-showman, the son of Charles Willson Peale. He is associated with detailed portraits of George Washington and with The Court of Death, a moral allegory that toured widely.

• Emily Carr — Emily Carr was a Canadian painter associated with British Columbia, Indigenous subjects, and the Group of Seven. Her best-known works include The Indian Church, later renamed Church at Yuquot Village, as well as forest scenes, totem poles, and images of wildlife such as Big Raven.

• Jamie Wyeth — American realist painter from the Wyeth family known for depictions of Maine seashores, lighthouses, livestock, and other rural subjects. He is the son of Andrew Wyeth and grandson of N. C. Wyeth; his realistic portraits and animal paintings include Portrait of Pig.

• N. C. Wyeth — American illustrator and painter associated with the Brandywine school, trained by Howard Pyle. He was known for vivid work in books and magazine art, especially classic editions of Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, and Rip Van Winkle. He was the father of Andrew Wyeth.

• Raphaelle Peale — Raphaelle Peale was an American still-life painter and an early U.S. practitioner of trompe l’oeil. He was a son of Charles Willson Peale and is known for works such as Venus Rising from the Sea and for appearing in family portraits with his brother Titian.

• Wyeth — The Wyeth family produced several major American artists, including N. C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, and Jamie Wyeth. Andrew Wyeth is best known for Christina’s World and for his studies of the Olson House and Helga Testorf, while N. C. Wyeth illustrated adventure classics such as Treasure Island and Kidnapped. The surname is a shorthand for this artistic dynasty.

• Painting genres
  • genre painting — Genre painting depicts scenes from ordinary daily life, especially domestic interiors and household activity. Dutch Golden Age artists such as Jan Steen and Vermeer helped make the form famous, and later painters like Chardin and Henry Ossawa Tanner also worked in it.
    • Rural genre scenes
      • The Ox-Plow — The Ox-Plow is a French folk painting subject likely referring to a 19th-century rural scene associated with French genre art.
    • Sugaring Off — Sugaring Off is a painting or series of paintings depicting maple sugaring in a snowy rural scene. The works show people, children, and animals helping collect sap and boil it into syrup.
  • landscape — A landscape is a painting genre devoted to natural scenery, often shown in wide views of fields, forests, valleys, and distant horizons. Bruegel, Constable, Turner, and Friedrich are all associated with famous landscapes such as The Fall of Icarus, Dedham Vale scenes, and Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.

• Thomas Kinkade — Thomas Kinkade was a highly commercial American painter known as the “Painter of Light.” His work features glowing cottages, churches, and sentimental landscapes that were widely marketed through mass retail and home-shopping channels. He is also associated with Christmas Cottage and with paintings such as The Forest Chapel and Moonlit Village.

• Archibald M. Willard — Archibald M. Willard was an American painter best known for The Spirit of ‘76. He also painted the mural series in the Fayette County Courthouse in Ohio, later identified from his initials hidden in one of the paintings.

• Arthur Bowen Davies — Arthur Bowen Davies was an American painter associated with The Eight and the Ashcan School, and a key organizer of the Armory Show. He served as president of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors and helped oversee the exhibition’s success. He painted works such as Along the Erie Canal, Dancers, Crescendo, and Unicorns, and was remembered for paintings of mythic figures.

• Asher Brown Durand — Asher Brown Durand was a Hudson River School painter noted for landscapes such as Kindred Spirits and Early Morning at Cold Spring. He also worked as an engraver, including the famous engraving after Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence.

• Hudson River School
  • Asher B. Durand — Asher B. Durand was a leading Hudson River School painter and engraver who first became known for banknote engraving and John Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence. He later became a leading figure in American landscape painting, with landscapes including Kindred Spirits, depicting Thomas Cole and William Cullen Bryant in a landscape, helping define American romantic painting.
    • Kindred Spirits — Kindred Spirits is Asher Durand’s Hudson River School painting of Thomas Cole and William Cullen Bryant standing together in the Catskills. The work was inspired by Keats and celebrates the landscape that Cole and Bryant loved, making it one of the best-known images of artistic friendship in American painting. It shows the two men on a rocky outcropping amid a dramatic, idealized wilderness.

• Frederick Edwin Church — Frederick Edwin Church was a Hudson River School landscape painter and student of Thomas Cole best known for huge scenic canvases such as Niagara and The Heart of the Andes. His work often turns to South American volcanoes and waterfalls, including Cotopaxi and Twilight in the Wilderness, along with dramatic Arctic and wilderness subjects.

• George Luks — George Luks was a member of The Eight and a painter of gritty street scenes associated with Greenwich Village realism. His work includes canvases such as The Spielers, The Wrestlers, Hester Street, and Houston Street.

• George Wesley Bellows — George Bellows was an American Ashcan School painter known for gritty scenes of urban life and prizefights. His boxing canvases include Stag at Sharkey’s and Dempsey and Firpo, and he also painted works such as Men of the Docks and Cliff Dwellers.

• John Sloan — John French Sloan was an Ashcan School painter and one of The Eight, known for lively urban scenes of working-class New Yorkers in intimate everyday settings. He had socialist sympathies, was mentored by Robert Henri, and worked as art editor for The Masses. His best-known works include McSorley’s Bar, Hairdresser’s Window, Chinese Restaurant, City Life, Cliff Dwellers, and Both Members of This Club.

• William Glackens — William Glackens was an American painter associated with the Ashcan School and scenes of urban leisure and high society. His works include Chez Mouquin, The Shoppers, and portraits of his wife Edith.

• George Bellows — George Bellows was an Ashcan School painter known for gritty urban scenes and violent boxing images such as Both Members of This Club, Stag at Sharkey’s, and Dempsey and Firpo. He also painted The Cliff Dwellers and winter or labor scenes of New York, and his wartime images include The Germans Arrive and Massacre of Dinant. His work often combines muscular figures, street life, and social criticism.

  • A Stag at Sharkey’s — A Stag at Sharkey’s is George Bellows’s 1909 boxing painting, showing a brutal match in a New York athletic club. Its crowded ringside scene and the fighters’ locked, almost antler-like poses made it one of the best-known Ashcan School works.

  • Both Members of This Club — Both Members of This Club is a George Bellows painting of a boxing match between a white fighter and Joe Gans. Its title mocks the social exclusivity of private clubs by suggesting that the combatants are both members of such a club.

  • Cliff Dwellers — Cliff Dwellers is a George Bellows painting of New York’s Lower East Side, crowded with tenement life, laundry lines, and street vendors. Bellows painted it as a gritty urban scene rather than an idealized city view.

  • Stag at Sharkey’s — Stag at Sharkey’s is George Bellows’s 1909 painting of an illegal boxing match at the Sharkey Athletic Club. The canvas crowds the fighters with spectators and is often paired with Bellows’s other boxing scene, Both Members of This Club.

• Stuart Davis — Stuart Davis was an American painter known for jazzy, brightly colored works that turned advertisements and product labels into abstract compositions. After studying with Robert Henri and moving beyond Ashcan realism, he developed synthetic-cubist still lifes and later painted WPA murals such as Swing Landscape.

• Walt Kuhn — Walt Kuhn was an American modernist painter and one of the organizers of the Armory Show. He later painted circus and vaudeville subjects, including clown portraits that are among his best-known works.

• Georgia O’Keeffe — American modernist painter associated with New Mexico and Alfred Stieglitz. Known for close-up flowers, desert landscapes, cow and animal skulls, shells, and other desert forms; her New Mexico paintings include references to the Black Place and the White Place, and she is closely associated with Blue and Green Music. Other works include Black Iris III, Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue, Jimson Weed, Radiator Building—Night, and Sky Above Clouds IV; Abiquiú and Cerro Pedernal recur in her New Mexico imagery.

• Tom Thomson — Thomas John Thomson was a Canadian landscape painter whose work helped inspire the Group of Seven. He is best known for The Jack Pine, The West Wind, and In the Northland, many based on Algonquin Park. His death near the Bridge of Allan and the legend of his final sunset became part of his biography.
  • The Jack Pine — The Jack Pine is Tom Thomson’s best-known painting of a lone conifer standing before a Canadian lake, often identified with Grand Lake or Little Cauchon Lake. Its stylized sky and stark tree silhouette make it one of the signature images of Canadian art.

Modern and Contemporary Artists

Connect modern and contemporary artists to their works and artistic concerns.

Early Modernism (c. 1900–1930)

• Gustav Klimt — Austrian; Symbolism/Art Nouveau; The Kiss (1907–1908); Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907); Judith I (1901); ornate gold-leaf surfaces and erotic symbolism. He was a Vienna Secession painter whose decorative “golden phase” also included the Beethoven Frieze and the university ceiling paintings Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence.

  • Adele Bloch-Bauer — Adele Bloch-Bauer was a Viennese socialite and muse for Gustav Klimt, most famous as the subject of The Woman in Gold. Her portraits were later recovered by Maria Altmann, and one version is remembered for its jeweled dress and gold-leaf style.

  • Beethoven Frieze — The Beethoven Frieze is Gustav Klimt’s monumental mural celebrating Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It depicts figures such as the knight, the gorgons, Typhoeus, and a final embrace beneath an Ode to Joy chorus. Quizbowl clues often mention its display at the 1902 Vienna Secession exhibition and its use of gold-toned decorative imagery.

  • The Kiss — Klimt, 1907–1908 (Belvedere, Vienna); a couple entwined in a golden robe covered with floral and geometric patterns kneels at the edge of a flower-covered cliff; the woman’s face is turned away; made with gold leaf; iconic image of the Vienna Secession. It is a 1908 Symbolist painting from Klimt’s Golden Period, housed in Vienna and among the signature images of the Vienna Secession.

  • Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I — Klimt, 1907 (Neue Galerie, New York); subject was a prominent Viennese Jewish socialite; the work was seized by the Nazis and restituted to her heirs in 2006 after a landmark legal battle (basis for the film Woman in Gold); sold to Ronald Lauder for $135 million at the time.

• Amedeo Modigliani — Italian; Expressionism; Reclining Nude (1917–1918); Portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne (1919); elongated, mask-like faces. He was also a sculptor associated with Montmartre’s Le Bateau-Lavoir and painted portraits of Jeanne Hébuterne, Chaim Soutine, and Jean Cocteau. Modigliani died in 1920 of tubercular meningitis, and Jeanne Hébuterne died by suicide shortly afterward.

• Yves Tanguy — French-American; Surrealism; Indefinite Divisibility (1942); Mama, Papa is Wounded! (1927); dreamlike, arid landscapes populated with amorphous biomorphic shapes; self-taught after seeing a de Chirico canvas in a Paris gallery window. He was married to Kay Sage, and works such as The Furniture of Time helped define his highly automatist style.

• Max Ernst — German; Dada/Surrealism; The Elephant Celebes (1921); Europe After the Rain II (1940–1942); invented frottage and grattage techniques. He also worked in painting and sculpture, associated with collage novels such as La Femme 100 têtes and Une Semaine de bonté, and later used decalcomania. Other notable works include Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale.
  • Loplop — Loplop is a recurring alter ego created by Max Ernst, known as the “superior of birds.” He appears in Ernst’s collage novels and related surrealist works, often as a bird-headed figure introducing himself or others.
• Joan Miró — Spanish; Surrealism/Abstraction; The Tilled Field (1923–1924); Harlequin’s Carnival (1924–1925); The Farm (1921–1922); biomorphic forms and primary colors. He was a Catalan painter and sculptor associated with Surrealism, dreamlike imagery, and mixed media including collage, mosaic, tapestry, assemblage, and public sculpture. Other works mentioned include Dog Barking at the Moon, Person Throwing a Stone at a Bird, The Reaper, Still Life with Old Shoe, and the Constellation paintings; he also reworked Dutch Interiors and created the Chicago sculpture originally titled The Sun, the Moon, and One Star.

  • Dog Barking at the Moon — Dog Barking at the Moon is a Joan Miró painting with a ladder on the left, a dog on the right, and a stark moonlit landscape. It is one of Miró’s best-known surrealist images and is often discussed with his experiments in automatic or scraped paint techniques.

  • Harlequin’s Carnival — Joan Miró’s Harlequin’s Carnival is a Surrealist painting packed with playful, dreamlike creatures and floating objects. It is especially recognizable for the harlequin figure and the cluttered room with ladders, musical notes, and odd hybrid animals.

  • Joan Miró i Ferrà — The Harlequin’s Carnival is one of Joan Miró’s best-known surrealist paintings, filled with playful biomorphic forms and a dreamlike interior. Miró also painted Dog Barking at the Moon and developed series such as the Constellations and Dutch Interiors.

• Fauvism and Expressionism
  • Henri Matisse — French; Fauvism/Modernism; The Joy of Life (1905–1906); Dance (I and II) (1909–1910); The Red Room (Harmony in Red) (1908); Woman with a Hat (1905); The Snail (1953, cut-out); leader of Fauvism; rival and friend of Picasso.

    • Amelie Matisse — Amélie Matisse was the wife and frequent model of Henri Matisse. She appears in The Green Stripe and in Woman with a Hat, two paintings central to the early Fauvist controversy.

    • Blue Nude — Blue Nude, or Nu bleu, is a Henri Matisse painting subtitled “Memory of Biskra.” It depicts a reclining nude figure and reflects Matisse’s interest in Morocco and North African imagery.

    • Harmony in Red — Henri Matisse’s 1908 Fauvist canvas shows a maid or woman setting a table in a room saturated in red, with the tablecloth, wallpaper, and other interior surfaces merging into one decorative field. The composition includes an open window at the left, a yellow chair at lower left, and fruit arranged on the table; the work was originally painted in a green-and-blue scheme before Matisse altered it.

    • Le Bonheur de vivre — Henri Matisse’s Le Bonheur de vivre is a Fauvist pastoral canvas filled with nude figures, trees, and dancers in a bright, simplified landscape. It is known for its vivid colors, broad orange field, and circular group of dancers, and it quotes motifs from The Dance. The painting was controversial for Matisse’s radical use of color and simplified forms, and it influenced later modernist painting, including Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

    • The Blue Nude — The Blue Nude is one of Henri Matisse’s well-known depictions of a reclining female figure, later echoed in related cut-paper works. It is often cited for its simplified form and intense use of blue, and one version was famously burned in effigy at the Armory Show.

    • The Dance — Henri Matisse’s painting The Dance (La Danse) depicts five nude figures holding hands in a circle against a simple landscape. It was commissioned by Sergei Shchukin, completed in 1910, and reused a motif from The Joy of Life. It is often paired with Matisse’s Music and the related Barnes Foundation version.

    • The Green Stripe — Henri Matisse’s 1905 portrait of his wife Amélie, identified by the vertical green stripe down the center of her face and vivid blocks of color in the background. It was exhibited with the Fauves at the 1905 Salon d’Automne and is also known by the French title La Raie Verte.

    • The Red Studio — The Red Studio is a 1911 painting by Henri Matisse depicting his studio as a nearly all-over flat red field. The room, floor, and furniture are simplified against the red background, with Matisse’s own paintings hanging on the walls and scattered studio objects including a tabletop with everyday items such as a bottle, candles, crayons, and an ashtray, along with a sailor and a reclining girl.

    • Woman with a Hat — A 1905 portrait of Henri Matisse’s wife, Amélie Parayre, painted after his experiments with André Derain at Collioure. The woman wears an extravagantly colored hat, and the work became one of the defining paintings of Fauvism after its exhibition at the Salon d’Automne. It is now in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

  • André Derain — French; Fauvism; London Bridge (1906); Charing Cross Bridge (1906); co-founder of Fauvism with Matisse; the term “Fauves” (wild beasts) was coined by critic Louis Vauxcelles at the 1905 Salon d’Automne. His work with Maurice de Vlaminck helped establish Fauvism; among his best-known canvases are Charing Cross Bridge and The Turning Road at L’Estaque. He also illustrated later editions of Rabelais.
    • Charing Cross Bridge — Charing Cross Bridge is a London landmark often painted by impressionists and other modern artists. André Derain depicted it in a vivid Fauvist style, making the Thames bridge a recurring art-history clue.

  • Maurice de Vlaminck — French; Fauvism; The River (c. 1910); Tugboat on the Seine (c. 1906); along with Derain and Matisse, one of the three core Fauves; used paint straight from the tube. Before painting, he worked as a professional bicyclist and violinist, and one of his best-known Fauvist works is Red Trees.

  • Ernst Ludwig Kirchner — German; Expressionism; Street, Berlin (1913); Self-Portrait as a Soldier (1915); co-founder of Die Brücke. His work also includes woodcuts, stark nudes, and alpine landscapes from Davos. The Nazis later labeled his art degenerate, and he died by suicide afterward.

  • Emil Nolde (Emil Hansen) — German-Danish; Expressionism; Dance Around the Golden Calf (1910); The Last Supper (1909); Legend: St. Mary of Egypt (triptych, 1912); briefly associated with Die Brücke; intense, luminous religious and landscape paintings; his work was deemed “degenerate” by the Nazis.

  • Edvard Munch — Norwegian; Symbolism/Expressionism; The Scream (1893, multiple versions); The Madonna (1894–1895); The Dance of Life (1899–1900); psychological anguish and existential dread. His work also includes The Scream, The Madonna, The Dance of Life, Death in the Sickroom, The Sick Child, Vampire, Puberty, and Death of Marat, and he is strongly associated with the Frieze of Life cycle. He was a major influence on Die Brücke.

    • Death in the Sick Room — Death in the Sick Room is an Edvard Munch painting from his Frieze of Life series showing the death of his sister Sophie in a crowded sickroom. The work emphasizes grieving figures in dark clothing around the bed while the dying child sits slumped in a wicker chair.

    • Death in the Sickroom — Death in the Sickroom is an Edvard Munch painting about the death of his sister Sophie from tuberculosis. The scene shows Munch’s family mourning in a sparsely furnished room as part of his Frieze of Life cycle.

    • Edvard Munch (moonk) — Edvard Munch was the Norwegian painter associated with The Scream and the Frieze of Life series. His clues often involve angst, sickness, death, sexuality, and his self-portraits, along with the orange-red sky and bridge figures of his most famous painting.

    • Frieze of Life — Edvard Munch’s linked cycle of paintings about life, love, anxiety, sex, and death. It includes The Scream, The Sick Child, Vampire, Ashes, Anxiety, Puberty, Death in the Sickroom, and various self-portraits and moonlit scenes.

    • The Dance of Life — The Dance of Life is an Edvard Munch painting showing a garden party or dance scene with many couples in motion. Its composition is framed by figures in white, red, and black, including a cheerful woman in white and a forlorn woman in black at opposite sides.

    • The Frieze of Life — Edvard Munch’s cycle of paintings about love, jealousy, anxiety, and death. Its best-known works include The Sick Child, Jealousy, Vampire, Death in the Sick Room, and The Three Stages of Woman, and the series is unified by Munch’s recurring treatment of relationships and loss.

    • The Scream — Edvard Munch’s famous Expressionist painting depicts a panic-stricken figure on a bridge or hill above the Oslofjord, clutching its face or head against a swirling, blood-red sky. It was painted in 1893 and is closely associated with modern anxiety and with Munch’s Frieze of Life series. One version was stolen from the National Gallery in Oslo in 1994, and another was taken from the Munch Museum in 2004. Munch said he drew inspiration from a walk with friends, and the red sky is often linked to the Krakatoa eruption.
      • screaming — Screaming is the title action in Edvard Munch’s The Scream and related works by Francis Bacon and others. The clue set also points to artistic depictions of anguish, fear, or outcry in modern painting and literature.

    • The Sick Child — The Sick Child is a major series of works by Edvard Munch depicting his sister Sophie as she dies of tuberculosis. The images often show a grieving relative beside the bedridden child. Munch returned to the scene in multiple paintings, prints, and sketches over many years, making it one of his most persistent motifs.

    • The Vampire — The Vampire is an Edvard Munch painting from The Frieze of Life showing a red-haired woman bent over and embracing a man. The image is often read as a study of desire and danger rather than a literal supernatural scene.
  • Egon Schiele — Austrian; Expressionism; Self-Portrait with Physalis (1912); The Family (1918); raw, contorted figures; student of Klimt. He is known for raw self-portraits, contorted nudes, and intensely sickly coloration. His notable works include Death and the Maiden, Self-Portrait as Saint Sebastian, and erotic figure studies and paintings of Wally Neuzil. His art led to an obscenity trial in 1912.
    • Egon Schiele (“SHEE-luh”) — Egon Schiele was an Austrian Expressionist and a student of Klimt known for contorted nudes and anguished self-portraits. His work often features his muse Wally Neuzil, and several of his paintings were looted during the Nazi era.

  • Erich Heckel — German; Die Brücke; Glassy Day (1913); Two Men at a Table (1912, featuring Dostoevsky); co-founder of Die Brücke; figures often gaunt and angular.

  • Karl Schmidt-Rottluff — German; Die Brücke; Woman with a Hat (1905); Houses at Night (1912); co-founder of Die Brücke; more purely abstract color areas than Kirchner.

  • August Macke — German; Der Blaue Reiter; Turkish Café (1914); Hat Shop (1913); luminous color and structured form; killed in WWI at 27, making him the first of the Der Blaue Reiter circle to die.

  • Die Brücke (The Bridge) — German Expressionist group founded 1905 in Dresden by Kirchner, Heckel, Schmidt-Rottluff, and Bleyl; emphasized raw woodcut technique and distorted forms; dissolved 1913 after Kirchner’s controversial chronicle pamphlet.

  • Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) — German Expressionist almanac and loose association founded in Munich by Kandinsky and Marc, 1911–1914; embraced abstraction and spiritual art; the almanac included Schoenberg, Webern, and Macke; dissolved with the outbreak of WWI.

  • Franz Marc — German; Expressionism; Blue Horse I (1911); Fate of the Animals (1913); co-founded Der Blaue Reiter with Kandinsky; died at Verdun. He is known for vividly colored animal paintings and for a spiritual symbolism in color and form.
    • Fighting Forms — Fighting Forms is a late abstract painting by Franz Marc that presents two clashing red and black shapes. It reflects Marc’s move away from animal imagery seen in works like The Fate of the Animals.
  • Vasily Kandinsky — Russian; Expressionism/Abstraction; Composition VII (1913); Composition VIII (1923); Yellow-Red-Blue (1925); credited with creating the first purely abstract paintings (c. 1910–1913); co-founded Der Blaue Reiter. He wrote Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Point and Line to Plane, taught at the Bauhaus, and his abstract works in the Composition and Improvisation series were later targeted by the Nazis as degenerate art. He also studied law and economics before turning to art in Germany.

    • Compositions — Compositions is the title Wassily Kandinsky gave to a major abstract painting series, where he pushed geometric form and color toward increasingly nonrepresentational art. The series includes works associated with diagonal movement, cossacks, and dense fields of color and line.

    • Improvisations — Improvisations is the title Kandinsky gave to a series of his abstract paintings. These works are less deliberate than his Compositions and include images such as a sea battle and a couple reclining on the sun.

    • Vasily Vasilyevich Kandinsky — Vasily Kandinsky was a Russian abstract painter and theorist who helped pioneer modern abstraction. He founded the Blue Rider group, taught at the Bauhaus, and titled many works as Compositions, Improvisations, and Impressions.

    • Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky — Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian painter and theorist who helped found Der Blaue Reiter and is often treated as a pioneer of abstract art. His writings such as Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Point and Line to Plane explore inner necessity, form, and color, while works like Composition VIII and On White II are among his best-known paintings.

  • Alexey von Jawlensky — Alexey von Jawlensky was a Russian expressionist associated with Der Blaue Reiter and the Blue Four. He is best known for stylized portraits and abstract heads such as Mystical Head, Looking Within, and Madame Turandot.

  • Otto Dix — Otto Dix was a German painter and printmaker associated with New Objectivity and the antiwar imagery of World War I. His best-known works include Der Krieg, The Skat Players, and Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden.

  • Oskar Kokoschka — Oskar Kokoschka was an Austrian expressionist painter and writer known for psychologically intense portraits and his obsession with Alma Mahler. His clues often mention The Bride of the Wind, The Tempest, and the notorious life-size doll he made of Mahler.
    • Bride of the Wind — Oskar Kokoschka’s 1914 painting depicting himself with Alma Mahler amid turbulent brushwork and a stormy blue-purple atmosphere. It is associated with his relationship with Alma Mahler, and the title has also been linked to Kokoschka’s own autobiography and to Georg Trakl.
  • Käthe Kollwitz — Käthe Kollwitz was a German Expressionist printmaker and sculptor known for stark images of suffering, grief, and war. Her works include the War and Death cycles, The Weavers, and Grieving Parents, all shaped by her antiwar politics and mourning for her son.
    • Kathe Kollwitz or Kathe Schmidt — Käthe Kollwitz, also known as Käthe Schmidt, was a German artist famous for expressive prints and memorials centered on war, loss, and social suffering. Her work includes the War and Death series, along with the sculptural memorial Mother with her Dead Son.
• Cubism, Futurism, and Constructivism
  • Pablo Picasso — Spanish; Cubism/multiple movements; Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907); Guernica (1937); Girl Before a Mirror (1932); Weeping Woman (1937); Three Musicians (1921); co-founded Analytic and Synthetic Cubism with Braque; most exhibited artist of the 20th century. He is also associated with the Blue Period and Rose Period, later political and antiwar works, and major paintings such as The Old Guitarist, Boy with a Pipe, Le Rêve, Young Acrobat on a Ball, and a series of portraits of Dora Maar. His work includes sculpture and ceramics, and his reinterpretations of Las Meninas are also notable.

    • Boy with a Pipe — Boy with a Pipe is a Rose Period painting by Picasso showing a young man holding a pipe and wearing a flower garland. It is often cited as an early sign of his movement toward cubism. The work became famous for its high-profile sale decades later.

    • Family of Saltimbanques — Family of Saltimbanques is a Rose Period painting by Picasso showing circus performers in a barren landscape. The work includes a self-portrait of Picasso in harlequin costume and was later linked to Rilke’s Fifth Duino Elegy. Its figures include a youth with a drum, a seated woman, and other isolated circus characters arranged in a melancholy grouping.

    • Jaime Sabartes — Jaime Sabartés was a Catalan writer, artist, and longtime secretary of Pablo Picasso. He was also a subject of Picasso’s portraits and helped found the Picasso Museum in Barcelona by donating his collection.

    • La Vie — Picasso’s La Vie is a Blue Period painting that contrasts a nude couple on the left with a clothed mother and child on the right. The work is also known for its autobiographical associations with Carlos Casagemas.

    • Marie-Thérèse Walter — Marie-Thérèse Walter was one of Pablo Picasso’s mistresses and a frequent model in his paintings and etchings. She appears in works such as Girl Before a Mirror and The Dream.

    • Pablo Diego Jose Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Maria de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santisima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso — Pablo Picasso was the Spanish artist whose sculpture work ranged from whimsical assemblages to monumental public pieces. He is better known for paintings such as Guernica, but the clues point to his full name and his ceramic and sculptural experiments at Vallauris.

    • The Old Guitar Player — This Picasso painting shows an elderly guitarist slumped against a wall, with closed eyes and a torn shirt. The canvas may have been reused from an earlier portrait, which is suggested by faint traces of a woman’s head and legs.

    • The Old Guitarist — The Old Guitarist is a Blue Period painting by Pablo Picasso showing an emaciated blind man hunched over a guitar. Its somber palette and impoverished subject make it one of Picasso’s most famous early works.

    • Three Musicians — Pablo Picasso’s Three Musicians is a synthetic Cubist painting with versions at MoMA and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Its figures are commonly identified as Harlequin, Pierrot, and a monk, often linked to Picasso’s circle of Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire. Quizbowl clues may mention the dog hidden beneath the table or the comparison to later stage-inspired compositions.

    • Guernica — Picasso, 1937 (Reina Sofía, Madrid); monumental grisaille canvas (349 × 776 cm) responding to the Nazi bombing of the Basque town; a screaming horse, a bull, dismembered figures, and a lamp dominate; sent on tour to raise funds for Spanish aid; held at MoMA until Spain’s return to democracy (1981).

    • Les Demoiselles d’Avignon — Picasso, 1907 (MoMA, New York); five nude figures, two with African mask-like faces; proto-Cubist fracturing of form; influenced by Cézanne, Iberian sculpture, and African masks; kept private for years before becoming a touchstone of modernism. Also called The Young Ladies of Avignon.
      • Demoiselles D’Avignon — Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is Pablo Picasso’s early Cubist painting of five nude women in Barcelona. The work was once known as The Philosophical Bordello and now belongs to the Museum of Modern Art.
    • Pablo Ruiz Picasso — Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish painter who helped pioneer Cubism with Georges Braque. He painted works such as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Guernica, The Old Guitarist, and Weeping Woman, and his art is often linked to African masks and the Blue Period.

  • Georges Braque — French; Cubism; Violin and Candlestick (1910); Houses at l’Estaque (1908); co-founded Cubism with Picasso; introduced collage elements (Fruit Dish and Glass, 1912). He is also associated with overlapping planes, the use of letters in composition, and early papier collé.

  • Juan Gris — Spanish; Cubism; Portrait of Picasso (1912); Violin and Checkerboard (1913); more geometric and colorful than early Picasso/Braque.

  • Fernand Léger — French; Cubism/Purism; The City (1919); Three Women (Le Grand Déjeuner) (1921); bold, cylindrical forms.

    • Fernand — Fernand is the title used for a French painter known for works such as The Plunge, The Construction Workers, and The Grand Parade. Fernand is also the given name of the Viscount de Morcerf in The Count of Monte Cristo.

    • Joseph Fernand Henri Léger — Joseph Fernand Henri Léger was a French cubist painter associated with Purism and bold tubular forms. His best-known works include Three Women, The City, and collaborations such as Ballet Mécanique.

    • Leger — The surname Leger belongs to a family that includes Canadian governor-general Jules, archbishop Paul-Emile, Nobel laureate Alexis, and Cubist painter Fernand. Fernand Leger painted works such as The Mechanic, Three Women, and Great Parade and later associated with Le Corbusier.

  • Umberto Boccioni — Italian; Futurism; The City Rises (1910); States of Mind triptych (1911); Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913, original plaster; bronze casts made posthumously from the 1930s); co-author of the Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto (1910); the most important Futurist visual artist.⁶ He was associated with Marinetti, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini.
    • Unique Forms of Continuity in Space — Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space is the famous Futurist sculpture of a striding, armless figure. Cast in bronze after his death, it is often linked to the movement, speed, and dynamism celebrated by Futurism.
      • Unique Forms of Continuity in Space or Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio — Unique Forms of Continuity in Space is a Futurist bronze sculpture by Umberto Boccioni showing a striding, wind-swept human figure. Its flowing surfaces and forward motion make it one of the best-known sculptural statements of Futurism.
  • Giacomo Balla — Italian; Futurism; Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (Leash in Motion, 1912); Abstract Speed + Sound (1913–1914); Speeding Automobile (1912); captured motion through simultaneous superimposition of sequential positions; remained in Rome while most Futurists moved toward abstraction.
    • Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash — Giacomo Balla’s Futurist painting shows a dog and its owner in repeated, overlapping motion, creating the sense of rapid movement. The work, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, is a signature example of Futurist fascination with speed and modern visual effects.

  • Futurism — Italian avant-garde movement launched by Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto (1909); glorified speed, technology, violence, and the machine; the painters’ technical manifesto (1910) was signed by Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo, Balla, and Severini; the movement later became associated with Italian Fascism.

  • Kazimir Malevich — Russian; Suprematism; Black Square (c. 1915); Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918); Red Square (Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions) (1915); founded Suprematism, claiming geometric abstraction as the highest form of pure feeling in art. Russian painter and avant-garde artist; he was associated with groups such as Jack of Diamonds, the Donkey’s Tail, and Blue Rider. He also made arkhitekton models, was associated with the 0,10 Exhibition, and wrote The World as Non-Objectivity; he also used the term constructivist or constructive art in a pejorative sense.
    • White on White — White on White is a Kazimir Malevich painting or series of Suprematist works built from nearly colorless geometric forms. The best-known version is a tilted pale square set against an even paler background.

  • Vladimir Tatlin — Russian; Constructivism; Monument to the Third International (Tatlin’s Tower, 1919–1920, unrealized design); Corner Counter-Reliefs (c. 1914–1915); co-originator of Constructivism; the tower, designed to rotate and house Comintern offices, became a symbol of Soviet utopian art. He is often credited as the founder of Constructivism. He also created other early relief works that helped define Russian avant-garde sculpture.

  • El Lissitzky — Russian; Constructivism; Proun series (1919–1923); Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919, propaganda poster); developed the Proun concept as a “transfer station between painting and architecture”; influential on graphic design and typography. He was also a Russian-Jewish Constructivist and Suprematist artist associated with UNOVIS projects, geometric compositions, and a visual book for Had Gadya.

  • Alexander Rodchenko — Russian; Constructivism; Pure Red Color, Pure Yellow Color, Pure Blue Color (triptych, 1921); photomontages and poster work for the USSR in the 1920s; declared painting dead and turned to design and photography.

  • Liubov Popova — Liubov Popova was a Russian avant-garde painter associated with Cubism, Futurism, and later Constructivism. After the Revolution she moved toward textile and costume design, while works like her Painterly Architectonics use stacked geometric forms.

  • Natalia Goncharova — Natalia Goncharova was a Russian avant-garde painter associated with Cubo-Futurism, Rayonism, and the Jack of Diamonds group. Her work ranges from peasant scenes and cyclists to religious subjects that once drew censorship in Russia.

  • Carlo Carra — Carlo Carrà was an Italian Futurist painter who later helped develop metaphysical painting with Giorgio de Chirico. He painted The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli and other angular modernist works before turning to quieter landscapes.
    • The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli
      • Angelo Galli — Angelo Galli was an Italian anarchist whose funeral was painted by Carlo Carrà. The work depicts a clash between police and demonstrators marked by black flags, and it is now in the Museum of Modern Art.
• Abstraction, Design Schools, and Dada
  • Piet Mondrian — Dutch; De Stijl/Neoplasticism; Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–1943); Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow (1930); reduced painting to primary colors and orthogonal black lines. Born Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan, he later used the shortened name Piet Mondrian. He is also associated with tilted lozenge canvases and earlier works such as Gray Tree and Pier and Ocean.

    • Pieter Cornelis “Piet” Mondrian — Piet Mondrian was a Dutch De Stijl painter famous for his geometric compositions in red, yellow, and blue. His late works such as Broadway Boogie Woogie and Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue exemplify his move toward abstraction.

    • Victory Boogie Woogie — Victory Boogie Woogie is Piet Mondrian’s final major work, an unfinished diamond-shaped painting completed near the end of his life. Its blocks of red, blue, yellow, gray, and black are arranged to evoke syncopated rhythm.

  • De Stijl — Dutch art movement founded 1917 by Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, and the architect J.J.P. Oud; the journal De Stijl (1917–1932) propagated “Neoplasticism,” reducing art and design to primary colors, black, white, and right angles; deeply influenced the Bauhaus and international modernism.

  • Theo van Doesburg — Dutch; De Stijl; Counter-Composition V (1924); Simultaneous Counter-Composition (1929); co-founder of De Stijl; broke with Mondrian by introducing diagonals (calling it “Elementarism”); also worked under the pseudonym I.K. Bonset for his Dada activities. He was also a painter and wrote on concrete art and elementarism.

  • Bauhaus — German art school founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar, 1919; united fine art, craft, and industrial design; faculty included Klee, Kandinsky, Albers, Moholy-Nagy, and Mies van der Rohe; closed by the Nazis in 1933; its exiled faculty carried its ideas to the United States.

  • Paul Klee — Swiss-German; Expressionism/Bauhaus; Twittering Machine (1922); Fish Magic (1925); Ad Parnassum (1932); poetic, childlike line and color theory; taught at the Bauhaus. He was a modernist painter associated with Blaue Reiter, and other well-known works include Angelus Novus, The Goldfish, and Viaducts Break Ranks.

    • Ad Parnassum — Ad Parnassum is a late Paul Klee painting built from tiny squares of color and a triangular mountain-like form. Its title refers to Mount Parnassus, and the work is often described as a pointillist or mosaic-like composition with a bright sun.

    • Angelus Novus — Angelus Novus is a 1920 Paul Klee print showing a wide-eyed angelic figure with wings and ornamented features. Walter Benjamin later associated it with the image of history blown forward by a storm from paradise.

    • Death and Fire — This 1940 Paul Klee painting centers on a pale face whose features spell the German word for death. Its red, black, and white palette and the stick-figure confrontations give it an apocalyptic, near-skeletal look.

    • Twittering Machine — Paul Klee’s Twittering Machine is a surreal drawing of bird-like figures mounted on a crank-driven wire above a pit. Its title and imagery suggest a machine that turns birdsong into a fantastical apparatus.

  • Josef Albers — German-American; Bauhaus/Color Field; Homage to the Square series (begun 1950); Interaction of Color (1963, treatise); taught at the Bauhaus, then Black Mountain College, then Yale; his systematic exploration of how colors interact was foundational for Op Art and Color Field painting.

  • László Moholy-Nagy — Hungarian; Bauhaus; Light-Space Modulator (1922–1930, kinetic sculpture); Photogram series; Space Modulator paintings; taught at the Bauhaus, then founded the New Bauhaus (later IIT Institute of Design) in Chicago; championed light, transparency, and industrial materials. He also worked on influential graphic design.

  • Marcel Duchamp — French-American; Dada/Conceptual; Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912); Fountain (1917, readymade urinal); The Large Glass (1915–1923); Étant donnés (1946–1966, posthumously revealed installation, Philadelphia Museum); transformed the definition of art. He was also a pioneer of the readymade and conceptual art, and used the alter ego Rrose Sélavy in several works. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 became famous after the Armory Show, and his other notable pieces include L.H.O.O.Q., Bicycle Wheel, Bottle Rack, and Boîte-en-valise.

    • Bicycle Wheel — Bicycle Wheel is Marcel Duchamp’s first readymade and is often described as an early kinetic sculpture. It combines a bicycle wheel mounted on a wooden stool.

    • In Advance of the Broken Arm — This Duchamp readymade is a household snow shovel suspended and titled as a work of art, an early example of his use of ordinary objects.

    • L.H.O.O.Q. — Marcel Duchamp’s readymade parody of the Mona Lisa, made by defacing a postcard reproduction with a drawn mustache and beard/goatee. Its title is a French pun that sounds like an obscene or risqué sentence about the Mona Lisa.

    • Nude Descending a Staircase — Marcel Duchamp’s 1913 controversial Cubo-Futurist painting shown at the Armory Show, depicting a fragmented motion study of a nude figure descending stairs. The work scandalized viewers and was mocked by critics as an “explosion in a shingle factory,” helping establish Duchamp as a major figure in modern art.

    • Nude Descending a Staircase, Number 2 — Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 is a 1912 painting that fused cubist and futurist ideas. It became notorious at the Armory Show for its depiction of motion and its highly controversial reception.

    • Prelude to a Broken Arm
      • snow shovel — Snow shovel is the ordinary object Duchamp repurposed as a readymade in Prelude to a Broken Arm. Like his other readymades, it was presented as art through selection rather than traditional craft.

    • readymades — Ordinary or slightly modified manufactured objects presented as art, most famously by Marcel Duchamp in Fountain and Bicycle Wheel. Duchamp’s readymades were used to challenge traditional “retinal” aesthetics and are central to Dada and later conceptual art, where selection and context turn everyday things into artworks. Other well-known examples include In Advance of a Broken Arm.

    • Rrose Sélavy — Marcel Duchamp’s female alter ego, a name punning on a French phrase about life. The persona appears in Duchamp readymades and related works, including the perfume-bottle image and Why Not Sneeze, Rrose Sélavy?; the title of that work also plays on the name.

    • The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even — Marcel Duchamp’s divided glass construction depicts a bizarre courtship between an elusive bride and her bachelors. Its upper and lower panels contain mechanical imagery including the bride, the bachelors, the chocolate grinder, and the malic molds. The work became famous through Duchamp’s Green Box notes and his embrace of accident after the glass was damaged in transit; it is a signature work of Dada and conceptual art.

    • Étant donnés — Étant donnés is Marcel Duchamp’s secret final installation, assembled over decades and now housed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Seen through peepholes, it shows a nude woman holding a gas lamp amid a rough landscape, making it one of Duchamp’s most famous late works.

    • Fountain — Duchamp, 1917; a commercially purchased porcelain urinal turned on its side, signed “R. Mutt 1917”; submitted to and rejected by the Society of Independent Artists; the original is lost; considered the most influential artwork of the 20th century in a 2004 survey of 500 art world figures. It was reproduced and discussed in The Blind Man and photographed by Alfred Stieglitz; the title refers to a public water-spraying monument.

      • a urinal — Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain is a readymade urinal presented as art in 1917. It became one of the most famous examples of Dada and anti-art provocation, especially after being photographed and rejected by the Society of Independent Artists.

      • R. Mutt — R. Mutt was the pseudonym Marcel Duchamp used on Fountain, the famous readymade urinal submitted in 1917. The signature is part of the work’s challenge to artistic authorship and conventional definitions of art.

    • Duchamp — The Duchamp family produced several notable early modern artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Suzanne Duchamp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Jacques Villon. Their work ranges from Cubist sculpture and stained glass to Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and Suzanne’s mechanomorphic paintings.
  • Jean (Hans) Arp — Alsatian-French; Dada/Surrealism; Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance (1916–1917); Human Concretion (1935, relief); co-founder of Zurich Dada and the Abstraction-Création group; works in relief, collage, and biomorphic sculpture.
    • Arp — Dada artist, sculptor, and poet associated with Zurich Dada, Der Blaue Reiter, Surrealism, and Abstraction-Creation. He made chance-based collages, abstract reliefs, and biomorphic sculpture with organic, amoeba-like forms. Works and collaborations associated with him include Constellation, Collage with Squares Arranged with the Laws of Chance, Endless Mustache, Cloud Shepherd, and carved or collaged pieces made with Sophie Taeuber-Arp, including the interior of Café Aubette.
      • Human Concretion — Human Concretion is a 1935 sculpture by Jean Arp that was later cast in stone in 1949. It is a biomorphic work designed to be viewed in multiple orientations.

  • Kurt Schwitters — German; Dada; Merzbau (built c. 1923–1937, Hanover, destroyed); Merz collages using urban debris (bus tickets, wire, newspaper); the term “Merz” was cut from a scrap of “Kommerz”; created a second Merzbau in Norway and a third in England.

  • Hannah Höch — Hannah Höch was a German Dada artist best known for photomontage and collage. Her works include The Beautiful Girl and Cut With the Kitchen Knife Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany.

  • Hilma af Klint — Hilma af Klint was a Swedish pioneer of abstract art. Her spiritually inspired, non-objective works include The Ten Largest, The Paintings for the Temple, and Studies of the Life of the Soul. The Paintings for the Temple was an early major cycle tied to her spiritualist séances and her idea of a commissioned body of work. Her work was long kept secret and later rediscovered through exhibitions such as the Guggenheim’s Paintings for the Future.

  • Sonia Delaunay — Ukrainian-born French abstract artist and designer associated with Orphism and simultaneous contrasts, and with her husband Robert Delaunay. She applied these ideas to painting, fashion, book design, textile work, costume, and stage design. Her colorful collaboration with Blaise Cendrars includes Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France.

• The Armory Show — International Exhibition of Modern Art, New York, 1913; introduced European modernism (Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Duchamp) to American audiences; Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 caused the greatest scandal; a turning point for American art. Officially the International Exhibition of Modern Art; organized by Arthur B. Davies, Walter Pach, and others, and later toured to Chicago and Boston.

• Romaine Brooks — Romaine Brooks was an American portraitist known for monochrome paintings and androgynous self-portraits. She painted figures such as Gluck and Natalie Barney in a cool gray palette that became her signature.

• Carlos Schwabe — Carlos Schwabe was a Symbolist painter and printmaker known for eerie imagery and illustrations for Les Fleurs du mal. His work includes paintings such as The Wave, Spleen and Ideal, and The Death of the Grave-Digger.

• Chaim Soutine — Chaim Soutine was a Belarusian-Jewish Expressionist painter associated with thick brushwork and distorted, often unsettling subjects. He became known for still lifes of carcasses and butchered meat, as well as portraits and scenes painted in heavily worked layers over old canvases.

• Georges Rouault — Georges Rouault was a French Fauvist and Expressionist painter known for thickly painted, darkly outlined, spiritually charged figures and religious imagery. His subjects often included judges, clowns, and prostitutes. His work includes Christ Mocked by Soldiers, The Old King, and the Miserere cycle, and he spent years working on The Old King. After Moreau’s death, he became curator of the Gustave Moreau Museum.

• James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor — James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor, was a Belgian Expressionist painter noted for grotesque masks, skeletons, and carnival crowds. His best-known painting is Christ’s Entry into Brussels, and other works include The Vile Vivisectors and Skeletons Fighting over a Hanged Man.

• Oscar Kokoschka — Oscar Kokoschka was an Austrian expressionist painter and playwright associated with the Vienna Secession. He is especially remembered for his intense portraits, his play Murderer, Hope of Women, and his relationship with Alma Mahler, including the painting The Bride of the Wind. His fixation on Alma Mahler led him to commission a life-sized doll in her likeness, a notorious episode in his biography.

• Matisse — Henri Matisse was a Fauvist painter known for works such as Woman with a Hat, Harmony in Red, The Dance, and The Joy of Life. His surname is also shared by Sophie Matisse, who created the Back in 5 Minutes series by removing figures from famous paintings.
  • Joy of Life — Joy of Life, also given as La Joie de vivre or Le Bonheur de vivre, is a title shared by works by Matisse, Picasso, Delvaux, and Suzanne Valadon. In art clues it most famously points to Matisse’s 1906 Fauvist scene of nude figures in an idyllic landscape.

• Pierre Bonnard — Pierre Bonnard was a Nabis painter associated with the intimist style and with Edouard Vuillard and Paul Sérusier. His works often show sunlit interiors, bath scenes with Marthe de Méligny, and japonisme-inflected posters and decorative panels.

• Raoul Dufy — Raoul Dufy was a French Fauvist painter known for bright, decorative scenes, harbor subjects, and later large public murals. His works include Regatta at Cowes and Harbor at Le Havre, and he also made woodcuts for Apollinaire’s Bestiaire. Later versions of Harbor at Le Havre attracted avant-garde vandalism by Jubal Brown.

• Ernst Kirchner — Ernst Kirchner was a German Expressionist painter and founder of Die Brücke, known for urban scenes like Potsdamer Platz and Street, Berlin. His work also includes self-portraits marked by wartime trauma and bold, angular color, including Self-Portrait as a Soldier.

• Emil Nolde — German Expressionist painter and printmaker briefly associated with Die Brücke. He is known for vivid religious paintings and watercolors, including The Life of Christ and The Last Supper, as well as the woodcut The Prophet and the painting Dance Around the Golden Calf.

• Vassily Kandinsky — Vassily Kandinsky was a Russian abstract painter associated with Der Blaue Reiter and the Bauhaus. His work often features horses and riders, and he wrote On the Spiritual in Art.

• Bart van der Leck — Bart van der Leck was a Dutch artist associated with De Stijl and one of its founders alongside Mondrian and van Doesburg. His work moved toward geometric abstraction in pieces such as Composition with One Gray Stripe and The Tempest.

• Koloman Moser — Koloman Moser was a major Vienna Secession artist who designed decorative works, illustrated the movement’s magazine Ver Sacrum, and helped shape its visual style. He also created mosaics and stained glass for Otto Wagner’s Steinhof Church and co-founded the Vienna Workshop with Josef Hoffmann.

• Albers — The surname Albers refers to both Anni Albers and Josef Albers. Anni became a major textile artist associated with Black Mountain College, while Josef is known for The Interaction of Color and the Homage to the Square paintings.

• collage
  • collages — Collage is an art form made by assembling pasted images, paper, and other materials onto a surface. It ranges from Dada photomontage to the work of Romare Bearden and later mixed-media painting.

• Marie Laurencin — Marie Laurencin was a Cubist painter known for pastel scenes of women in soft pinks, grays, and blues. She also designed costumes and sets, and clues may mention Apollinaire, Chanel, or The Muse Inspiring the Poet.

• Preparatory drawings
  • tapestry cartoons — Tapestry cartoons are the full-size preparatory drawings used to make tapestries. Raphael’s designs for the Acts of the Apostles and Goya’s royal cartoon series are famous examples of this medium. The term cartoon here means a working design, not animation.

• saltimbanques — Saltimbanques are itinerant circus performers, and Picasso’s Rose Period painting Family of Saltimbanques depicts them in a desolate landscape. Rilke’s Duino Elegies were also inspired by this subject. The same term appears in Daumier’s work about wandering performers.

• Jacques Villon — Gaston Duchamp, better known as Jacques Villon, was a French artist associated with Cubism and the Section d’Or. He worked in printmaking and related decorative arts, and was the eldest of the Duchamp brothers and the brother of Marcel Duchamp.

• Joseph Stella — Joseph Stella was an Italian immigrant painter associated with works ranging from realism to abstraction. He is best known for semi-abstract depictions of the Brooklyn Bridge and for works such as Battle Lights: Coney Island and The Bridge, and he is also noted for introducing futurism to America.

• Erté — Erté was a Russian-born French Art Deco artist and designer whose pseudonym comes from the French pronunciation of his initials. He designed costumes and sets for the Ziegfeld Follies and created more than 200 Harper’s Bazaar covers.

• Kay Nielsen — Kay Nielsen was a Danish illustrator associated with Art Nouveau fantasy imagery and Disney’s Fantasia. He is especially known for illustrations for fairy-tale collections such as East of the Sun and West of the Moon.

• Amedeo Clemente Modigliani — Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was the Italian painter and sculptor known for elongated necks, oval faces, and almond-shaped eyes in his portraits. He painted friends such as Jeanne Hébuterne, Paul Guillaume, and Max Jacob, and also produced sculptures like Head and Caryatid.

• Amédée Ozenfant — Amédée Ozenfant was a French painter and theorist who co-founded Purism with Le Corbusier. He opposed what he saw as decorative Cubism and promoted cleaner, more orderly forms in works and manifestos such as After Cubism.

• found objects
  • bottles — Bottles are the everyday objects transformed into artworks by artists such as Cildo Meireles and El Anatsui. Their caps and flattened components also appear in installations and other recycled-material sculpture.
• Aesthetic movement
  • Aubrey Vincent Beardsley — Aubrey Vincent Beardsley was a British illustrator associated with the Aesthetic movement, decadence, and symbolism. He co-founded The Yellow Book and is known for his black-and-white drawings for Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, including The Peacock Skirt, as well as illustrations for Le Morte d’Arthur, The Rape of the Lock, and Lysistrata.

• Akseli Gallen-Kallela — Akseli Gallen-Kallela was a Finnish painter closely associated with the Kalevala and with national romantic imagery. His works include Lemminkäinen’s Mother, The Defense of the Sampo, and Lake Keitele.

• Alphonse Mucha — Alphonse Mucha was a Czech Art Nouveau artist best known for decorative posters and elegant designs from fin-de-siècle Paris. His work is closely associated with Sarah Bernhardt and with posters such as La Tosca and Gismonda. He also created The Seasons and the monumental Slav Epic.
  • The Slav Epic — The Slav Epic is a cycle of 20 monumental paintings by Alphonse Mucha. The series depicts episodes from Slavic history, including Jan Hus, the Battle of Grunwald, and the Siege of Szigetvár. It is often associated with Prague and with controversy over its long-term display location.

• Giorgio Morandi — Giorgio Morandi was an Italian painter known for restrained still lifes of bottles, vases, boxes, and other simple objects. Though briefly linked to Futurism, he became best known for quiet, repetitive compositions associated with the Strapaese milieu.

• Tamara de Lempicka — Tamara de Lempicka was a Polish Art Deco painter known for sleek, stylized portraits and urban modernity. Her best-known works include Self-Portrait in a Green Bugatti, Adam and Eve, and Portrait of Marjorie Ferry, and she was later associated with Paris and with celebrity admirers such as Madonna.

• George Grosz — George Grosz was a German satirical artist and printmaker associated with photomontage, savage political satire, and bitter depictions of Weimar society. His socially critical works include Eclipse of the Sun, The Pillars of Society, Ecce Homo, The Face of the Ruling Class, Cain, or Hitler in Hell, and Hitler in Hell, which mock militarism, corruption, and bourgeois hypocrisy.

• Bloomsbury Group
  • Bell — Bell is the surname shared by Bloomsbury figures such as Clive Bell and Vanessa Bell. Clive Bell wrote about significant form, while Vanessa Bell painted and designed for the Omega Workshops and Hogarth Press.

Latin American Modernism and Muralism

• Jose Clemente Orozco — Mexican; Muralism; Prometheus (fresco, 1930, Pomona College); Epic of American Civilization (fresco cycle, 1932–1934, Dartmouth College); politically charged frescoes alongside Rivera and Siqueiros. He is especially associated with politically charged modernist frescoes and with the Mexican mural movement alongside Rivera and Siqueiros. His works include Prometheus (a 1930 fresco at Pomona College), the fresco cycle The Epic of American Civilization (1932–1934) at Dartmouth College, and paintings such as Man of Fire and Christ Destroys His Cross. Other named works include The Trench.

  • Jose Orozco — José Clemente Orozco was a Mexican muralist associated with Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. His murals include The Epic of American Civilization, Gods of the Modern World, and other dramatic works filled with skeletal imagery and political symbolism.

  • The Epic of American Civilization — The Epic of American Civilization is José Clemente Orozco’s 24-panel mural cycle at Dartmouth College’s Baker Library. Its scenes range from conquest and mechanized violence to modern institutions and skeletons, making it one of Orozco’s major statements about the history of the Americas.

• Diego Rivera — Mexican; Muralism; Detroit Industry Murals (1932–1933); Man at the Crossroads (1933–1934, destroyed); Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Park (1947–1948); monumental social-realist frescoes.

  • Detroit Industry Murals — Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry Murals depict the Ford River Rouge complex and the labor of automotive assembly. The cycle at the Detroit Institute of Arts is famous for its industrial scenes, scientific imagery, and symbolic treatment of modern production.

  • Man at the Crossroads — Diego Rivera’s mural commissioned for Rockefeller Center and destroyed after Nelson Rockefeller objected to its portrait of Lenin. Rivera then painted a revised version in Mexico as Man, Controller of the Universe, with a central figure manipulating a machine-like cosmos and contrasting capitalist and socialist imagery.

  • Man at the Crossroads or Man, Controller of the Universe — Man at the Crossroads, later retitled Man, Controller of the Universe, is Diego Rivera’s mural cycle for Rockefeller Center that was destroyed and then recreated in Mexico City. Its imagery includes Lenin, Trotsky, industrial conflict, and a central figure controlling the forces of modern society.

• Frida Kahlo — Mexican; Surrealism/Magical Realism; The Two Fridas (1939); Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940); The Broken Column (1944); autobiographical pain and Mexican symbolism; married to Diego Rivera. Her full name was Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón de Rivera; she is also associated with the Blue House, childhood polio, a 1925 bus accident, and a distinctive unibrow.

  • Henry Ford Hospital — Henry Ford Hospital is a 1932 Frida Kahlo painting showing her on a bed after the miscarriage-like trauma following her accident. The image includes red or blood-like strings connecting her to symbolic objects such as a fetus, a pelvis, a snail, and a flower.

  • The Broken Column — A 1944 self-portrait by Frida Kahlo showing her body split open and supported by a cracked or broken Ionic column in place of her spine. It reflects the physical trauma she suffered in a bus accident and the pain of later spinal surgery, and includes the nails, corset, and fractured torso imagery associated with the work.

  • The Suicide of Dorothy Hale — The Suicide of Dorothy Hale is Frida Kahlo’s painting of a woman falling from the Hampshire House building in New York. The work was commissioned by Clare Boothe Luce and is infamous for its stark depiction of the body and blood after the suicide.
    • Dorothy Hale — Dorothy Hale was an American socialite and actress whose suicide became the subject of a famous Frida Kahlo painting. Kahlo’s portrait shows Hale falling from a building and lying dead below, and the work is known as The Suicide of Dorothy Hale.

  • The Two Fridas — Frida Kahlo’s 1939 double self-portrait shows two seated versions of herself against a gray background, with exposed hearts linked by an artery and one side bleeding from a cut. It was made during her divorce from Diego Rivera and contrasts a European dress with a Tehuana outfit while one figure holds a tiny portrait of Rivera.

  • What the Water Gave Me — What the Water Gave Me is a Frida Kahlo self-portrait in which she reflects on traumatic and autobiographical imagery in a bathtub-like scene. Floating objects, wounds, a volcano, and other surreal symbols crowd the canvas, making it one of her best-known introspective works.
• David Alfaro Siqueiros — David Alfaro Siqueiros was a major Mexican muralist and one of the great twentieth-century mural painters, alongside Diego Rivera and José Orozco. A committed leftist associated with Communist politics, he helped found the artists’ syndicate and El Machete. His works include The March of Humanity, Portrait of the Bourgeoisie, Tropical America, Echo of a Scream, From Porfirio Diaz to the Revolution, and Death to the Invader. He was also involved in a failed plot to assassinate Leon Trotsky.

  • Echo of a Scream — David Alfaro Siqueiros’s mural Echo of a Scream shows a giant baby head with a smaller baby emerging from its mouth amid rubble, broken metal, and smokestacks. The work is often identified by its stark antiwar imagery and by the red-togaed infant at its center.

  • The March of Humanity — The March of Humanity is the enormous mural by David Siqueiros displayed in and around the Polyforum in Mexico City. Its panels depict revolution, space-age imagery, and a search for a better society, making it one of the world’s largest murals.

• Rufino Tamayo — Rufino Tamayo was a Mexican painter known for brightly colored modernist works and for inventing the Mixografía printing process. He painted pieces such as Tres Personajes, The Flautist, and Two Characters Attacked by Dogs, and he influenced later artists including Helen Frankenthaler.

• Tarsila do Amaral — Tarsila do Amaral was a Brazilian modernist painter associated with Antropofagia and works like Abaporu and Carnival at Madureira. Her art helped define Brazilian post-cubism and inspired Oswald de Andrade’s anthropophagic manifesto.

• Wifredo Lam — Wifredo Lam was a Cuban painter known for The Jungle and for blending surrealism, Cubism, and Santería imagery. His work also includes politically charged pieces such as The Third World and other abstract self-portraits.

• Fernando Botero — Fernando Botero is the Colombian painter and sculptor known for his exaggerated, voluminous figures. His works include depictions of Abu Ghraib abuse and playful parodies of Old Master paintings in his signature inflated style.

• Diego Rivera AND Frida Kahlo — Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo were married Mexican artists whose work and personal lives often appeared together in art-history clues. Rivera was the muralist, while Kahlo was the painter associated with self-portraits and The Broken Column.

• Dr. Atl — Dr. Atl is the pseudonym of Gerardo Murillo, a Mexican muralist and landscape painter. He is associated with volcano paintings, especially Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, and with a namesake painting medium.

• Orozco — Orozco is the surname of both José Clemente Orozco, a Mexican muralist, and Gabriel Orozco, a contemporary conceptual artist. José Clemente Orozco painted The Epic of American Civilization, while Gabriel Orozco is known for works such as Horses Running Endlessly and Black Kites.

• Murals — Large paintings made directly on walls, often in fresco. The Mexican mural tradition is associated especially with Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Siqueiros; other major muralists include Thomas Hart Benton. Notable works include Rivera’s Detroit Industry, Man, Controller of the Universe, and Man at the Crossroads, Orozco’s The Epic of American Civilization, Benton’s America Today, and the Detroit Industry cycle.

Surrealism and the Interwar Period

• Salvador Dalí — Spanish; Surrealism; The Persistence of Memory (1931, melting watches); Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee (1944); The Elephants (1948); Christ of Saint John of the Cross (1951); theatrical, paranoia-critical method. He also painted The Metamorphosis of Narcissus, The Hallucinogenic Toreador, Soft Construction with Boiled Beans, Swans Reflecting Elephants, The Burning Giraffe, and The Great Masturbator, and made objects such as the Lobster Telephone and Mae West sofa. Dalí collaborated with Luis Buñuel on Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog), designed a dream sequence for Hitchcock’s Spellbound, and later produced works such as The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory and Galatea of the Spheres, as well as religious and metamorphic imagery in his “nuclear mysticism” period.

  • a lobster — A lobster is a recurring surrealist motif in Salvador Dalí’s work, including the lobster telephone and a Schiaparelli dress. The animal is used for visual puns that link food, sexuality, and erotic symbolism.

  • drawers — Salvador Dalí’s “The Burning Giraffe” features a woman with drawers protruding from her body, one of his surrealist symbols for Freud’s idea of hidden depths. Dalí also made a 1936 sculpture based on the Venus de Milo with drawers and pom-poms.

  • Gala — Gala was Salvador Dalí’s wife and muse, and she appears as the central figure in works such as The Madonna of Port Lligat. She is also represented in The Persistence of Memory companion works and in Dalí’s spherical portrait Galatea of the Spheres.

  • Gala Dalí — Salvador Dalí’s wife and muse, appearing in many of his paintings under variations of her name. She is associated with works such as The Madonna of Port Lligat, Leda Atomica, Corpus Hypercubus, and Gala of the Spheres, and appears in an optical image that shifts from her portrait to Abraham Lincoln when viewed from a distance.

  • Lobster Telephone — Salvador Dalí’s Lobster Telephone is a surrealist object that combines a functioning phone with a lobster shell. It was made for Edward James and is also known as the Aphrodisiac Telephone.

  • Salvador Dalí y Domenech — Salvador Dalí was the Spanish Surrealist known for The Persistence of Memory, melting clocks, and eccentric dream imagery. His paintings also include Gala portraits, hallucinatory scenes, and religious works such as Christ of St. John of the Cross. Bosch-inspired visions and other fantastical temptations also recur in his art.

  • Soft Construction with Boiled Beans
    • Boiled beans — Boiled beans appear in Salvador Dalí’s Soft Construction with Boiled Beans, also subtitled Premonition of Civil War, a surreal image tied to the Spanish Civil War.

  • Swans Reflecting Elephants — Swans Reflecting Elephants is a Salvador Dalí painting from his paranoiac-critical period. Its lake scene makes swans and trees transform optically into elephants, creating a surreal double image.

  • The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus — The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus is a Salvador Dalí painting in which Columbus is shown as an adolescent boy carrying a banner with Gala depicted as the Virgin or Saint Helena. Dalí also appears in the background as a monk, and the foreground sphere alludes to the moon and other new worlds.

  • The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory — The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory is Salvador Dalí’s later reimagining of his famous melting-clock image. The painting breaks the scene into floating fragments and is often linked to his interest in modern science and visual distortion.

  • The Great Masturbator — The Great Masturbator is a Salvador Dalí painting filled with insect imagery, sexual symbolism, and surreal body distortions. It is often discussed as a Freudian work reflecting the artist’s anxieties about desire and repression.

  • The Hallucinogenic Toreador — The Hallucinogenic Toreador is a late Salvador Dalí painting packed with recurring images, especially the Venus de Milo and visual illusions. It was inspired by bullfighting and the death of Manolete, and it includes Dalí’s wife Gala in the composition. The work is closely associated with the Salvador Dalí Museum in Florida.

  • The Metamorphosis of Narcissus — Salvador Dalí’s surrealist painting shows Narcissus at left staring into water while a hand at right holds an egg from which a flower emerges. The composition also includes ants, a chessboard-like plinth, a dog, and distant mountains and figures along the horizon.
    • Metamorphosis of Narcissus — The Metamorphosis of Narcissus is a Salvador Dalí painting showing the mythic youth by a pool, paired with a stone hand holding an egg and a flower. It belongs to Dalí’s surrealist body of work and often appears in clues alongside other images from his dreamlike symbolic style.

  • The Temptation of Saint Anthony — Salvador Dalí’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony shows a nude saint warding off a surreal procession of elephants on spindly legs and a charging white horse.

  • The Persistence of Memory — Dalí, 1931 (MoMA, New York); small canvas (24 × 33 cm) depicting melting pocket watches draped over a barren landscape; the ants on the watch echo a recurring Dalí motif of decay; one of the most recognized Surrealist images. Dalí also painted a later Disintegration of The Persistence of Memory version that breaks the scene into geometric fragments.
• René Magritte — Belgian; Surrealism; The Treachery of Images (“Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” 1929); The Son of Man (1964); Personal Values (1952); Golconde (1953); conceptual displacement of ordinary objects. Also known as René François Ghislain Magritte, he is associated with visual paradoxes and images that unsettle representation, including men in bowler hats, apples obscuring faces, mirrors and windows, and works such as Time Transfixed, The Human Condition, The False Mirror, and Delusions of Grandeur.

  • Golconde — Golconde is René Magritte’s painting of men in bowler hats arranged in a floating grid before a town backdrop. The image is often described as a surreal rain of identical suited figures.

  • Green Apple — Rene Magritte repeatedly used the green apple as a surreal motif, most famously in The Son of Man and The Listening Room. In these paintings, the fruit blocks or replaces a human face and turns ordinary domestic space into something uncanny.

  • green apples — Green apples recur in René Magritte’s paintings, notably in The Son of Man and The Listening Room. They often appear as an obstructive or surreal object, sometimes masking a face or filling an impossible interior space.

  • Not to Be Reproduced — René Magritte’s Not to Be Reproduced shows a man facing a mirror that reflects the back of his head instead of his face. It is often identified as a portrait of Edward James.

  • On the Threshold of Liberty — On the Threshold of Liberty is a René Magritte painting showing a room whose walls are covered with different scenes, along with a cannon on the floor. The work belongs to Magritte’s surrealist exploration of indoor spaces and framed images.

  • The Empire of Light — René Magritte’s painting series contrasts a dark street or nighttime scene with a bright daytime sky, often with a lone lamp or streetlight glowing in the foreground. Its eerie juxtaposition became especially famous through its association with The Exorcist poster and for exemplifying Magritte’s surreal visual logic.

  • The Listening Room — This René Magritte painting shows a giant green apple filling most of a room with wooden floorboards and a view through a window on the left. The work’s title suggests a listening room, even though the image is dominated by the absurdly oversized fruit.

  • The Lovers — René Magritte’s The Lovers is a surrealist painting series showing two figures kissing with cloths covering their heads. The title also identifies the French film Les Amants, which was involved in the obscenity case Jacobellis v. Ohio.

  • The Menaced Assassin — René Magritte’s The Menaced Assassin shows a gramophone-playing murderer in a room while armed figures wait to ambush him outside. The painting draws on Fantômas-style detective fiction and includes the corpse of a nude woman in the foreground.

  • The Son of Man — René Magritte’s surreal painting shows a man in a dark suit and bowler hat, standing before a low wall and blue background, with his face mostly hidden by a floating green apple. The image is often described as a self-portrait, and its obscured face and ordinary clothing make it one of Magritte’s most recognizable works.

  • The Treachery of Images — René Magritte’s famous surrealist painting of a pipe with the caption “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” / “This is not a pipe.” It is a classic example of his playful challenge to the relation between images, words, and reality, making the point that an image is not the object it represents.

    • a pipe — In René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, the painted object is a pipe, but the caption insists that it is not one. The work became a famous meditation on representation and was echoed by later artists who played with the claim that images are not the things they depict.

    • This is not a pipe — Famous caption associated with René Magritte’s painting The Treachery of Images. It appears beneath a painted pipe and emphasizes the difference between an image and the object it depicts, reflecting Magritte’s interest in the relation between image and reality. The French wording, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, is the standard alternate form.

  • Time Transfixed — A René Magritte painting showing a locomotive emerging from a fireplace beneath a mantel clock, with a surreal arrangement including candlesticks and a mirror over the mantel. It is associated with Edward James.
• Giorgio de Chirico — Italian; Metaphysical Art; The Disquieting Muses (1916–1918); Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914); eerie, anachronistic cityscapes; major precursor of Surrealism. Born in Greece to Italian parents, he founded the Metaphysical School of painting and later used the phrase pictor classicus sum in a neoclassical phase. His work juxtaposes classical and modern elements and often features mannequins, locomotives, statues, and classical ruins in psychologically unsettling, dreamlike settings.

  • Giorgio di Chirico — Giorgio di Chirico was a Greek-born painter and a founder of Metaphysical painting. His uncanny cityscapes and shadowed plazas, such as The Soothsayer’s Recompense and Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, helped shape later surrealism.

  • Melancholy and Mystery of a Street
    • Melancholy and Mystery of a Street or Mystery and Melancholy of a Street — Melancholy and Mystery of a Street is a 1914 painting by Giorgio de Chirico. It shows a girl with a hoop in a strange metaphysical street scene, with long shadows, architectural oddities, and an eerie sense of perspective.

  • The Disquieting Muses — The Disquieting Muses is Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical painting showing three mannequin-like figures before the Castello Estense and factory smokestacks. The work inspired a Sylvia Plath poem and is one of de Chirico’s best-known images of eerie, static classical forms.

  • The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street — Giorgio de Chirico’s celebrated metaphysical painting shows a little girl rolling a hoop through an empty arcade-lined cityscape, rendered with a slanted perspective. A white stadium appears in the distance, and the scene is marked by an ominous shadow, a red flag, and an isolated wagon.
• Man Ray — American; Dada/Surrealism; Le Violon d’Ingres (1924); invented the Rayograph (photogram); Tears (1930–1932). Born Emmanuel Radnitzky, he was also associated with fashion photography and with iconic images of Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy, as well as surreal objects such as Object to be Destroyed and The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse.

  • Object to Be Destroyed — Object to Be Destroyed is a Man Ray work built around a metronome with a photograph of a woman’s eye attached to its arm. Man Ray made several versions of the piece over the years, and one version was destroyed by anti-Dadaists.

  • The Violin of Ingres — The Violin of Ingres is a Man Ray photograph of Kiki de Montparnasse whose back is altered to resemble a string instrument. Its title uses a French idiom for a hobby and alludes to the painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.

    • Kiki — This is the nickname of Alice Prin, the model known as the “Queen of Montparnasse” who posed for Man Ray’s Le Violon d’Ingres. It is also the title of a Scissor Sisters song and a Japanese reduplicative name associated with a witch in a Studio Ghibli film.
• Marc Chagall — Belarusian-French; Modernism/Surrealism; I and the Village (1911); The Birthday (1915); White Crucifixion (1938); dreamlike imagery drawing on Jewish folklore and Russian village life. He also painted The Green Violinist, Paris Through the Window, Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers, and Time Is a River Without Banks. Later works include stained-glass windows for the United Nations and cathedrals in Reims and Metz, as well as projects for Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center and the ceiling of the Paris Opera House.

  • Bella Rosenfeld — Bella Rosenfeld was Marc Chagall’s wife and the subject of several paintings in which she appears floating or towering over the landscape. She also wrote the memoir Burning Lights, published posthumously, and is associated with works such as The Birthday, Over the Town, and The Promenade.

  • I and the Village — I and the Village is a Marc Chagall painting full of dreamlike imagery from his memories of Vitebsk. Quizbowl clues usually mention the green face and goat, the milkmaid, the scythe-bearing figure, the upside-down houses, and the glowing tree branch linking the central figures.

  • Self Portrait with Seven Fingers — Marc Chagall’s Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers shows the artist in a white tuxedo painting at an easel, with the Eiffel Tower and Vitebsk visible in the background. The work is known for its imaginative self-portraiture, including the floating cow-and-milkmaid image and the artist’s exaggerated hand.

  • White Crucifixion — White Crucifixion is Marc Chagall’s stark depiction of Jesus on the cross amid scenes of Jewish suffering and anti-Semitic violence. It is identified by the prayer shawl on Christ, the burning synagogue, the menorah at his feet, and the surrounding mobs and flags.

• Francis Barraud
  • His Master’s Voice — His Master’s Voice is the famous trademark image of the dog Nipper listening to a phonograph or gramophone. The logo originated in Francis Barraud’s painting and became closely associated with RCA Victor and other record labels.

• Leonora Carrington — Leonora Carrington was an English-born Mexican surrealist painter and writer best known for The Hearing Trumpet and Down Below. Her art and prose often feature dream imagery, talking animals, and occult or alchemical themes. Clues may also reference her relationship with Max Ernst, her political life in Mexico, or works such as The Debutante and her mural for the National Museum of Anthropology. She is a standard answer for both surrealist literature and visual art.

• Paul Nash — Paul Nash was a British surrealist and war artist whose landscapes often feature shattered trees and blasted battlefields. His works include Totes Meer, which turns wrecked German aircraft into a moonlit sea, along with First World War paintings such as The Menin Road and We Are Making a New World.

• Remedios Varo — Spanish-born Surrealist painter who worked in Mexico and was associated with dreamlike, occult imagery, alchemy, and dreamlike machinery. Her best-known works include The Juggler, The Alchemist or The Useless Science, Useless Science, or the Alchemist, and Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle.

• Kay Sage — Kay Sage was a Surrealist painter and poet whose lonely, architectural canvases often feature barren scaffolds, blank planes, and sealed-off spaces. She married Yves Tanguy, wrote poems and a partial autobiography, and is associated with works such as The Answer Is No and Tomorrow Is Never.

• Paul Delvaux — Paul Delvaux was a Belgian Surrealist painter known for eerie classical settings filled with pale nude women, skeletons, and dreamlike cityscapes. His better-known canvases include Sleeping Venus, The Village of the Mermaids, The Awakening of the Forest, The Great Sirens, and The Echo.

• Surrealism
  • bowler hats — Bowler hats are the rounded felt hats worn by Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot and by many of René Magritte’s anonymous men. They became a repeated visual symbol in surrealist art, especially in works like Son of Man and Golconda.

• Dorothea Tanning — Dorothea Tanning was an American Surrealist painter, poet, and writer associated with works like Birthday and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Her imagery often features uncanny interiors, recursive doors, and unsettling dolls or animal figures.

• Claude Cahun — Claude Cahun was a gender-nonconforming Jewish-French Surrealist photographer known for elaborate self-portraits and staged identities. Her work, often made with Marcel Moore, uses masks and performance to question gender and self-image.

• Dora Maar — Dora Maar, born Henriette Theodora Markovitch, was a Surrealist photographer and artist closely associated with Picasso. She documented the making of Guernica, modeled for Picasso’s The Weeping Woman, and made experimental works including Portrait of Ubu and other surrealist photomontages.

• Méret Oppenheim — Swiss Surrealist and Dada-associated artist best known for Object, the fur-covered teacup, saucer, and spoon. Her work often makes domestic objects uncanny and also includes My Nurse, a sculptural piece made from two high heels, as well as works tied to food, the body, and performance. Photographs by Man Ray helped make her a Surrealist icon, and later performances and reinterpretations often reference her through feminist and surreal imagery.

• Joseph Cornell — This American artist is best known for surreal shadow boxes and assemblages built from found objects, including works like Medici Slot Machine. He also made the experimental film Rose Hobart from reused footage of a B-movie starlet.

Abstract Expressionism and Mid-Twentieth Century

• Jackson Pollock — American; Abstract Expressionism; No. 31 (1950); Lavender Mist: Number 1, 1950 (1950); Full Fathom Five (1947); developed “drip painting” (action painting) technique; his large-scale drip works were made by pouring and flinging industrial paint onto canvas laid on the floor. He was nicknamed “Jack the Dripper.” He was photographed by Hans Namuth, and he was married to painter Lee Krasner. Other works include Blue Poles, Number 5, 1948, and Going West.

  • Blue Poles — Blue Poles is a Jackson Pollock painting also known as No. 11, 1952. Its title refers to the blue vertical streaks or poles that cut through the composition, and its 1973 purchase by the National Gallery of Australia caused controversy.

  • Full Fathom Five — Full Fathom Five is a Jackson Pollock drip painting titled from Ariel’s speech in The Tempest. The same phrase also appears in Shakespeare and inspired related poems and artworks about a drowned body beneath the sea.

  • Lavender Mist — Lavender Mist is Jackson Pollock’s 1950 drip painting also known as Number 1, 1950. It is one of his best-known all-over canvases and is held at the National Gallery of Art.

  • Pollock — Pollock refers both to Jackson Pollock, the action painter known for drip techniques and works such as Full Fathom Five, and to Griselda Pollock, the feminist art historian. Jackson Pollock’s work was documented by Hans Namuth, while Griselda Pollock wrote Vision and Difference and other major studies of women and modern art.

• Barnett Newman — American; Abstract Expressionism/Color Field; Onement I (1948); Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950–1951, 5.4 m wide); Broken Obelisk (1967, Rothko Chapel plaza); developed the “zip” — a thin vertical stripe dividing large monochromatic fields. He was also a sculptor, and later works include Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue?

  • Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue — Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue? is Barnett Newman’s four-part series of color-field paintings built from only red, yellow, and blue. The title work is especially famous for its central zip and for the vandalism and restoration controversies that surrounded it.

  • zips — Barnett Newman’s zips are the thin vertical stripes that cut through his color-field canvases, especially Onement I and Vir Heroicus Sublimis. The motif became one of Newman’s signature devices, appearing as a single line or band that structures the composition.

• Clyfford Still — American; Abstract Expressionism; PH-950 (1950); 1957-D No. 1 (1957); large jagged fields of color with ragged edges; one of the first pure Abstract Expressionists; donated his entire estate to a Denver museum dedicated solely to his work.

• Color Field painting — American movement of the 1950s–60s; artists including Rothko, Newman, Still, Frankenthaler, Louis, and Noland used large expanses of flat or stained color to evoke emotional or spiritual states; distinguished from gestural Action Painting by stillness and scale.

• Morris Louis — American; Color Field; Beth Aleph (1960); Unfurled series (1960–1961); poured thinned acrylic paint down unprimed canvas; the staining technique was inspired by Frankenthaler’s Mountains and Sea. He was associated with the Washington Color School, which he formed with Kenneth Noland. Other major series include Veils and Columns. Some paintings use broad bands or stripes of color. He died young of lung cancer, a detail sometimes linked to fumes from his painting technique.

• Kenneth Noland — American; Color Field; Turnsole (1961); A Warm Sound in a Gray Field (1961); concentric circle “target” paintings and chevron stripes; associated with Greenberg’s formalist criticism. He also made later shaped canvases and other bold geometric color studies.

• Willem de Kooning — Dutch-American; Abstract Expressionism; Woman I (1950–1952); Excavation (1950); gestural, figurative abstraction. He studied at the Academy van Beeldende Kunsten in Rotterdam and became one of the leading figures of postwar American painting. His work also includes Black and White Abstraction, Standing Man, Pink Angels, Asheville, and A Tree in Naples.
  • The Women
    • The Women Series — Willem de Kooning’s series of paintings of women, marked by aggressive brushwork, vivid color, and distorted female figures. Several works were painted as variations such as Woman I and Woman as Landscape. The canvases were repeatedly scraped and repainted, and the series is often associated with de Kooning’s remark that flesh is the reason oil paint was invented.
  • Woman series — Willem de Kooning’s Woman series is a six-painting abstract expressionist sequence made between 1950 and 1953. The works feature gestural, often grotesque female figures, and the third painting famously sold for over $130 million. The series is also linked to the Rauschenberg erasure and to de Kooning’s interest in painting as a kind of female image seen through abstraction.
• Mark Rothko — Latvian-American; Abstract Expressionism/Color Field; No. 61 (Rust and Blue) (1953); Rothko Chapel paintings (1964–1967); large luminous color rectangles evoking spiritual contemplation. Born Marcus Rothkovich, also called Marcus Yakolevich Rothkowitz, he is a leading figure of Color Field painting and Abstract Expressionism; other works include No. 10 (1950), Red on Maroon, Orange and Yellow, White Center, and the Seagram Murals.
  • Mark Rothko or Marcus Rothkowitz — Mark Rothko, born Marcus Rothkowitz, was a color field painter associated with abstract expressionism. His later works are the famous floating rectangles and squares with soft edges, and he rejected the label “abstract expressionist” for his art.

• Franz Kline — American; Abstract Expressionism; Mahoning (1956); bold black-and-white gestural strokes.

• Lee Krasner — American; Abstract Expressionism; The Seasons (1957); Celebration (1959–1960); married to Pollock; her work was long overshadowed but has since been reassessed. Her work ranges from the Little Image series to later large canvases such as Gaea, and she also made collage-like works by reworking her own and Jackson Pollock’s discarded paintings.

• Helen Frankenthaler — American; Color Field; Mountains and Sea (1952); developed the soak-stain technique. Her works include The Bay, and she was the only woman included in Clement Greenberg’s 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition. Other noted canvases include A Green Thought in a Green Shade and Green Likes Mauve.

• Arshile Gorky — Armenian-American; Abstract Expressionism; The Liver is the Cock’s Comb (1944); Agony (1947); bridge between Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. Born Vosdanik Adoian; he fled the Armenian genocide and later worked in the United States. His emotionally charged canvases include The Artist and His Mother, Portrait of Master Bill, and the later color-veil painting One Year the Milkweed.
  • The Liver is the Cock’s Comb — The Liver is the Cock’s Comb is an abstract painting by Arshile Gorky often cited as a high point of early Abstract Expressionism. Its biomorphic shapes and violent colors make it one of Gorky’s most famous works.

• Louise Bourgeois — French-American; Surrealism/Abstract; Maman (1999, giant spider sculpture); Cell series (1990s); The Destruction of the Father (1974); autobiographical psycho-sexual sculpture. Her work often uses cramped enclosures, bodily imagery, and themes of family trauma; later works also include Fillette.

• Alberto Giacometti — Swiss; Surrealism/Existentialism; Walking Man I (1960); The Palace at 4 a.m. (1932–1933); emaciated, elongated bronze figures. He was also a painter, and his work includes The Nose. His art is often linked to Surrealism and existentialist imagery, especially spindly human forms and isolated, attenuated bodies.
  • Walking Man — Walking Man is Alberto Giacometti’s famous series of thin bronze sculptures showing a gaunt figure in motion. Individual works in the set include Walking Man I and Walking Man II, and one example sold for more than 100 million dollars.
• Robert Motherwell
  • Elegy to the Spanish Republic — Elegy to the Spanish Republic is Robert Motherwell’s abstract painting series memorializing the Spanish Civil War. Its works repeat black vertical bars and ovals, and the series is associated with a related piece called At Five in the Afternoon.
    • Elegy to the Spanish Republic series — Elegy to the Spanish Republic series is Robert Motherwell’s long-running set of abstract paintings commemorating the Spanish Civil War. The works feature stark black bars and ovals on white ground and began with an image tied to a Harold Rosenberg poem.

• Elaine de Kooning — Elaine de Kooning was an abstract expressionist and portraitist known for her John F. Kennedy series and for works made at Tamarind. She was married to Willem de Kooning, but her own style was more recognizably figurative and painterly.

• Philip Guston — Philip Guston was an American painter who broke with abstract expressionism and became known for cartoonish figures, especially hooded KKK members and oversized cigarette gloves. His late work also features disembodied legs, shoes, and a self-portrait head with a single eye.

• Agnes Martin — Agnes Martin was a Canadian-born artist who worked in New Mexico and became known for restrained grid paintings. Her works often have titles like Untitled No. 3 and explore subtle monochrome patterning. Her pale grid paintings are closely associated with her life in New Mexico.

• Yves Klein — French avant-garde artist known for monochrome works, especially the ultramarine shade he called International Klein Blue. He made Anthropometries by having nude models press paint-covered bodies onto canvas, and his conceptual works included The Void and the sale of empty space. He also created photographic pieces such as Leap into the Void and the artbook Dimanche, associated with his experimental performance-based practice.
  • The Void — The Void is Yves Klein’s title for a famous empty-gallery exhibition in Paris. Klein paired that concept with his leap photograph, making absence and immateriality central to the work.

• Nat Tate — Nat Tate was a fictional American abstract expressionist invented as a literary hoax. The hoax was associated with a fabricated biography that claimed he destroyed most of his work and died young.

• Eva Hesse — Eva Hesse was a German-American postminimalist sculptor known for fragile, often deteriorating works made from latex, fiberglass, rubber, and wire. Her best-known pieces include Hang Up, the Accession series, and Repetition Nineteen III.

Pop Art and Late Twentieth Century

• Bridget Riley — British; Op Art; Movement in Squares (1961); Blaze (1964); Cataract 3 (1967); precise geometric patterns producing illusions of movement; represented Britain at the 1968 Venice Biennale. Her best-known works also include Current, Kiss, and later color series such as Ka, Ra, and Nataraja.

• Op Art (Optical Art) — movement of the 1960s using geometric patterns to create visual illusions of movement or depth; key figures include Riley and Victor Vasarely; named by a 1964 Time magazine article; the 1965 MoMA exhibition “The Responsive Eye” was its defining institutional moment. It is also described as using abstract patterning to produce visual distortions, shimmering color effects, and apparent movement as the viewer shifts position; high-contrast designs, often in black and white, are common. Other artists associated with the style include Carlos Cruz-Diez, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Richard Anuszkiewicz.

• Victor Vasarely — Hungarian-French; Op Art; Zebra (1937, proto-Op); Vega series (1957–1971); Tlinko (1955); considered the grandfather of Op Art; developed a systematic theory of visual kinetics.

• Julian Schnabel — American; Neo-Expressionism; The Exile (1980); Vita (1983); plate paintings made on broken crockery set in resin; co-led the Neo-Expressionist return to figuration and painterly gesture in the early 1980s alongside Basquiat and Salle. He also directed films such as Basquiat, Before Night Falls, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

• David Hockney — British; Pop Art/Figurative; A Bigger Splash (1967); Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1970–1971); Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972); California swimming pools and Yorkshire landscapes; also pioneered iPad drawing. He is also associated with photographic joiners and works such as The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate.

  • A Bigger Splash — A Bigger Splash is a David Hockney painting of a Los Angeles swimming pool with a small splash implied by the title. Its flat acrylic surface and stark framing make it one of his best-known California scenes.

  • Bigger works
    • bigger — “Bigger” is the adjective that titles several works by David Hockney, including A Bigger Splash and A Bigger Picture. It also appears in titles such as Bigger Trees Near Warter and A Bigger Grand Canyon.

  • Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy — Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy is a David Hockney double portrait showing the fashion designer Ossie Clark, his wife Celia Birtwell, and their white cat Percy. The painting places the couple in an interior with lilies, a telephone, and a relaxed domestic pose that made it one of Hockney’s best-known works.

  • swimming pool — Swimming pools are a recurring subject in David Hockney’s painting, especially in works like A Bigger Splash and Portrait of an Artist. Hockney used them to explore light, California modernism, and the geometry of domestic landscapes.
• Francis Bacon — British-Irish; Expressionism/Figurative; Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944); Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953); Triptych – Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969); distorted, existentially raw figures.

  • George Dyer — George Dyer was Francis Bacon’s lover, and Bacon painted him in the Black Triptychs after Dyer’s 1971 suicide. Bacon also portrayed him in a toilet-and-sink scene and in a seated portrait with a hanging lightbulb.

  • Innocent X Series — The Innocent X Series is Francis Bacon’s set of distorted paintings based on Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X. The series is known for enclosing the pope-like figure in a transparent, isolated space.

  • Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion — Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion is Francis Bacon’s 1944 triptych of distorted, birdlike figures against a burnt-orange ground. The work is often read through the Furies and through religious imagery of crucifixion and lament.

• Lucian Freud — German-British; Figurative; Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995); Sleeping by the Lion Carpet (1996); unflinching realist portraits of the body. He was the grandson of Sigmund Freud and also painted Girl with a White Dog and Night Portrait.
  • Benefits Supervisor Sleeping — Benefits Supervisor Sleeping is a 1995 Lucian Freud painting showing the overweight Sue Tilley reclining nude on a couch. It became famous after Roman Abramovich bought it for a record price for a living artist.

• Cy Twombly — American; Abstract Expressionism/Neo-Dada; Cy Twombly: Poems to the Sea (1959); Leda and the Swan (1962); Fifty Days at Iliam (1978); gestural scrawl and classical allusions. His full name was Edwin Parker Twombly Jr. He is also associated with the Menil Collection pavilion in Texas, and some of his works drew public attention, including Phaedrus, which was damaged by a kiss from Rindy Sam. A small number of interviews helped shape the myth surrounding his career.

• Jean-Michel Basquiat — American; Neo-Expressionism; Untitled (Skull) (1981); Hollywood Africans (1983); In Italian (1983); graffiti origins, SAMO tag, layered text and symbols; died at 27. Haitian-American; moved from SAMO graffiti to Neo-Expressionist painting in 1980s New York. His work often features skulls, crowns, and anatomy references, and he was associated with Andy Warhol and Keith Haring.
  • The Radiant Child — “The Radiant Child” is the subtitle of Tamra Davis’s 2009 documentary about Jean-Michel Basquiat and the title of Rene Ricard’s 1981 Artforum essay on him. The phrase is also a clue for Basquiat himself, the Brooklyn artist later honored by the Nets on their City Edition court and uniforms.

• Keith Haring — American; Pop Art/Street Art; Radiant Baby (1982); Crack is Wack (1986, mural); The Tree of Life (1985); bold line figures addressing AIDS, apartheid, and capitalism. He was also known as Keith Allen Haring. Other characteristic motifs included red hearts, snakes, skulls, and subway chalk drawings, and his public work included Tuttomondo; his imagery also appeared on clothing worn by Madonna.

• Damien Hirst — British; YBAs (Young British Artists); The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991, shark in formaldehyde; specimen replaced in 2006); For the Love of God (2007, diamond-encrusted skull); Spot Paintings series; leader of the YBAs; associated with collector Charles Saatchi.⁷ He is also a contemporary artist known for shock pieces centered on death, decay, and luxury, and for his spin paintings.

  • For the Love of God — For the Love of God is Damien Hirst’s platinum human skull covered with 8,601 diamonds and fitted with eighteenth-century teeth. It was shown in the Beyond Belief exhibition in 2007 and became one of the best-known examples of Hirst’s shock-art celebrity pieces.

  • The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living — Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living is the famous shark-in-formaldehyde work from his Natural History series. It became a touchstone of YBA spectacle after being sold and later repaired, and it is often mocked by works and titles like A Dead Shark Isn’t Art.

    • tiger shark — Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living is the famous formaldehyde installation featuring a tiger shark. The shark also appears in other art references, including a Frida Kahlo work with a related title.
• Tracey Emin — British; YBAs; My Bed (1998, shortlisted for Turner Prize 1999); Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995, embroidered tent, destroyed in 2004 Momart fire); confessional art using personal biography; represented Britain at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Known for installation and embroidery as well as confessional autobiographical work; My Bed features messy personal objects, and Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 was a tent embroidered with the names of sexual partners.
  • My Bed
    • bed — A bed is the object Tracey Emin made famous in a messy installation, complete with rumpled linens and personal debris. Quizbowl clues may also point to Procrustes’s torture device or to symbolic beds in works by Kahlo and Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach.

• Young British Artists (YBAs) — loose grouping of British artists who emerged from Goldsmiths College in the late 1980s–1990s; the 1988 exhibition Freeze, organized by Hirst, is the origin point; Charles Saatchi’s patronage was decisive; includes Hirst, Emin, Marcus Harvey, Chris Ofili, and Gillian Wearing. They are also associated with Sarah Lucas and are known for provocative installations and exhibitions.

• Chris Ofili — British-Trinidadian; YBAs; The Holy Virgin Mary (1996, elephant dung and collaged pornography); No Woman, No Cry (1998); The Upper Room (1999–2002, installation); winner of the 1998 Turner Prize; his use of elephant dung as a support and decorative element is a signature.
  • the Holy Virgin Mary — The Holy Virgin Mary is Chris Ofili’s controversial painting that incorporates elephant dung and collage elements from pornography magazines. The work became notorious after New York’s mayor objected to its exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.
• M.C. Escher (Maurits Cornelis Escher) (1898–1972) — Dutch; Graphic Art; Relativity (1953); Ascending and Descending (1960); Drawing Hands (1948); Waterfall (1961); used mathematical concepts (tessellations, impossible architectures, infinite loops) to create visually paradoxical lithographs and woodcuts; his work bridges art and mathematics. Other works include Hand with Reflecting Sphere, Belvedere, Reptiles, and Tower of Babel; Moorish ornament at the Alhambra influenced his interest in tessellation.
  • House of Stairs — House of Stairs is an M. C. Escher print filled with impossible stairways and strange creatures called wentelteefjes. It is one of his best-known images of visual paradox and spatial recursion.
• Pop Art and Its Afterlives
  • Andy Warhol — American; Pop Art; Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962); Marilyn Diptych (1962); Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964); Mao (1972); Brillo Boxes (1964); silk-screen repetition; Factory studio; defined Pop Art. Born Andrew Warhola. He was also associated with portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Mao Zedong, as well as Coca-Cola imagery and a broader celebration of celebrity and consumer mass production. He was shot and wounded by Valerie Solanas in 1968; later works also included films such as Sleep and Chelsea Girls and the Velvet Underground’s debut album cover.

    • 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans — 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans is Andy Warhol’s famous 1962 series of thirty-two separate canvases. Each panel depicts a different variety of Campbell’s soup, making it a landmark of Pop Art.

    • Death and Disaster Series — Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster series consists of silkscreen paintings and prints of crashes, suicides, and other grim news images. Works such as Silver Car Crash and Purple Jumping Man belong to the series.

    • Edie Sedgwick — Edie Sedgwick was one of Andy Warhol’s most famous superstars. She appeared in many Warhol films and later became associated with Bob Dylan.

    • Soup cans — Warhol’s 1962 Campbell’s Soup Can works depict ordinary soup cans as serial paintings. His famous silkscreens include Campbell’s grocery items such as tomato and chicken noodle varieties.

    • The Factory — The Factory was Andy Warhol’s New York studio, the gathering place of his superstars and the site of his silkscreen production. Clues may mention the silver-painted interior, Exploding Plastic Inevitable, or Valerie Solanas’s shooting of Warhol there.

    • Warhol superstars
      • Candy Darling — Candy Darling was a transgender Warhol superstar and actress associated with underground New York cinema. She appeared in films such as Women in Revolt and Glamour, Glory and Gold. She is also evoked in songs such as one by St. Vincent and in Lou Reed’s “Candy Says,” which helped keep her name in pop-culture circulation.
    • Campbell’s Soup Cans — Warhol, 1962 (MoMA, New York); 32 canvases each depicting a different variety of Campbell’s soup can, installed in a row like supermarket shelves; debuted at the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles; challenged the boundary between commercial culture and fine art. The 32 canvases are arranged in a row like supermarket shelves and each depicts a different variety of Campbell’s soup can. It debuted at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles and later entered the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

  • James Rosenquist — American; Pop Art; F-111 (1964–1965, 26-meter mural); President Elect (1960–1961); worked as a billboard painter in Times Square; combined monumental scale with fragmented commercial imagery.

  • Richard Hamilton — British; Pop Art; Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (1956, collage); organized the 1956 “This Is Tomorrow” exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London; often cited as the founding work of British Pop Art. He also produced works such as $he and The Citizen.

  • Roy Lichtenstein — American; Pop Art; Whaam! (1963); Drowning Girl (1963); Look Mickey (1961); enlarged Ben-Day dot comic-strip aesthetic. He also parodied abstract expressionism with brushstroke paintings and later sculptures, and produced works such as Hopeless, Bedroom at Arles, and the 1982 campaign poster for a Connecticut Senate race.

    • Brad — Brad is a recurring male figure in Roy Lichtenstein paintings, often appearing as the off-panel boyfriend or rescuer. He is named in works such as Drowning Girl and Look Mickey!, where the title characters refer to him in comic-strip style dialogue.

    • Look Mickey! — Look Mickey! is a Roy Lichtenstein comic-style painting showing Donald Duck hooked by his own fishing line while another figure laughs. It is one of his early pop art works and is often identified by the bright primary colors and the speech bubble with the title phrase.

    • Whaam!

      • Wham — Whaam! is Roy Lichtenstein’s comic-book-inspired diptych of a fighter plane attack rendered in Ben-Day dots. The misspelled title often appears in clueing alongside the pop group Wham!, which George Michael formed with Andrew Ridgeley.

  • Jasper Johns — American; Neo-Dada/Pop; Flag (1954–1955); Three Flags (1958); Numbers in Color (1958–1959); questioned the boundary between image and object. He is a painter and printmaker known for encaustic works on common objects such as flags, maps, numbers, and targets. His art helped define postwar American Pop Art and related movements, and he also made works including Map and Painted Bronze with stenciled imagery.

  • Robert Rauschenberg — American; Neo-Dada; Bed (1955); Monogram (1955–1959, stuffed goat with tire); Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953); combines (assemblages blending painting and sculpture).

    • Combines — Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines are mixed-media works that fuse painting and sculpture into a single object, often by attaching found or real three-dimensional materials to the surface. They are associated with assemblage-like experimentation and a collapse of high art and everyday materials. Famous examples include Monogram, with a stuffed Angora goat passing through a tire, as well as Bed, Canyon, Broadcast, and Obelisk.

    • Monogram — “Monogram” is Robert Rauschenberg’s famous combine featuring a stuffed angora goat with a tire around its middle. The work also includes a tennis shoe, a police barrier, and paint.

  • Claes Oldenburg — Swedish-American; Pop Art; Floor Burger (1962); Clothespin (1976, Philadelphia); giant soft sculptures and public monuments. He also made oversized public sculptures with Coosje van Bruggen, including Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks and Spoonbridge and Cherry. The Store is another familiar project.

  • Robert Indiana — Robert Indiana was the Pop artist behind the LOVE sculptures and other bold letter-and-number works. He changed his surname from Clark to Indiana, and his designs were later echoed in AIDS-awareness parodies by General Idea.

  • Tom Wesselmann — Tom Wesselmann was an American Pop artist best known for the Great American Nude series. His work often turns everyday consumer imagery into bright, flattened still lifes and includes the sculptural Dropped Bra.

  • Wayne Thiebaud — An American California painter associated with Pop art, known for brightly colored paintings of cakes, pies, candies, ice cream cones, gumball machines, slot machines, and other consumer goods. His images often use thick paint and repeated rows of sweets or machines, and his work was often read as consumerist still life even when he rejected the Pop art label. Other repeated subjects include lipstick and watermelons.

  • Ed Ruscha — Los Angeles-based American Pop and conceptual artist known for photographs, artist’s books, and word paintings. His work is associated with iconic images of Los Angeles and the American roadside, and includes Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, OOF, Pay Nothing Until April, and large canvases reading phrases like “The End.” Later work includes the Chocolate Room and the Ribbon series.

    • Sunset Strip — Sunset Strip is the famous stretch of Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles that Ed Ruscha turned into an accordion-fold artist’s book by photographing every building along the road. The book’s deadpan road-trip imagery made the strip a staple example of Ruscha’s conceptual approach to pop landscapes.

    • Twentysix Gasoline Stations — Twentysix Gasoline Stations is a 1963 artist’s book by Ed Ruscha, built from photographs of gasoline stations along Route 66. Its best-known image is the spread labeled Union, Needles, California, and the work includes landmarks such as the Jack Rabbit Trading Post in Arizona.

  • Eduardo Paolozzi — Eduardo Paolozzi was a British sculptor and printmaker associated with collage, pop imagery, and modern design. His works include the As Is When series and the collage group Ten Collages from BUNK, drawn from magazine imagery and mass culture.

  • Pop art
    • Cans — Cans are the tin or metal containers famously painted by Andy Warhol in his Campbell’s Soup Cans series. They also appear in contemporary art and Pop Art references, including works by Jasper Johns and Piero Manzoni.
• Minimalism, Land Art, Light, and Installation

  • Donald Judd — American; Minimalism; Untitled (Stack) (1967, galvanized iron wall units); 100 untitled works in mill aluminum (1982–1986, Marfa, Texas); rejected illusionistic space in favor of “specific objects” — three-dimensional works that were neither painting nor sculpture.

  • Frank Stella — American; Minimalism/Abstract; Die Fahne Hoch! (1959, Black Paintings series); Hyena Stomp (1962, Stripe paintings); Harran II (1967, Protractor series); coined the phrase “what you see is what you see”; later moved to maximalist, three-dimensional painted reliefs. His Black Paintings use thin lines of bare canvas to separate bands of black paint, and he later made the Irregular Polygons, Polish Villages, and other geometric, sculptural series. He is also associated with Post-Painterly Abstraction.

  • Ellsworth Kelly — Ellsworth Kelly was an American painter associated with hard-edge abstraction, color field painting, and minimalist arrangement. His works include Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris, Spectrum V, Colors for a Large Wall, and Seine.

  • Dan Flavin — Dan Flavin was a Minimalist American artist known for fluorescent light installations and series of “Monuments” to Vladimir Tatlin. His works often appear as untitled light pieces dedicated to artists such as Piet Mondrian and Barnett Newman.

  • Robert Smithson — Robert Smithson was an American land artist best known for Spiral Jetty. Quizbowl clues often mention entropy, Partially Buried Woodshed, Amarillo Ramp, and his posthumously completed earthworks with Nancy Holt.
    • The Spiral Jetty — The Spiral Jetty is Robert Smithson’s 1970 earthwork at Rozel Point in the Great Salt Lake. Made from basalt rock and earth, the curled jetty was often submerged for decades before reappearing when water levels dropped.

  • James Turrell — James Turrell is a Light and Space artist known for his skyspaces and for the ongoing Roden Crater project in Arizona. His work emphasizes colored light, altered perception, and immersive environments rather than traditional images.

  • Andy Goldsworthy — Andy Goldsworthy is a Scottish artist known for ephemeral outdoor works made from natural materials like leaves, stones, icicles, and wool. His site-specific pieces often decay or disappear, and his work was documented in Rivers and Tides.

  • Christo (Christo Vladimirov Javacheff) — Bulgarian-American; Environmental/Conceptual; Wrapped Reichstag (1995, with Jeanne-Claude); The Gates (2005, Central Park); large-scale fabric-wrapping installations in public space. Projects with Jeanne-Claude include Running Fence, Surrounded Islands, Pont Neuf Wrapped, The Umbrellas, and Floating Piers.

    • Running Fence — Running Fence is Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s large-scale nylon fabric installation stretched across Sonoma and Marin counties. Completed in 1976, it was displayed for only a short time and became one of their best-known earthwork projects.

    • The Gates — The Gates is Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 2005 installation of saffron-colored fabric panels in Central Park. It consisted of thousands of fabric gates stretching along walkways near the Delacorte Theater and is one of Christo’s best-known large-scale environmental works.

    • The Gates, Central Park, New York, 1979–2005 — The Gates was Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 2005 Central Park installation, in which thousands of saffron-colored fabric panels hung from gates throughout the park. The project followed earlier large-scale environmental wrappings such as Surrounded Islands.

    • wrapping — Wrapping is the art action associated with Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who enclosed buildings and landscapes in fabric and rope. Their projects included the Pont-Neuf, the Reichstag, and other large-scale installations.

  • Hans Haacke — Hans Haacke is a conceptual and institutional-critique artist known for challenging museums as political institutions. His best-known controversy involved a 1970 poll at the Museum of Modern Art, making the artist a staple of questions about art-world politics.

  • Ólafur Elíasson — Ólafur Elíasson is a Danish-Icelandic artist known for immersive installations such as The Weather Project. His public works have included rainbow-colored panoramas, river-dyeing projects, and waterfall installations in New York City.

  • Felix Gonzalez-Torres — Felix Gonzalez-Torres was a Cuban-American conceptual artist known for installations of candy, paper stacks, and other works that change or disappear over time. His pieces often memorialized his partner Ross Laycock, including the empty-bed work and the synchronized clocks of Perfect Lovers.

  • Installation art
    • Carhenge — Carhenge is a roadside replica of Stonehenge near Alliance, Nebraska, built from vintage automobiles painted gray. Jim Reinders created it in the late 1980s as a memorial to his father, and it has become a quirky tourist attraction and art site.
  • light art
    • neon lights — Neon lights are gas-discharge displays that use electricity and plasma to create vivid colored signs and artworks. They are common in commercial signage, especially in places such as Las Vegas casinos and hotels, and became iconic in the twentieth century through large-scale signage and installations. Robert Venturi studied them; examples include the Binion’s Horseshoe stylized B and the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign. The medium has also been used by artists such as Bruce Nauman, Jenny Holzer, Tracey Emin, and Nam June Paik, including Paik’s Electronic Superhighway.
• Identity, Social Critique, and Contemporary Figurative Art
  • Kara Walker — American; Contemporary; A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby (2014, Domino Sugar Factory installation); Gone: An Historical Romance of Civil War as It Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (1994, room-sized silhouette installation); black paper cut-out silhouettes addressing race, gender, and violence in American history.
    • A Subtlety — A Subtlety is Kara Walker’s 2014 sugar sculpture installed at the former Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn. Its huge central sphinx, modeled on racist Mammy imagery and surrounded by resin attendants, made it one of Walker’s most discussed installations.

  • Kehinde Wiley — American; Contemporary Figurative; Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps (2005); Rumors of War (2019, bronze equestrian statue, Richmond, Virginia); official portrait of Barack Obama (2018, National Portrait Gallery); places Black subjects in the compositional poses of Old Master portraits. His work often features ornate, lush backgrounds and contemporary clothing.

  • Jenny Holzer — American; Conceptual/Text Art; Truisms (1977–1979, posters and electronic signs); Inflammatory Essays (1979–1982); Laments (1989); projects text onto buildings and public spaces; a 1990 Guggenheim retrospective featured her Arno LED spiral. Her work also includes Lustmord, and she is known for projecting brief slogans on buildings and LED signs.

  • Barbara Kruger — American; Conceptual; Untitled (Your Body Is a Battleground) (1989); Untitled (I Shop Therefore I Am) (1987); black-and-white photographs overlaid with red-and-white Futura Bold Oblique text; critiques consumer culture, power, and gender.

  • Kerry James Marshall — Kerry James Marshall is a contemporary American painter known for depicting Black figures with literally black skin. His work includes De Style, Past Times, School of Beauty, School of Culture, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self.

  • Betye Saar — Betye Saar is an American assemblage artist known for politically charged works that reclaim racist imagery. Her best-known piece, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, combines a Black Power fist with stereotyped mammy imagery.

  • Faith Ringgold — Faith Ringgold is an African American artist known for narrative quilts and politically charged paintings about race, gender, and American history. Works like Tar Beach, Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima?, and The French Collection combine text with image. Her art also includes flag paintings and responses to the civil rights era.

  • Dread Scott — Dread Scott is a contemporary artist known for politically charged installations involving the American flag. His work What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag? caused controversy and led to a Supreme Court flag-desecration case.

  • David Wojnarowicz — David Wojnarowicz was an American artist and AIDS activist whose work often confronted illness, violence, and queer identity. His pieces include A Fire in My Belly and self-portraits marked by stitched lips and a map-and-flame composition.

  • Guerrilla Girls — The Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous feminist art collective from New York City. They wear gorilla masks and create provocative posters criticizing sexism and racism in the art world, including work about the Whitney Biennial, the Met Museum, and the Oscars.
    • Guerilla Girls — The Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous feminist art collective known for gorilla masks and posters attacking sexism in the art world. They are especially famous for their Metropolitan Museum poster asking whether women have to be naked to get into the museum.
  • Judy Chicago — Judy Chicago is an American feminist artist best known for The Dinner Party, a large installation at the Brooklyn Museum honoring famous women from history. Her work also includes colorful minimalist sculpture such as Rainbow Pickett. She helped organize Womanhouse with Miriam Schapiro and is associated with feminist art and mixed-media works involving sewing and craft. The installation The Dinner Party places settings for figures such as Judith, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Georgia O’Keeffe.
    • The Dinner Party — The Dinner Party is Judy Chicago’s landmark feminist installation at the Brooklyn Museum. It presents a triangular banquet table honoring 39 women and includes a Heritage Floor with 999 names. Its plates and place settings reference historical and mythic women such as Emily Dickinson and Georgia O’Keeffe. The work is closely tied to Chicago’s ideas about central core imagery and to debates over representation in feminist art.

  • Adrian Piper — Adrian Piper is a conceptual and performance artist known for Catalysis, her Calling Card project, and identity-focused interventions. Her work often combines philosophy, race, and self-representation.

  • Yinka Shonibare — Yinka Shonibare is a British-Nigerian artist known for using Dutch wax fabric and headless mannequins to rework European art history. His works include Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle and The Swing (After Fragonard), which turn colonial and aristocratic imagery into pointed installations and sculptures.

  • Amy Sherald — Amy Sherald is the American painter known for her portrait of Michelle Obama and for works such as Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance) and Trans Forming Liberty. Her portraits often feature grisaille skin tones and carefully posed Black subjects drawn from everyday life.

  • Shirin Neshat — Shirin Neshat is an Iranian artist known for photography, film, and video installations that address gender and female sexuality. Her best-known works include the Women of Allah series and the installations Rapture, Turbulent, and Fervor.

  • Wangechi Mutu — Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan-American artist known for Afrofuturist sculpture, collage, and bronze figures that rework African and female forms. Her works include The Seated and The NewOnes, will free Us, and her sculptures were displayed on the facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  • Chéri Samba — Chéri Samba is a Congolese painter known for bright, text-filled works that mix caption, self-portrait, and social commentary. His paintings often state their meanings directly, as in works like The Draughtsman and Problème d’eau.

  • Arthur Jafa — Arthur Jafa is a contemporary artist and filmmaker best known for Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death. He also worked as cinematographer for Daughters of Dust, and his video art often uses found footage about Black life and culture.

  • William Kentridge — William Kentridge is a South African artist known for charcoal animations created by repeatedly erasing and redrawing the same image. His work also includes opera projections, large murals, and politically charged visual commentary.

  • Ai Weiwei — Ai Weiwei is a Chinese dissident artist known for politically charged installation and performance art, as well as photographs and public activism. His works include Sunflower Seeds, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, the middle-finger photo series, and his role in designing Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium. Sunflower Seeds was shown at Tate Modern. He often uses historical objects and public space to critique authority.
    • Sunflower Seeds — Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds is a Tate Modern Turbine Hall installation made from huge numbers of handmade porcelain seeds. The work’s title refers to sunflower seeds, a familiar snack and cooking ingredient, and it is one of Ai’s best-known large-scale pieces.
• album cover art
  • album cover — The artwork used for a record, CD, or other music release. Famous examples include Andy Warhol’s banana for The Velvet Underground & Nico, portrait-based designs by Richard Avedon, and the iconic imagery associated with David Bowie’s Hunky Dory and related releases; notable designers also include Peter Blake, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Alex Steinweiss.
• Dmitri Vrubel
  • My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love — My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love is Dmitri Vrubel’s satirical Berlin Wall mural of Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker kissing. The image was based on a 1979 photograph and was later recreated after the original deteriorated.

• Marc Quinn — Marc Quinn is a contemporary British artist associated with provocative body-based sculpture and oversized figurative works. He is known for Self, a self-portrait made from his own frozen blood, and for Alison Lapper Pregnant.

• Maurizio Cattelan — Maurizio Cattelan is an Italian contemporary artist known for satire, shock art, and works such as America, Comedian, and La Nona Ora. His pieces often use humor, taxidermy, and absurdity to provoke controversy. He has also made sculptures such as a hand giving the finger and installations featuring Hitler or the pope. His work became especially famous after the banana taped to a wall and the gold toilet.
  • America
    • a golden toilet — A golden toilet is the kind of artwork Maurizio Cattelan made famous with America, a fully plumbed toilet cast in gold-colored metal. It became notorious when thieves stole a similar object from Blenheim Palace in 2019.

• Shepard Fairey — Shepard Fairey is a street artist and designer behind the OBEY brand and the Barack Obama “Hope” poster. He is also known for the “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” sticker and the Andre the Giant-based OBEY image; his work became famous partly through stencil art, stickers, copyright disputes, and large politically charged murals, including one of Nelson Mandela.

• The Beatles
  • The Beatles album covers — The Beatles’ album covers include iconic images such as the crosswalk scene from Abbey Road and the collage-style art on Revolver. Other famous examples are the colorful crowd scene of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the stark white sleeve of The Beatles, often called the White Album.
• Silhouette
  • silhouettes — Silhouettes are cut-paper portraits and profile images often associated with a French finance minister whose name became a byword for cheapness. Kara Walker and earlier artists such as Moses Williams used this stark black-on-white style to depict figures and scenes.

• Frederic Church and Frank Church — Frederic Church was a Hudson River School painter and the name of Frank Church’s artistic namesake. Frank Church was a U.S. senator from Idaho who chaired investigations into the CIA.

• Laurence Stephen Lowry — Laurence Stephen Lowry was a British painter born in Manchester in 1887 and famous for bleak industrial scenes. His best-known works include Going to the Match and A Manufacturing Town, often rendered in drab colors with strong drawing.

• Printmaking firms
  • Currier & Ives — Currier & Ives was a nineteenth-century American lithography firm founded in 1857 by Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives. Known as the “Printmakers to the American People,” it issued widely circulated popular prints before closing in 1907.

• Laroon — Laroon, also spelled Lauron, was a Dutch-born artist who worked in England and is associated with prints such as The Cryes of the City of London. The questions point to Marcel Laroon and his son Marcellus, who illustrated that work.

• map of the United States — A map of the United States is a recurring pop-art and multimedia motif, appearing in works by Jasper Johns, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and Nam June Paik. Paik’s Electronic Superhighway famously outlines the country with neon and televisions.

• Cory Arcangel — Cory Arcangel is an American post-conceptual artist and programmer known for manipulating video games and digital media into gallery art. His best-known works include Super Mario Clouds, I Shot Andy Warhol, and other projects built from hacks, mods, and internet-era software experiments.

• Dale Chihuly — Dale Chihuly is a leading American glass artist associated with the Studio Glass movement. He is known for monumental, colorful installations and forms such as chandeliers, botanical pieces, and the glass ceiling at the Bellagio. His work appears in museums and gardens, including the Tacoma Art Museum and major botanical displays. Mille Fiori and other large-scale glass environments are among his best-known pieces.

• Drawing
  • cartoons — Cartoons are drawings or illustrations that can appear in newspapers, magazines, and editorial contexts, often combining text and image for satire. The term also applies to preparatory drawings such as Raphael’s Cartoons for tapestries.

    • cartoon — A cartoon is both a humorous drawing or animated short and, in older art usage, a full-size preparatory drawing for a fresco or tapestry. The term comes from Italian for a large paper drawing and appears in questions about Renaissance preparatory art.

    • Robert Crumb — Robert Crumb, also known as R. Crumb, is a pioneering underground comix artist associated with Zap Comix, Weirdo, Fritz the Cat, Keep on Truckin’, and Mr. Natural. His work satirizes American culture and became a signature of counterculture comics through its sexual, abrasive, and highly recognizable imagery.

• Sherrie Levine — Sherrie Levine is an appropriation artist associated with the Pictures Generation and with rephotography. Her best-known works include After Walker Evans and other pieces that reuse or recontextualize canonical images.

• George Segal — George Segal was a Pop artist and sculptor famous for life-sized plaster figures cast from real people. His everyday scenes, such as diners, pedestrians, and bread lines, made him one of the best-known American figurative sculptors of the postwar era.

• Jean Tinguely — Jean Tinguely was a Swiss New Realism artist known for kinetic, self-destructing machines. He made Homage to New York, collaborated with Niki de Saint Phalle on the Stravinsky Fountain, and worked on Le Cyclop near Fontainebleau.

• Richard Diebenkorn — Richard Diebenkorn was a Bay Area Figurative Movement painter best known for the Ocean Park series. He also developed the term “pentimenti” for overpainting earlier images so traces of them remained visible.

• Ivan Albright — Ivan Albright was a Chicago painter known for grotesque, highly textured images of decaying flesh and wrinkled figures. He painted The Picture of Dorian Gray for the 1945 film and works such as Into This World There Came a Soul Called Ida and That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do.

• Leon Golub — Leon Golub was a Chicago painter known for huge politically charged canvases such as the Interrogation and White Squad series. His figures are often scraped and roughened with aggressive paint handling, giving his work a violent, distressed surface.

• Stanley Spencer — Stanley Spencer was an English painter best known for placing biblical scenes in the village of Cookham, where he lived for much of his life. His work includes The Resurrection: Cookham, murals for the Sandham Memorial Chapel, and paintings connected with shipbuilding on the Clyde.

• Balthus — Balthus was the pen name of Balthasar Klossowski, a Polish-born twentieth-century painter active in Paris and Switzerland. He was known for realist but unsettling, often eroticized depictions of girls, adolescents, interiors, and languid figures, and became notorious for works such as The Guitar Lesson, The Street, and La Chambre. His work was influenced by Piero della Francesca and also included stage design. As a child he published Mitsou with a preface by Rilke. He sometimes falsely presented himself as a count.

• Gluck — Gluck was a British painter known for modernist portraiture and close attention to line, including works such as Medallion and Three Nifty Nats. The artist also created a distinctive three-tiered frame style associated with their work.

• Street art
  • SAMO© — SAMO was the graffiti tag used by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Al Diaz in New York City. It later became famous through ironic copyright-marked slogans and the phrase “SAMO is dead.”

• Jeff Koons — American contemporary artist and sculptor known for glossy, kitschy works that appropriate popular imagery and consumer objects. His best-known pieces include Balloon Dog, Puppy at the Guggenheim Bilbao, Split Rocker, Banality sculptures, the controversial Made in Heaven series featuring himself and his wife, and the porcelain Michael Jackson and Bubbles sculpture.

• Asger Jorn — Asger Jorn was a Danish painter associated with the COBRA movement, which he led with Karel Appel. He is known for works such as Stalingrad and for collaborating with Guy Debord on Mémoires. His parody of Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q., The Avant-Garde Doesn’t Give Up, shows a schoolgirl with a drawn-on mustache.

• Banksy — Banksy is the anonymous British street artist known for stencil murals such as Girl with Balloon, Flower Thrower, and works critiquing war, consumerism, and policing. Quizbowl clues often mention the shredded auction piece Love is in the Bin, Dismaland, Exit Through the Gift Shop, and the Walled Off Hotel.
  • Love is in the Bin — Love is in the Bin is the work created when Banksy secretly built a shredder into one of his murals and let it partially destroy itself at auction in 2018. The piece belongs to his streak of provocative street art, alongside images such as Girl with Balloon and other sharply satirical works.

• Beeple — Beeple is the digital artist Michael Joseph Winkelmann, known for NFTs and hyperactive internet art under the name Beeple Crap. His Everydays collage sold at Christie’s for a record price, and his work Crossroads was tied to the 2020 U.S. election.

• Gottfried Helnwein — Gottfried Helnwein is an Austrian-Irish artist known for highly realistic, unsettling imagery. His work includes a series called The Disasters of War, and he has collaborated with bands such as Rammstein and Marilyn Manson.

• Grayson Perry — Grayson Perry is a British potter and artist who won the Turner Prize in 2003. He is known for decorative ceramics and for using his female alter ego, Claire, in his work.

• H. R. Giger — H. R. Giger was a Swiss artist known for biomechanical imagery, especially the creature design for Alien and the collection Necronomicon. His work also includes the controversial Penis Landscape and other nightmare-like industrial fantasies.

• Jenny Saville — Jenny Saville is a contemporary British painter known for monumental, distorted female nudes and self-portraits. Her work Propped and other paintings have been linked to Lucian Freud and the Young British Artists.

• Patricia Piccinini — Patricia Piccinini is an Australian artist known for hyperrealist sculptures of unsettling human-animal hybrids. Her works include The Young Family, Skywhale, Big Mother, and other fantastical creature forms.

• Sarah Lucas — Sarah Lucas is a Young British Artist known for crude visual puns and found-object works that play with the body, sex, and everyday materials. Pieces such as Au Naturel and Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab helped make her one of the best-known figures of the YBA movement.

• Chuck Close — Chuck Close was an American photorealist painter famous for huge grid-based portraits such as those of Bill Clinton, Mark, and Frank. After a spinal artery collapse he called “The Event,” he also made related works in tapestry and with daguerreotypist Jerry Spagnoli.

• Renee Cox
  • Yo Mama’s Last Supper — Renee Cox’s Yo Mama’s Last Supper is a photomontage that reimagines Leonardo’s Last Supper with Cox as a nude Black woman at the center and the apostles largely portrayed by Black men. The work sparked controversy when it was shown at the Brooklyn Museum, with Mayor Giuliani attacking it as indecent.

• Richard Prince — Richard Prince is an appropriation artist best known for rephotographing mass-culture images, including Marlboro cowboy ads and Instagram posts. His work also includes Spiritual America, based on a Brooke Shields photograph, and other collage pieces that borrow from celebrity and advertising imagery.

• Sigmar Polke — Sigmar Polke was a German painter associated with Capitalist Realism. His work ranges from ironic portraiture and photograph manipulation to odd materials such as stained books and fabric additions.

• Yue Minjun — Yue Minjun is a Chinese contemporary artist associated with cynical realism and with repeated images of bald, pink-skinned men laughing hysterically. He is known for parodic reworkings of scenes such as Liberty Leading the People and the Massacre of Chios.

• John Baldessari — John Baldessari was a Conceptual artist known for obscuring faces with painted dots, a signature strategy seen in works like Stonehenge with Two Persons. He also made text-based and minimalist works such as a diptych reading “Avant Garde” and the wall piece “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art.”

• Sun Yuan and Peng Yu
  • Can’t Help Myself — Can’t Help Myself is a 2016 kinetic sculpture by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu featuring a robotic arm that endlessly sweeps up a red liquid. It was shown at the Guggenheim’s Tales of Our Time exhibition and later drew attention for its programmed dance-like motions and eventual shutdown.
• Takashi Murakami — Takashi Murakami is a Japanese contemporary artist associated with the superflat style, smiling flowers, manga imagery, and the character Mr. DOB. His work includes collaborations with Louis Vuitton and pop-culture projects such as the bear on Kanye West’s Graduation.
  • Mr. DOB — Mr. DOB is Takashi Murakami’s round, sharp-toothed alter ego, combining pop-culture elements from anime, manga, and Western cartoons. The character appears in the triptych 727 and is associated with Murakami’s Superflat aesthetic.

• Gerhard Richter — Gerhard Richter is a German artist known for blurred photo-paintings, abstract works, and paintings made by dragging or wiping paint with a squeegee. His work includes the Cologne Cathedral windows, the Birkenau paintings, and a large catalog of serial sonatas-like repetitions in visual form through chance and grids.

• Gordon Matta-Clark — Gordon Matta-Clark was the artist-son of Roberto Matta whose work cut and altered condemned buildings as a form of architectural intervention. Pieces like Splitting and Conical Intersect made him a key figure in anarchitecture.

• Yayoi Kusama — Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese contemporary/avant-garde artist known for polka dots, repeating dots, pumpkins, mirrored spheres, and immersive installations such as the Infinity Mirror Rooms and the 1966 Narcissus Garden installation. Her work also includes obsessive accumulation pieces and collaborations that brought her style into fashion and popular culture, with hallucinations and repeated reflections often associated with her art.
  • Polka dots — Polka dots are a signature motif in the work of Yayoi Kusama, who uses repeated circular patterns to create effects of infinity and visual overwhelm. The pattern also appears in related Pop and contemporary art contexts, including painted pumpkins and installation rooms.

• Tom of Finland — Tom of Finland was the pseudonym of Touko Laaksonen, a Finnish artist famous for homoerotic drawings of muscular men in leather and uniforms. His work, especially the character Kake, became iconic in gay visual culture.

• Performance, Video, and the Body
  • Marina Abramović — Marina Abramović is a Serbian performance artist known for endurance works and audience participation, including Rhythm 0 and The Artist Is Present. Her performances often test the boundary between art and danger by using her own body and involving viewers directly. She collaborated for years with Ulay, including works such as Lovers, and later reunited with him at MoMA. Her work also includes the controversial piece Spirit Cooking.
    • The Artist Is Present — The Artist Is Present is Marina Abramović’s 2010 performance work at the Museum of Modern Art in which she sat silently across from visitors. The piece lasted 736 hours and became one of the best-known examples of her audience-facing performance art.

  • Karen Finley — Karen Finley is a performance artist associated with the NEA controversies of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Her work drew criticism for provocative body-based performances, including appearances smeared with food like chocolate and yams.

  • Matthew Barney — Matthew Barney is a contemporary visual artist and filmmaker best known for The Cremaster Cycle. His other large multimedia projects, including Drawing Restraint and the OTTO Trilogy, combine sculpture, performance, video, and film.

  • Bob Flanagan — Bob Flanagan was a performance artist and self-described supermasochist who used extreme pain art to confront cystic fibrosis. His work included collaborations with Sheree Rose, and his life and death were documented in Kirby Dick’s film Sick.

  • Bruce Nauman — Bruce Nauman is the American conceptual artist known for neon works, performance pieces, and video installations such as Good Boy, Bad Boy and Self Portrait as a Fountain. His work often uses repetition, bodily action, and language play, and later artists like Marina Abramović have recreated his pieces.

  • Gilbert and George — Gilbert Proesch and George Passmore are the British performance-art duo known collectively as Gilbert and George. They met at St. Martin’s art school and present themselves as a single “living sculpture,” often appearing in matching formal suits. Their brightly colored photo collages and photomontages use provocative imagery and titles such as Naked Shit Pictures, Jack Freak Pictures, and Beard Pictures. Their performances include singing “Underneath the Arches” for an entire day.

  • Gina Pane — Gina Pane was a French performance artist of Italian origin associated with body art and self-inflicted injury as a form of art. Her works include The Conditioning and Sentimental Action, both of which center on the artist’s vulnerable body and ritualized pain.

  • Ana Mendieta — Ana Mendieta was a Cuban-American artist known for earth-body works, especially the Silueta series and performances using her body in natural settings. Her death after a fall from a high-rise apartment and the subsequent acquittal of Carl Andre made her a major figure in feminist art history.

  • Carolee Schneemann — Carolee Schneemann was a performance artist associated with bodily, erotic, and confrontational works. She is known for Meat Joy, Interior Scroll, and photographic projects such as Infinity Kisses, which center her own body and her cats.

  • Chris Burden — Chris Burden was an American performance artist known for Shoot, Trans-Fixed, TV Hijack, and other extreme works involving bodily risk and public spectacle. He also made large installations such as Metropolis II and Beam Drop.
    • Shoot — Shoot is Chris Burden’s notorious 1971 performance in which he was shot in the shoulder with a rifle. It is a canonical example of his body-centered, high-risk performance art, alongside works such as Trans-Fixed and Through the Night Softly.

  • Vito Acconci — Vito Acconci was a performance artist known for Following Piece and Seedbed, in which he used hidden sexual monologues during gallery hours. He later moved into architecture, designing the Murinsel in Graz, Austria.

  • Yoko Ono — Yoko Ono is a Japanese conceptual artist and musician known for Fluxus works such as Grapefruit and Cut Piece. She collaborated with John Lennon, helped organize anti-war performances like the Bed-In for Peace, and often appears in clues about performance art and avant-garde instruction pieces.
    • Cut Piece — Cut Piece is Yoko Ono’s performance work in which audience members are invited to cut away pieces of her clothing. It is one of the best-known examples of her conceptual and Fluxus-era art, alongside her book Grapefruit and her anti-war collaborations with John Lennon.

  • Ulay — Ulay was the German performance artist and photographer best known as Marina Abramović’s longtime collaborator and partner. Their joint works included endurance pieces such as tying their hair together and sharing breath, and his later surprise appearance at The Artist Is Present became famous.

  • Nam June Paik — Nam June Paik was a Korean-American Fluxus artist and pioneer of video art who helped define the medium. He coined the phrase “electronic superhighway” and created installations such as TV Buddha, Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, and Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii. His work often featured television sets, performance art, and collaborations with Charlotte Moorman.

    • Electronic Superhighway — Electronic Superhighway is a Nam June Paik phrase and installation title associated with television imagery and the digital age. The work uses neon outlines and screens to map the contiguous United States, Alaska, and Hawaii.

    • Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii — Nam June Paik’s Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii is a video installation that maps the United States with neon state borders and screens inside each state. It is an early work of video art built from television monitors and light tubing.

  • Shigeko Kubota — Shigeko Kubota was a Japanese video artist associated with video sculpture and with Nam June Paik. Her works included Duchampiana pieces and performances that used her own body as part of the artwork, such as attaching a paintbrush to her underwear.

  • Christian Marclay — Christian Marclay is a Swiss-American conceptual artist and filmmaker best known for The Clock, a 24-hour montage that matches film clips of clocks to the actual time of day. His work also includes Tape Fall, Telephone, and other sound-and-image pieces built from scratched records, collage, and found media.

Sculpture through the Periods

Compare sculptors through material, form, function, and historical setting.

Sculptors

Ancient

• Phidias — ancient Greek; Classical; Athena Parthenos (chryselephantine, for the Parthenon, c. 438 BCE); oversaw the sculptural program of the Parthenon including the pediment figures; Zeus at Olympia (one of the Seven Wonders); no originals survive. He was patronized by Pericles and later tradition links him to exile or imprisonment. He is also associated with Athena Promachos and other monumental works for Athens and Olympia.

  • Athena Parthenos — Athena Parthenos was Phidias’s colossal chryselephantine statue of Athena inside the Parthenon. Clues often mention the Varvakeion copy, the peplos at the Panathenaia, and the goddess’s helmet, shield, and smaller Nike figure.

  • Athena Promachos — Athena Promachos was a giant bronze Athena by Phidias that stood on the Acropolis between the Propylaea and the Parthenon. Its name means “Athena who fights in the front line,” and Pausanias said it could be seen from the sea.

• Myron — ancient Greek; Classical (c. 480–440 BCE); Discobolus (Discus Thrower, c. 450 BCE, known only from Roman marble copies); also Athena and Marsyas (known from copies); celebrated for capturing frozen motion. He is also associated with the lost bronze heifer praised in ancient descriptions.
  • Discobolus — Myron’s famous ancient Greek statue depicts an athlete in the act of throwing a discus, usually shown in the instant before release or at the height of the backswing. The lost bronze original survives mainly through Roman marble copies, including the Townley and Palombara versions and copies associated with the British Museum, the Vatican, and the Lancellotti collection. It is a canonical work of the Severe style and a standard example of contrapposto, admired for its balanced, coiled pose and intense sense of motion.
• Praxiteles — ancient Greek; Classical (4th century BCE); Aphrodite of Knidos (c. 364–361 BCE, first monumental female nude in Greek art, known from Roman copies); Hermes with the Infant Dionysus (possibly surviving original, Olympia); enormously influential on Hellenistic and Roman sculpture. Other works linked to him include Apollo Sauroktonos, the Pouring Satyr, and, less certainly, sculptures at the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. He is associated with a softer Classical style.

  • Aphrodite of Cnidus — Praxiteles’s famous life-size female nude of Aphrodite, shown preparing to bathe and modestly covering herself. It became one of antiquity’s most celebrated female statues and is often identified as a canonical representation of the goddess; it is often associated with the courtesan Phryne.

  • Hermes and the Infant Dionysus — A Parian marble statue by Praxiteles found at Olympia in 1877. It depicts Hermes holding and balancing the infant Dionysus, with Hermes leaning on a tree trunk for support; the child god reaches toward grapes. The work is famous as the only surviving original sculpture attributed to Praxiteles and is also noted for the missing arm.

• Lysippus — ancient Greek; Classical/Early Hellenistic; court sculptor to Alexander the Great; Apoxyomenos (Scraper, known from Roman copies); changed the canon of human proportions to a slimmer, longer form; prolific output reported by ancient sources. His works are also associated with the Farnese Hercules and the statue of Eros Stringing His Bow.
  • Apoxyomenos — Lysippos’s sculpture of an athlete, usually identified as a wrestler, cleaning oil and dirt from his body with a strigil. It is famous for its contrapposto pose, and the best-known version is a Roman marble copy now displayed in the Vatican.

• Kresilas — Kresilas was a fifth-century BCE sculptor from Kydonia who worked in Athens during the Peloponnesian War. He is associated with a statue of Pericles wearing a Corinthian helmet and with a Dying Amazon at Ephesus.

• Scopas — Scopas was a Greek sculptor of the Classical-to-Hellenistic transition, associated with works such as Meleager, Pothos, and a head of Hygieia. He also worked on the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus and the temple of Athena Alea.

• Myron of Eleutherae — Myron of Eleutherae was a Greek sculptor best known for the Discobolus, the discus thrower captured in mid-motion. Ancient sources also credit him with a remarkably lifelike bronze cow and other athletic figures.

• Leochares — Leochares was a fourth-century BCE Greek sculptor associated with the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. He is often credited with the Apollo Belvedere and the Diana of Versailles.

• Lysippus (of Sicyon) — Lysippus of Sicyon was a major Classical Greek sculptor and the favorite artist of Alexander the Great. He is associated with the Apoxyomenus, the Farnese Hercules, and bronzes of Alexander.

Medieval and Renaissance

• Claus Sluter — Dutch (worked in Burgundy); Late Gothic; Well of Moses (1395–1406, Chartreuse de Champmol, Dijon); Tomb of Philip the Bold (begun c. 1385); powerfully realistic, monumental figures departing from Gothic convention. His work at Chartreuse de Champmol in Dijon is especially notable for its monumental realism, particularly in the mourners and prophets.
  • Well of Moses — The Well of Moses is Claus Sluter’s monumental hexagonal sculpture at the Chartreuse de Champmol near Dijon, decorated with prophets including Moses, Daniel, and Jeremiah. Its dramatic figures and original crucifixion group made it one of the masterpieces of late medieval sculpture.
• Lorenzo Ghiberti — Italian (Florentine); Early Renaissance; Gates of Paradise (gilded bronze doors, Florence Baptistery, 1425–1452); North Doors of the Baptistery (1401–1424); his competition panel for the Baptistery doors (1401) is considered the opening event of the Renaissance. Lorenzo Ghiberti was a Florentine Early Renaissance sculptor best known for the bronze doors of the Florence Baptistery called the Gates of Paradise. He also made the Baptistery’s North Doors and important Orsanmichele statues, and wrote the Commentarii, an early artist autobiography used by Vasari.

  • Ghiberti — Lorenzo Ghiberti was a Florentine Renaissance sculptor, goldsmith, and writer best known for the bronze doors of the Florence Baptistery. His masterpiece, the Gates of Paradise, made him one of the leading figures of early Renaissance sculpture.

  • Lorenzo — Lorenzo Ghiberti was the Florentine sculptor best known for the bronze doors of the Baptistery of San Giovanni, later called the Gates of Paradise. He also wrote an early autobiography and helped advance Renaissance art through his work on perspective and relief sculpture.

  • The Gates of Paradise — The Gates of Paradise are Lorenzo Ghiberti’s famous bronze doors for the Florence Baptistery, especially the eastern set. Their gilded Old Testament relief panels include scenes such as Jacob and Esau, David and Goliath, and Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac.

• Andrea del Verrocchio — Italian (Florentine); Renaissance; Equestrian Statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni (Venice, c. 1480–1488, cast 1490s); David (c. 1466–1469, bronze); Lady with a Bunch of Flowers (c. 1475–1480); Leonardo da Vinci trained in his workshop. He was a Florentine Renaissance sculptor and painter, best known as Leonardo da Vinci’s teacher. His workshop is also associated with works such as Baptism of Christ and Putto with a Dolphin, and he produced a St. Thomas for Orsanmichele.

• Benvenuto Cellini — Italian (Florentine); Mannerism; Perseus with the Head of Medusa (1545–1554, bronze, Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence); Salt Cellar of Francis I (1543, gold and enamel); also wrote a celebrated autobiography. He was a sixteenth-century Italian sculptor, goldsmith, and writer. His autobiography is famous for its vivid account of violence, imprisonment, and court intrigue, and he also produced other works including the Nymph of Fontainebleau and busts of Cosimo I and Bindo Altoviti.

  • Salt Cellar — The Salt Cellar, or Saliera, is Benvenuto Cellini’s gold and enamel Renaissance sculpture made for Francis I to hold spices. Its elaborate base shows earth and sea figures, the four winds, and the times of day, making it a famous example of Mannerist decorative metalwork.

  • The Saltcellar of Francis I — The Saltcellar of Francis I, or the Saliera, is Benvenuto Cellini’s famous gold, enamel, and ivory Mannerist table sculpture. It depicts Neptune and Ceres, with personifications of the winds, the times of day, the sea, and the earth built into an elaborate mythological scheme.

• Giambologna (Jean de Boulogne) — Flemish-Italian; Mannerism; The Rape of the Sabine Women (1582, marble, Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence); Mercury (c. 1580); Appennino (1580, garden colossus, Pratolino); famed for multi-viewpoint composition.

• Pisano — The Pisano or d’Apulia sculpting family included Nicola Pisano and Giovanni Pisano, major 13th-century Italian artists. They are especially known for cathedral sculpture and monumental marble pulpits that blend classical and medieval elements.

• Jacopo della Quercia — Jacopo della Quercia was an early Renaissance Italian sculptor from Siena. He is known for works including the Fonte Gaia, the tomb of Ilaria del Carretto, and the relief The Creation of Adam in San Petronio, which influenced Michelangelo.
  • Fonte Gaia — Fonte Gaia is Jacopo della Quercia’s famous fountain in Siena’s Piazza del Campo. Its reliefs include scenes from Genesis and the she-wolf of Rome, and quizbowl clues often mention that it replaced an older pagan statue.
• Nanni di Banco — Nanni di Banco was an early Renaissance Florentine sculptor best known for the Four Crowned Saints at Orsanmichele. He also worked on a relief for the Florence Cathedral and produced other figures such as a statue of St. Eligio and an intended Isaiah for the cathedral exterior.
  • Four Crowned Martyrs or Four Crowned Saints or Quattro Santi Coronati — The Four Crowned Martyrs, or Four Crowned Saints, are the doomed Christian sculptors commemorated in Nanni di Banco’s masterpiece at Florence’s Or San Michele. The group depicts four robed figures in a niche and honors the martyrs who refused Diocletian’s order to carve a statue of Asclepius.
• Italian sculptors and architects
  • Rossellino — The Rossellino brothers were a fifteenth-century Florentine family of sculptors and architects, best known for the Tomb of the Cardinal of Portugal. Antonio and Bernardo Rossellino are the best known members of the family.

• Luca della Robbia — Luca della Robbia was a Renaissance sculptor associated with a famous cantoria for the Florence cathedral complex. He is also remembered for pioneering glazed terracotta as a sculptural medium.

• Giambologna — Flemish-born Mannerist sculptor active in Italy, especially Florence for the Medici. Born in Douai, he was known for bronzes and fountain sculpture, including Flying Mercury, Hercules and the Centaur, The Rape of the Sabine Women, the monumental Appennino at Pratolino, and works for Medici Florence such as the Neptune commission and Cosimo I. His spiraling compositions are designed to reward viewing from multiple angles.
  • The Rape of the Sabine Woman — The Rape of the Sabine Woman is Giambologna’s Mannerist sculpture in Florence, famous for its spiraling vertical composition. It depicts the Roman abduction of women from a neighboring people, with three intertwined figures forming a helix in the Loggia dei Lanzi.
• Tilman Riemenschneider — Tilman Riemenschneider was a major late Gothic German sculptor and woodcarver active in Würzburg in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. He is known for unpainted wood sculpture and for altarpieces such as those at Creglingen and Rothenburg ob der Tauber.

Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

• Jean-Antoine Houdon — French; Neoclassical; Seated Voltaire (1781); portrait busts of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and Rousseau; supreme portraitist-sculptor of the Enlightenment. He also made the Écorché and a Washington statue showing the leader leaning on a pillar.

• Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi — French; Beaux-Arts; Liberty Enlightening the World (Statue of Liberty, 1886, New York Harbor, engineered with Eiffel); The Lion of Belfort (1880, sandstone colossus, Belfort). Other associations include his Washington, D.C., fountain, the Place des États-Unis, the 1876 Centennial, and Franco-Prussian War monuments.
  • Liberty Enlightening the World
    • Lion of Belfort / Liberty Enlightening the World — This clue set pairs the Lion of Belfort with Liberty Enlightening the World, the latter better known as the Statue of Liberty. Both are works associated with Auguste Bartholdi.
  • The Lion of Belfort — The Lion of Belfort is a monumental stone sculpture by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi commemorating Belfort’s resistance in the Franco-Prussian War. It is one of Bartholdi’s best-known works outside the Statue of Liberty.

• Aristide Maillol — French; Post-Impressionism/Classical; La Méditerranée (c. 1902–1905); Action in Chains (1905–1906); monumental, simplified female nudes rejecting Rodin’s turbulent surfaces in favor of calm architectonic form.

• Antoine-Louis Barye — Antoine-Louis Barye was a French Romantic sculptor best known for animalier bronzes such as Crocodile Devouring an Antelope and Python Killing a Gnu. He also produced monumental works for Napoleon-related commissions and became famous for his finely modeled animal sculptures.

• Bertel Thorvaldsen — Bertel Thorvaldsen was a Danish Neoclassical sculptor known for works such as Jason with the Golden Fleece, Christus, and the Lion of Lucerne. His reputation centered in Rome and Copenhagen, where his museum and cathedral sculptures made him one of the major rivals to Canova in Neoclassical sculpture.

• Charles-Antoine Coysevox — Charles-Antoine Coysevox was a French sculptor active at Versailles under Louis XIV. Among his works is a stucco relief of Louis XIV trampling enemies in the Salon de la Guerre, along with other decorative sculptures for the palace.

• Edmonia Lewis — Edmonia Lewis was a sculptor of mixed Native American and African-American ancestry who worked in Rome in the late 1860s and 1870s. Her works include Forever Free and The Death of Cleopatra, and she later vanished from public view around 1880.

• Horatio Greenough — Horatio Greenough was a neoclassical American sculptor best known for his bare-chested George Washington modeled on Zeus. He also made The Rescue and other ambitious classical works that drew on European models while trying to define an American monumental style.

• Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux — Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux was a French sculptor associated with lively Neoclassical and Second Empire work, and with an energetic, dramatic Baroque revival spirit. His best-known pieces include La Danse (The Dance) at the Paris Opera, the Observatory Fountain, the Fountain of the Four Parts of the World, and Ugolino and His Sons.

• Jean-Baptiste Pigalle — Jean-Baptiste Pigalle was a French sculptor known for Mercury Fastening His Sandals and a nude, anatomically realistic Voltaire. His name survives in Paris’s Pigalle district.

• John Flaxman — John Flaxman was an English neoclassical sculptor and designer who made models for Wedgwood jasperware. His works include The Fury of Athamas, Saint Michael Overcoming Satan, and monuments for Admiral Nelson and Agnes Cromwell.

• John Quincy Adams Ward — John Quincy Adams Ward was an American sculptor known for works such as The Indian Hunter and The Freedman. He also created the George Washington statue associated with Wall Street. His grave in Urbana includes a cast of The Indian Hunter.

• Madame Tussaud — Madame Tussaud was born Marie Grosholts and became famous for making wax figures and death masks, especially those linked to the French Revolution. She toured with her collection before founding the London wax museum that bears her name, and is also associated with wax portraiture and anatomical models.

• Sculptors

  • Clodion — Clodion, born Claude Michel, was a French Rococo sculptor known for small terracotta works and classical pastoral subjects. His works include Nymph and Satyr Carousing and other mythological scenes, along with decorative models tied to the Montgolfier balloon project.

  • Hiram Powers — Hiram Powers was a nineteenth-century American neoclassical sculptor who worked largely in Florence. He is best known for The Greek Slave, along with works such as The Last of the Tribe, California, and Eve Tempted and Eve Disconsolate.

    • The Greek Slave — Hiram Powers’s 1843 marble sculpture of a nude young woman in chains, identified as a Christian captive by her cross and locket. The neoclassical work was modeled on the Venus de Medici, and its display stirred mid-19th-century controversy as well as poems and commentary about its mixture of sensuality, chastity, and Christian moral symbolism.

• William Rush — William Rush was an early American sculptor and woodcarver from Philadelphia. He helped found the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and is known for works such as Water Nymph and Bittern and allegorical Schuylkill figures.

• Auguste Bartholdi — Auguste Bartholdi was the French sculptor who designed the Statue of Liberty. He also sculpted the Lion of Belfort and collaborated with Gustave Eiffel on the Statue of Liberty’s structure.
  • Lion of Belfort — The Lion of Belfort is a monumental red-sandstone sculpture by Auguste Bartholdi. Carved into the side of a mountain, it commemorates the French resistance during the Franco-Prussian War.
• Augustus Saint-Gaudens — Augustus Saint-Gaudens was a leading American sculptor of the late nineteenth century and a key figure of the American Renaissance. He is especially known for the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial in Boston, Standing Lincoln, the Sherman Memorial, and the Adams Memorial; he also designed the $20 Double Eagle coin. His work is often linked to Cornish, New Hampshire, and he was noted for relief-style bronze compositions and Civil War monuments, as well as major monument designs in New York.

  • Amor Caritas — Amor Caritas is a recurring angelic motif by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, showing a winged figure with a tablet bearing the title words. Saint-Gaudens used the subject in several bronze works, including versions for the Edwin Morgan tomb and the Vanderbilt mantelpiece.

  • Robert Gould Shaw Memorial — The Robert Gould Shaw Memorial is Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s bronze relief in Boston Common honoring the 54th Massachusetts Regiment and its colonel. It shows Shaw mounted on horseback with a procession of Black सैनिकs and includes the Society of Cincinnati motto.

• Edvard Eriksen
  • The Little Mermaid
    • Little Mermaid statue (Copenhagen) — The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen depicts Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy-tale character seated on a rock by the water. It is famous enough to have inspired a Vancouver imitation, Girl in a Wetsuit, and to have been threatened by vandalism.
• Edward Eriksen
  • Little Mermaid — The Little Mermaid is the Copenhagen statue by Edward Eriksen inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, with a head modeled on dancer Ellen Price and a body based on the sculptor’s wife. It has been repeatedly vandalized, including beheadings and explosions, and Banksy reimagined it as part of Dismaland with a distorted, signal-like appearance.

• François Rude — François Rude was a French sculptor born in Dijon best known for La Marseillaise, the dramatic relief on the Arc de Triomphe. His other works include Mercury Attaching His Winged Sandals and Napoleon Awakening to Immortality.

• Étienne Maurice Falconet — French Rococo and neoclassical sculptor best known for The Bronze Horseman, the equestrian monument to Peter the Great in St. Petersburg. He worked for the Sèvres porcelain manufactory, published the sculpture section of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, and created pieces such as Pygmalion and Galatea.
  • Bronze Horseman — The Bronze Horseman is Etienne-Maurice Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter the Great in St. Petersburg. It stands on the Thunder Stone and is the subject of a famous Pushkin poem.

• Aleijadinho — Brazilian baroque sculptor and architect known for works in Ouro Preto and at the Sanctuary of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos in Congonhas do Campo, especially the Twelve Old Testament Prophets (the 12 Prophets). After a midlife illness left him unable to use his arms and hands, he continued carving with tools strapped to his limbs; this gave rise to legends about him continuing to work despite severe disability.

• Lorado Taft — Lorado Taft was an American sculptor associated with Chicago’s monumental public art, including Fountain of Time and the Heald Square Monument. He also organized the White Rabbits, a group of women sculptors for the World’s Columbian Exposition.

• William Wetmore Story — William Wetmore Story was an American sculptor and poet who lived in Rome and was connected to Henry James’s biography William Wetmore Story and His Friends. His sculpture Cleopatra is also linked in literary discussions of Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun.

• Balthasar Permoser — Balthasar Permoser was a German Baroque sculptor known for theatrical, expressive figures and elaborate decorative work. His best-known piece is a dramatic Marsyas bust, and he also worked on tomb sculpture and jeweled figures with Johann Melchior Dinglinger.

• Daniel Chester French — American sculptor who studied at MIT and in Florence. He is best known for The Minute Man at Concord and the seated Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial. His other works include the bust of Emerson, the statue of John Harvard, Alma Mater at Columbia, the Statue of the Republic, and the sculpture of Alice Cogswell at Gallaudet University. Many of his monuments were carved by the Piccirilli Brothers.

  • Alma Mater — Alma Mater is Daniel Chester French’s seated Columbia University statue of a robed woman reading a Bible and wearing a laurel wreath. French also sculpted The Minute Man, the seated Lincoln Memorial figure, and the bronze doors and commemorative works mentioned in the clues.

  • The Minute Man — The Minute Man is Daniel Chester French’s famous Concord sculpture of a colonial militiaman with a plow and a musket. It stands near Old North Bridge and is made from melted cannon metal.

• David Chester French — David Chester French was the American sculptor who designed the statue of Lincoln inside the Lincoln Memorial. He is also known for The Minute Man.

Early Twentieth Century

• Gutzon Borglum — American; monumental sculpture; Mount Rushmore National Memorial (1927–1941, South Dakota; the 60-foot heads of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt); began the Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain, Georgia (commissioned by Helena Plane, depicting Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis) but quit after a dispute, and his work there was scrapped; Mares of Diomedes (1904) was the first American sculpture purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art; also carved a marble bust of Lincoln and gargoyles for Princeton; his son Lincoln Borglum completed Mount Rushmore after his death. His full name was John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum. He is also associated with The Aviator and a Lincoln bust in the Capitol Rotunda.

• Constantin Brancusi — Romanian-French; Modernism; Bird in Space (multiple versions, 1923–1940); The Kiss (1907–1908); Sleeping Muse (1910); Endless Column (1938, Târgu Jiu, Romania); reduced form to its essential, polished geometry; foundational figure of modern sculpture. He briefly studied under Auguste Rodin. Bird in Space became famous after U.S. Customs initially treated it as a manufactured object rather than art. Other works associated with him include Princess X, the Mademoiselle Pogany portraits, and the Târgu Jiu memorial ensemble with the Table of Silence and the Gate of the Kiss.

  • Bird in Space — Constantin Brâncuși’s abstract sculpture series evoking the essence of flight by reducing a bird to sleek elongated forms, often in bronze or marble, without wings or a beak. The works became especially famous after one bronze example was detained by U.S. customs in 1923 and disputed as raw material or machine part rather than art; some clues also connect the series with the related Măiastra works.

  • Constantin Brâncuşi (“brin-KOOSH”) — Constantin Brâncuși was a Romanian sculptor whose works include Bird in Space, Endless Column, Maiastra, and Sleeping Muse. He was also central to modernist disputes over abstraction and the definition of art.

  • Endless Column — Constantin Brâncuși’s famous Târgu Jiu monument is made of repeating rhomboidal modules or stacked rhomboids, creating an effect of endless ascent. It is dedicated to Romanian soldiers of World War I and forms part of the Târgu Jiu memorial ensemble with The Gate of the Kiss and The Table of Silence. The work is also associated with Brâncuși’s modernist abstraction and later artists inspired by its repeated geometric form.

  • Princess X — Princess X is Constantin Brancusi’s controversial bronze sculpture, intended as an abstract likeness of Marie Bonaparte. Its phallic form caused scandal and removal from the 1920 Salon des Indépendants on grounds of obscenity.

  • Sleeping Muse — Constantin Brâncuși’s Sleeping Muse is a bronze or marble sculpture of a reclining, sideways head modeled on Renée-Irana Frachon. It reduces the head to an egg-like form with minimal facial detail, emphasizing a closed, dreamlike face rather than a full figure, and is one of Brâncuși’s best-known modernist works, often associated with his simplified, ovoid forms.

  • Table of Silence — Brâncuși’s Table of Silence is a memorial sculpture at Târgu Jiu, where twelve hourglass-shaped seats encircle a round stone table. It is part of the World War I memorial ensemble that also includes the Endless Column.

  • The Beginning of the World — The Beginning of the World is a Brancusi sculpture from the early 1920s, nearly featureless and egg-like. Brancusi described it as “sculpture for the blind man,” emphasizing form over surface detail.

• Alexander Calder — American; Abstraction; Lobster Trap and Fish Tail (1939, MoMA); La Grande Vitesse (1969, Grand Rapids, first federally funded public sculpture); invented the mobile (kinetic hanging sculpture named by Duchamp) and the stabile; Circus (1926–1931, performing miniature circus of wire figures). Other works include Flamingo and Eagle.

  • Alexander “Sandy” Calder — Alexander “Sandy” Calder was an American sculptor best known for inventing mobiles and creating monumental stabiles. His works include Mercury Fountain, Lobster Trap and Fish Tail, and La Grande vitesse, and he often used wire and sheet metal to suggest motion.

  • Calder — Alexander Calder was an American sculptor famous for mobiles and for coining the term “stabiles” for static abstract sculptures. Another artist with the same surname created the Lady Justice work mentioned in the clues.

  • Calder red — Calder red is the vivid signature color associated with many of Alexander Calder’s mobiles and stabiles. Works such as Flamingo and Eagle are often painted in this bold red-orange shade.

  • Flamingo — Flamingo is a bright red Alexander Calder stabile installed in Chicago’s Federal Center Plaza, in front of the Kluczynski Federal Building. It is one of Calder’s best-known abstract animal sculptures and a classic example of his monumental painted steel works.
    • Kluczynski Federal Building — The Kluczynski Federal Building in Chicago is the site of Alexander Calder’s bright red Flamingo sculpture. The work is a plaza centerpiece and a recognizable example of Calder’s monumental public art.

  • Lobster Trap and Fish Tail — Alexander Calder’s Lobster Trap and Fish Tail is a suspended mobile made of painted steel wire and aluminum. Commissioned for the Museum of Modern Art, it is among his best-known kinetic sculptures and is hung in a stairwell there.

  • Lobster Trap and Fishtail — Lobster Trap and Fishtail is an Alexander Calder sculpture made from wire and sheet aluminum. Its title combines a lobster form with dark shapes interpreted as fish or other sea creatures.

  • Mercury Fountain — Mercury Fountain is Alexander Calder’s sculpture made with liquid mercury in protest against Franco’s seizure of the Almaden mines. It was shown in the Spanish Pavilion beside Guernica and is now displayed in protective glass because the mercury fumes are toxic.

  • stabile — A stabile is a stationary abstract sculpture, usually associated with Alexander Calder and simple sheet-metal forms. It is the nonmoving counterpart to Calder’s mobile, and examples include Flamingo and other large outdoor sculptures.

  • stabiles — Stabiles are stationary abstract sculptures associated with Alexander Calder and named by Jean Arp. Unlike Calder’s mobiles, these fixed works include pieces such as Flamingo and La Grande Vitesse.
• Henry Moore — British; Modernism; Reclining Figure (multiple versions, 1929–1984); Two Forms (1934); Warrior with Shield (1953–1954); large-scale abstract figures with holes and voids emphasizing the relationship between mass and space; extensive public sculpture across Britain and internationally. He was born Henry Spencer Moore.
  • Reclining Figures — Reclining Figures is the name of Henry Moore’s recurring sculptural theme of abstract human forms. These works were inspired by Chacmool figures and appear in sites such as the UNESCO building in Paris and Lincoln Center.
• Barbara Hepworth — British; Modernism; Pelagos (1946); Single Form (1963, United Nations, New York, as a memorial to Dag Hammarskjöld); Stringed Figure (1939); developed abstract biomorphic sculpture parallel to Moore; based in St Ives, Cornwall.
  • Dame Barbara Hepworth — Dame Barbara Hepworth was a major twentieth-century British sculptor known for pierced, hole-filled forms and stringed abstract works. Pieces like Single Form and Two Forms (Divided Circle) exemplify her smooth modernist style.

• Isamu Noguchi — Japanese-American; Modernism/Sculpture; Red Cube (1968, Manhattan); The Noguchi Table (1944, glass and wood, for Herman Miller); designed sets for Martha Graham; the UNESCO garden (Paris, 1956–1958); bridged East and West in sculpture, furniture, and landscape design. He also designed the Akari paper lanterns and other furniture and lighting, and created minimalist stage designs for Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring.

• David Smith — American; Abstract Expressionism/Sculpture; Cubi series (1961–1965, stainless steel); Agricola series (1951–1959); welded steel sculpture; among the first to use industrial metals and welding as a primary sculptural medium; killed in a truck accident 1965. His work helped define postwar American abstract sculpture through industrial materials and geometric forms, and includes the Zig series.

• Charles Russell — Charles Russell was an American painter and sculptor known for western scenes and cowboy imagery. His statue represents Montana in the United States Capitol’s Statuary Hall.

• Alexander Archipenko — Alexander Archipenko was a Ukrainian-American Cubist sculptor known for sculpto-paintings, Walking Woman, and later experiments with Plexiglas and light-modulating sculpture. His work mixed sculpture and collage with unusual materials and strong geometric abstraction.

• Ernst Barlach — Ernst Barlach was a German Expressionist sculptor and playwright whose work often uses massive, simplified figures and intense facial expression. His notable works include War Monument, Magdeburg Cenotaph, and sculptures such as Have Pity! and The Avenger.

• Gaston Lachaise — Gaston Lachaise was a French-born American sculptor known for his voluptuous female figures, especially his Standing Woman series. His work often emphasized massive hips, rounded forms, and an idealized body rooted in modern reinterpretations of fertility figures.

• Jacob Epstein — Jacob Epstein was a twentieth-century British sculptor known for works such as Rock Drill, the tomb of Oscar Wilde, and the controversial Day and Night sculptures. He also created major public commissions for the British Medical Association building and sculptures for Coventry Cathedral. His work often mixed modernist form with monumental public portraiture.
  • The tomb of Oscar Wilde — Jacob Epstein’s monument to Oscar Wilde in Père Lachaise is a famous funerary sculpture often treated as a grave marker for the Irish writer. The work is known for its winged, sphinx-like figure and for being protected from the lipstick-kissing tradition that long damaged it.

• Jacques Lipchitz — Jacques Lipchitz was a Russian-born Cubist sculptor known for works such as Prometheus Strangling the Vulture and the series he called “transparents.” He also collaborated with figures such as Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso, and Alexander Archipenko before fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe. His work often appears in large public versions, including a copy of Prometheus Strangling the Vulture in Minneapolis and pieces connected to modern portraiture. Other clues tied to him include Joy of Life and his later wartime sculptures Flight and Arrival.

• Raymond Duchamp-Villon — Raymond Duchamp-Villon was a French Cubist sculptor best known for The Large Horse, a machine-like bronze work cast after his death by his brothers. He also designed the facade for La Maison Cubiste, the cubist architectural installation shown at the 1912 Salon d’Automne.

• Sir Jacob Epstein — Sir Jacob Epstein was a modernist sculptor known for controversial public works such as Rock Drill and Day. His other notable pieces include Jacob and the Angel and the tomb of Oscar Wilde.

• Alexander Stirling Calder — Alexander Stirling Calder was an American sculptor known for mobiles, including Lobster Trap and Fish Tail and other hanging works. He also created Circus and early Parisian toy-like figures that led toward his later large sculptures.

• Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney — Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was a sculptor and patron who founded the Whitney Museum of American Art and supported American contemporary art. Her works include memorial sculpture such as the Titanic Memorial, and her name now marks both the museum and its biennial exhibition.

• Bill Reid — Bill Reid was a Haida artist and sculptor best known for Spirit of Haida Gwaii and Raven and the First Men. His work draws heavily on Indigenous Northwest Coast mythology and imagery.
  • Spirit of Haida Gwaii — Spirit of Haida Gwaii is Bill Reid’s monumental canoe sculpture, depicting many Haida figures crowded into a single vessel. Versions known as the Jade Canoe and the Black Canoe are displayed in Vancouver and Washington, D.C., respectively.

• Antoine Pevsner — Antoine Pevsner was a Russian sculptor who issued a Realist Manifesto with Naum Gabo in 1920. His works include Developable Surface and a portrait of Marcel Duchamp.

• Arno Breker — Arno Breker was a German sculptor whose neoclassical work was heavily favored by the Nazi regime. His monumental athletic figures, such as The Party and The Army, made him one of the most prominent artists associated with Nazi art.

• Camille Claudel — French sculptor associated with Auguste Rodin, remembered for expressive bronzes and allegorical works such as The Waltz, The Mature Age, The Wave, Sakuntala, and The Gossips. Her sculptures often feature dramatic drapery and emotionally charged figures, and she also modeled hands and feet for Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais. She is known as Rodin’s longtime lover, and her work often transformed personal relationships into sculpture.

  • Camille Rosalie Claudel — Camille Claudel was a French sculptor, student, and model of Auguste Rodin, known for works such as The Waltz and The Mature Age. Her art and life are often described through her relationship with Rodin and the love-triangle imagery of The Mature Age.

  • The Waltz — The Waltz is a sculpture by Camille Claudel, whose work often dramatizes couples, motion, and psychological tension. Claudel also created The Mature Age, Clotho, and Sakuntala, and is frequently discussed in relation to Auguste Rodin, her longtime lover and artistic rival. Her bronzes are prized for their expressive movement.

Related Works, People, and Context

• Emancipation
  • Forever Free — Forever Free is a sculpture associated with emancipation, showing an enslaved man and woman being released from chains. The title was also used for a Sargent Johnson sculpture of a woman sheltering two children and for a 1867 prayerful emancipation image.

• François Girardon — François Girardon was a French sculptor and Versailles decorator under Louis XIV. He is known for works such as Bath of the Nymphs and The Rape of Persephone, and he later fell from favor after serving as a leading court artist.

• Portrait medallion
  • medallion — A medallion is a relief portrait or commemorative artwork, often cast in bronze. The form was revived in Britain by artists such as Alphonse Legros and was famously used by Pisanello and later by Augustus Saint-Gaudens.
• portrait sculpture
  • medallions — Medallions are small relief portraits or medals, a form used in portrait sculpture by artists such as Pisanello and Auguste Préault. In the United States, Augustus Saint-Gaudens made famous bronze medallions of figures like George Washington and Theodore Roosevelt.
• Sculptural poses
  • contrapposto — Contrapposto is the classical sculptural pose in which a figure’s weight rests on one leg, shifting the hips and torso into a relaxed, asymmetrical stance with a natural twist between the shoulders and hips. It is associated with Greek sculpture such as Polykleitos’s Doryphoros (Spearbearer) and was revived in Renaissance works like Michelangelo’s David.
• sculpture — Sculpture is the art of making three-dimensional works such as statues, bronzes, and carved figures. Rodin, Phidias, and Polykleitos are major names in the medium, and Rilke’s poem on a torso ends with the line about changing one’s life.

  • balloons — Balloons are disposable inflatable objects that appear in modern art, including works by Eva Hesse, Piero Manzoni, Claes Oldenburg, and Jeff Koons, who turned them into glossy sculpture. They are also associated with hot-air travel, party decorations, balloon drops, and works such as Girl with Balloon and Balloon Dog.

  • busts — A bust is a sculpture of the head and upper torso, often used for portraits of historical figures and famous artists. Examples include Nefertiti, Houdon’s Voltaire, and Brancusi’s stylized portrait busts.

  • carving — Carving is the sculptural method of removing material from a solid block to form a work of art. It is the technique used for works such as Michelangelo’s David and for engraved gems such as intaglios and cameos.

  • Equestrian Sculpture — Equestrian sculpture depicts a mounted figure, usually a rider on horseback. Famous examples include the Marcus Aurelius statue in Rome, Donatello’s Gattamelata, and later monumental American and European statues of military and civic leaders.

  • Equestrian statues — Equestrian statues are sculptures of people on horseback, a form modeled on Roman examples like Marcus Aurelius and revived in the Renaissance. Donatello’s Gattamelata and Verrocchio’s Bartolomeo Colleoni are famous examples of this type.

  • Medardo Rosso — Medardo Rosso was an Italian sculptor associated with Impressionist and post-Impressionist experiment in sculpture. He is known for wax-over-plaster works with blurred forms, including Laughing Woman and Man Reading.

  • relief — Relief is a sculptural technique in which figures project from a flat background, ranging from low or bas relief to high and sunken forms. It appears on works from ancient monuments to modern memorials like Mount Rushmore and Michelangelo’s sculptural projects.

  • relief sculpture — Relief sculpture is a carving technique in which the figures remain attached to a flat background. Its forms include sunken relief and bas-relief, where the image projects only slightly from the surface.

  • sculptures — Sculpture is the branch of visual art devoted to three-dimensional works made in materials such as stone, bronze, or wood. Artists like Donatello, Jacob Epstein, and Praxiteles are standard clues for this art form. Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” ending with a demand to change one’s life, is a related literary clue.

  • The Aviator — The Aviator is a bronze sculpture of a nude winged youth. It commemorates pilot James McConnell and stands outside Clemons Library at the University of Virginia.

  • tomb or funerary monument — A tomb or funerary monument is a commemorative artwork created for a burial site or memorializing the dead. Examples include Renaissance and later sculptural monuments such as papal tombs and elaborate memorials in churches or cemeteries.

• Statues
  • equestrian statue — An equestrian statue is a sculpture showing a rider on horseback. Famous examples include Donatello’s Gattamelata, Verrocchio’s Bartolomeo Colleoni, and the bronze Marcus Aurelius in Rome.
• Madame Marie Tussaud — Madame Tussaud, born Marie Grossholtz, founded the wax museum tradition that bears her name. She became famous for making death masks during the French Revolution before later settling in London and exhibiting her wax figures there.

Postwar and Contemporary Sculpture

• Richard Serra — American; Minimalism/Process Art; Tilted Arc (1981, Federal Plaza, New York, removed 1989 after public controversy); The Matter of Time (1994–2005, Guggenheim Bilbao); large-scale Cor-Ten steel plates that force the viewer through curving corridors of space; his work engages the site and viewer’s body as essential elements. His best-known pieces include Tilted Arc, the Guggenheim Bilbao installation The Matter of Time, and other large-scale process sculptures such as Snake and Torqued Ellipses.
  • Tilted Arc — Tilted Arc was Richard Serra’s large Corten-steel sculpture installed in New York’s Federal Plaza and later removed after a major controversy. Its defenders argued that the site-specific work was meant to alter movement through the plaza, while critics attacked its size and obstruction of public space.

• Louise Nevelson — American; Assemblage/Sculpture; Sky Cathedral (1958); Black Wall (1959); monochromatic painted wooden assemblages of found objects stacked into architectural wall-sized compositions; known for working in all black, then all white, then all gold.

• Lee Bontecou — American; sculpture and assemblage; Untitled (1961, MoMA) combines welded steel, canvas, fabric, rawhide, copper wire, and soot. Its projecting form and central dark opening sit between painting and sculpture, and between organic and mechanical imagery.⁸

• Anish Kapoor — British-Indian (b. 1954, Mumbai); Contemporary sculpture; Cloud Gate (2006, Millennium Park, Chicago) — polished stainless-steel bean-shaped sculpture nicknamed “the Bean,” 10 m tall, reflects and distorts the Chicago skyline and visitors; Sky Mirror (2006, Rockefeller Center and Nottingham); Marsyas (2002, Tate Modern Turbine Hall, 700-ton PVC membrane); Descent into Limbo (1992, a pit that appears bottomless); known for concave voids, pigment works (intense ultramarine and red), and his exclusive commercial license (2016) to use Vantablack, the darkest artificial substance. He is also associated with the ArcelorMittal Orbit and with controversial Vantablack-related work, including Dirty Corner.
  • Cloud Gate — Cloud Gate is Anish Kapoor’s reflective stainless-steel sculpture in Chicago’s Millennium Park, popularly nicknamed “The Bean.” Its polished surface and mirrored skyline make it one of the city’s best-known public artworks.

• Tony Smith — Tony Smith was an American sculptor known for large black steel works shaped by architectural ideas. His minimalist monuments helped define postwar American sculpture.

• Marisol Escobar — Marisol Escobar was a Venezuelan-American sculptor and Pop artist born in Paris. She often used found objects, mixed media, and casts of her own face in playful sculptural assemblages that satirized modern social life. Her life-size works include Women and Dog, The Party, and Self-Portrait Looking at The Last Supper.

• Rachel Whiteread — Rachel Whiteread is a British sculptor known for casting the negative space of rooms and objects, including House and Untitled Monument. She won the Turner Prize and made works such as Ghost, the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, and the fourth-plinth cast in Trafalgar Square.

• Antony Gormley — Antony Gormley is a contemporary British sculptor best known for the Angel of the North, Another Place, and Field. His work often centers on the human body and uses casts of his own body, repeated figures, empty casts, and large site-specific installations, including Field for the British Isles and other horizon-themed pieces.

• Duane Hanson — Duane Hanson was an American Pop and photorealist sculptor from Minnesota known for hyperrealistic, lifelike figures made with resin and fiberglass. His works include Bowery Derelicts, Self Portrait with Model, Cleaning Woman Pushing a Cart, Supermarket Shopper, Young Shopper, Tourists, and Queenie II.
  • The Shoppers — The Shoppers is a pair of Duane Hanson sculptures depicting a lifelike overweight man and woman in garish 1970s clothing.

• El Anatsui — El Anatsui is a Ghanaian artist known for large wall hangings made from bottle caps and copper wire. His works imitate kente cloth patterns in pieces such as Dzesi II and Flag for a New World Power.

• Frederick Hart — Frederick Hart was an American sculptor known for the Creation relief at Washington National Cathedral and for The Three Soldiers at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. His work is often paired with more controversial memorial designs and with a realistic, figurative style.

• Maya Lin — Maya Lin is the Chinese-American artist and architect of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Her work also includes the civil rights memorial in Montgomery, the Women’s Table at Yale, and landscape pieces such as Wave Field.

• Niki de Saint Phalle — Niki de Saint Phalle was a French artist known for her colorful Nanas, her Tarot Garden, and her collaboration with Jean Tinguely on works such as the Stravinsky Fountain. She also made shooting paintings and monumental assemblages like Hon and Saint Sébastien.

Photography, Prints, Design, and Other Media

Distinguish photography, printmaking, design, and other media by process.

Photography

• Photography — Photography is the art and practice of making images with light-sensitive processes or a camera and lens. It is often discussed in terms of aperture, shutter speed, ISO, the rule of thirds, tilt-shift effects, and image editing with tools such as Lightroom. Major historical and artistic figures include Daguerre, Nadar, Brassaï, André Kertész, Alfred Stieglitz, Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, Margaret Bourke-White, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Cindy Sherman, and Diane Arbus. It is a major medium for documentary and fine-art work; famous images include Migrant Mother and Untitled Film Stills. Related works include Susan Sontag’s On Photography and Lewis Carroll’s parody Hiawatha’s Photographing.

  • blurriness — Blurriness is the soft-focus or out-of-focus look prized in photography, where a lack of sharp edges can be described as bokeh. It is often mentioned in discussions of Francesca Woodman and Robert Capa, whose images were criticized or admired for their hazy, dreamlike quality.

  • photograms — Photograms are cameraless photographs made by placing objects directly on light-sensitive material and exposing it to light. Anna Atkins used the technique in her algae book, while Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy popularized it with works like rayographs and related abstract prints.

  • photographer — A photographer is the artistic profession shared by figures in plays such as Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Lion and the Jewel. The clues point to the person who takes photos, as in Mathew Brady, Ansel Adams, and the “Lost Traveller” scene in Soyinka.

  • Photographers — A photographer makes images by using a camera to capture light on film or a sensor, and figures like Alfred Stieglitz, Annie Leibovitz, and Dorothea Lange are famous examples. The occupation also includes pioneers of modern art photography such as Eadweard Muybridge and the founders of Magnum Photos.
    • Andreas Gursky — Andreas Gursky is the German photographer famous for large-scale, highly detailed images of modern spaces such as supermarkets, factories, and racetracks. His best-known works include 99 Cent, Rhine II, and Chicago Board of Trade, with the latter and other prints often appearing as monumental color studies.
      • Rhein II — Rhein II is Andreas Gursky’s monumental photograph of the Rhine, showing a flat landscape interrupted by a path and river. It became famous as one of the most expensive photographs ever sold.

    • André Kertész — Hungarian-born photographer associated with Dada, early Leica work, Paris scenes, and later American photojournalism. He helped pioneer photojournalism and is especially known for The Fork, the Washington Square photographs/series, the Distortions series (or studies), and other highly arranged modernist images such as Satiric Dancer.

    • Berenice Abbott — Berenice Abbott was an American photographer known for her portraits of writers and artists as well as her documentary work on New York City. She also made scientific photographs at MIT and studied with Man Ray.

    • Edward Burtynsky — Edward Burtynsky is a Canadian photographer known for large-scale images of industrial landscapes and environmental damage. His projects include Oil, tailings in Sudbury, and other aerial views of mines, quarries, tires, and dams.

    • Lee Miller — Lee Miller was a surrealist photographer and former model who worked with Man Ray before becoming a war correspondent. She photographed the London Blitz and the liberation of concentration camps, and she is also remembered for the image of her in Hitler’s bathtub.

    • Philippe Halsman — Philippe Halsman was a Lithuanian-American portrait photographer known for surreal compositions and for photographing jumping subjects. His best-known image is Dali Atomicus, and he also created numerous Life magazine covers.
  • Photomontage
    • John Heartfield — John Heartfield was the German Dada and political photomontage artist born Helmut Herzfeld. He is known for sharp anti-fascist imagery, including propaganda-style works that used art as a political weapon.

  • street photography — Street photography is candid photography taken in public urban spaces, often associated with Henri Cartier-Bresson, Imogen Cunningham, Fan Ho, and Vivian Maier. Its subjects are usually ordinary scenes or passersby rather than posed studio images.

  • war photography — War photography is the photographic documentation of armed conflict, especially famous in the work of Robert Capa, Larry Burrows, and H. S. Wong. Iconic examples include images from World War II, Vietnam, and the Spanish Civil War.

  • Zone System — The Zone System is Ansel Adams and Fred Archer’s photographic method for controlling exposure and development through numbered tonal zones. It is associated with black-and-white printing, exposure values, and Adams’s work with the f/64 group.
• Photography techniques
  • exposure — In photography, exposure is the amount of light reaching the film or sensor, determined by shutter speed, aperture, and related settings. Long exposures can blur motion or flatten seascapes into abstract tones, while overexposure makes images look washed out.
• Alfred Stieglitz — American; Photography/Modern Art Advocacy; The Steerage (1907); Equivalents (1920s cloud series); ran the 291 gallery (1905–1917), introducing Picasso, Matisse, and Cézanne to America; championed photography as fine art; married to Georgia O’Keeffe. He helped found the Photo-Secession and published Camera Work. He also photographed Georgia O’Keeffe.

  • Camera Work — Camera Work was Alfred Stieglitz’s influential photographic journal, published from 1903 to 1917. It helped promote the Photo-Secession and featured work by artists such as Edward Steichen.

  • The Steerage — The Steerage is Alfred Stieglitz’s influential modernist photograph taken aboard the Kaiser Wilhelm II. It is often discussed as a proto-Cubist image that contrasts the crowded upper deck with the lower-class steerage passage and became famous through Camera Work.

• Edward Weston — American; Photography; Pepper No. 30 (1930); Nude (1934); co-founded Group f/64 with Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham; sharp-focus large-format photography of natural forms and nudes. He was also known for portraits, his Daybooks, and California and New Mexico scenes, along with studies of peppers, shells, and dunes such as Nautilus.

• Ansel Adams — American; Photography; Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico (1941); Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite (1944); Mount Williamson (1944); co-founded Group f/64; developed the Zone System with Fred Archer; his images helped establish wilderness preservation as a national cause. He also made notable Yosemite black-and-white landscapes, photographed Georgia O’Keeffe with Orville Cox, and documented Japanese American internment at Manzanar.
  • Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico — Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico is Ansel Adams’s famous black-and-white photograph of a moonlit New Mexico town beneath dramatic clouds and mountains. It is one of his best-known landscape photographs and a staple of American photography clues.
• Henri Cartier-Bresson — French; Photography; Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare (1932); Seville (1933); developed the concept of “the decisive moment” (L’instant décisif); co-founded the Magnum Photos agency (1947); used a 35mm Leica for unobtrusive street photography.
  • The Decisive Moment — The Decisive Moment is the English title of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous photobook about capturing the exact instant of a scene. It is associated with his street photography, including the image of a man leaping over a puddle near the Gare Saint-Lazare.
• Dorothea Lange — American; Documentary Photography; Migrant Mother (Florence Owens Thompson, 1936, Nipomo, California); White Angel Breadline (1933); photographed for the Farm Security Administration during the Depression; her images galvanized public response to rural poverty. She later photographed Japanese American internment at Manzanar for the War Relocation Authority.

  • Migrant Mother — Dorothea Lange’s iconic Great Depression photograph of Florence Owens Thompson with her children. It became one of the best-known images of Depression-era hardship and American documentary photography, and is often linked to Lange’s work for the Farm Security Administration; it is also described as one of the defining photographs of American documentary art.

  • White Angel Breadline — White Angel Breadline is Dorothea Lange’s Depression-era photograph of men waiting in a San Francisco breadline. Its central figure faces the camera with a worn hat and cup, while the crowded line stretches behind him.

• Diane Arbus — American; Photography; Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park (1962); Identical Twins (1967); A Young Man in Curlers at Home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C. (1966); photographed marginalized subjects (nudists, dwarfs, drag queens) with a direct, unflinching flash; died by suicide 1971. Her photographs were black-and-white portraits of social outsiders and other unconventional subjects, including giants and children.
  • toy hand grenade — A toy hand grenade is the small explosive prop associated with Diane Arbus photographs of children, including the image titled for Colin Wood. Arbus also used it in a war-related photograph of a young boy clutching the toy in one hand.

• Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) — British-American; Photography; Animal Locomotion series (1887); The Horse in Motion (1878); proved that all four of a galloping horse’s hooves leave the ground simultaneously using multiple cameras with trip wires; a foundational figure in motion photography and the prehistory of cinema. He also developed the zoopraxiscope.

• Annie Leibovitz (b. 1949) — American; Portrait Photography; the last portrait of John Lennon and Yoko Ono (Rolling Stone, December 1980, taken hours before his assassination); Demi Moore nude pregnant cover (Vanity Fair, 1991); chief photographer at Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair; known for elaborate, cinematic celebrity portraits. Her full name is Anna-Lou Leibovitz. She also photographed the nude John Lennon embracing Yoko Ono shortly before Lennon’s murder, and later made portraits of celebrities including Miley Cyrus.
  • Annie Liebovitz — Annie Leibovitz is a photographer known for celebrity portraiture and for the famous final portrait of John Lennon with Yoko Ono. Her work ranges from Vanity Fair commissions to elaborate staged compositions and the book Down in the Garden.
• Cindy Sherman — American; Conceptual Photography; Untitled Film Stills series (1977–1980, 69 black-and-white photos posing as stills from imaginary B-movies); History Portraits (1988–1990); Clowns (2003–2004); uses herself as the sole model in elaborate self-constructed scenarios exploring female identity and media representation. Her other major series include Centerfolds (1981) and Sex Pictures (1992).
  • Untitled Film Stills — Untitled Film Stills is Cindy Sherman’s series of 69 black-and-white self-portrait photographs staged like scenes from old movies. The images depict Sherman in stereotyped feminine roles, such as a housewife, career woman, or hitchhiker, in deliberately ambiguous narratives.

• Paul Strand — Paul Strand was an American photographer and filmmaker associated with sharply composed modernist imagery. His well-known photographs include Wall Street, White Fence, and portraits such as the Blind Woman image, and he also worked on Manhatta.

• Pete Souza
  • Situation Room — The Situation Room is Pete Souza’s 2011 photograph of President Barack Obama and his national security team during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. The image is famous for Hillary Clinton’s worried expression and for the way later reproductions and censorship controversies highlighted its composition.

• Edward S. Curtis — Edward S. Curtis was an American photographer best known for his early twentieth-century portraits of Native Americans. He is famous for The North American Indian, a huge ethnographic record of Native American life, and was known as the “Shadow Catcher.” His work, including images of Chief Joseph, was financially supported by J. P. Morgan. He also made dramatic orotones and other Western landscapes.

• Edward Steichen — Edward Jean Steichen was a Luxembourg-born American photographer and curator associated with Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession and the 291 Gallery. He co-founded Photo-Secession with Stieglitz, organized the Family of Man exhibition, and is known for early color work such as The Pond—Moonlight, as well as The Fighting Lady and his early iconic portraits and landscape photography.
  • The Family of Man — The Family of Man was Edward Steichen’s massive MoMA photography exhibition, later turned into a book with a Carl Sandburg introduction. It presented images of shared human experience, toured internationally, and is often discussed alongside criticism by Roland Barthes and the inclusion of famous photographs such as Migrant Mother.

• Jacob Riis — Jacob Riis was a Danish-American photographer and journalist who pioneered photojournalism with stark images of New York tenements and slums. His best-known book is How the Other Half Lives, and his work includes famous scenes like Bandit’s Roost.

• James Van Der Zee — James Van Der Zee was a leading photographer of the Harlem Renaissance, famous for elegant portraits of Harlem’s middle and upper classes. His best-known images include The Couple Wearing Raccoon Coats and many portraits of figures such as Marcus Garvey and Countee Cullen. He also retouched negatives to create composite tableaux and ghostlike figures.

• Lewis Hine — Lewis Hine was a social reform photographer whose images helped expose child labor in the United States. He also documented the construction of the Empire State Building and made the famous Power house mechanic working on steam pump photograph.

• Nadar — French photographer and balloonist known for pioneering aerial photography, especially from balloons, and for portraits of artists and writers such as Victor Hugo. He also photographed the Paris Catacombs and was the subject of Daumier’s caricature Elevating Photography to a Fine Art.

• Thomas Struth — Thomas Struth is a German photographer associated with the Düsseldorf School and the series Museum Photographs. One of his best-known images shows schoolchildren studying Velázquez’s Las Meninas in a museum.

• Imogen Cunningham — Imogen Cunningham was an American photographer associated with Group f/64 and known for close-up botanical images and portraits. She also appears in a famous Judy Dater photograph with Twinka Thiebaud in Yosemite.

• Straight photography

  • f/64 — f/64 was a San Francisco photography collective associated with Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and Willard Van Dyke. Its name comes from the very small lens aperture f/64, and the group championed straight, sharply detailed landscape photography in the American West.

  • Group f/64 — Group f/64 was the San Francisco photography collective associated with Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Imogen Cunningham. Named for a small camera aperture, it promoted sharp focus and straight photography in reaction to the softer Pictorialist style.

• Brassaï — Brassaï was a Hungarian-born photographer known as the “eye of Paris” for his nocturnal images of Paris, including brothel scenes, portraits of Parisian life, graffiti, and street life. He is best known for the book Paris by Night and later reflected on photography as revealing a hidden magic beneath reality; his later book is Proust in the Power of Photography. He adopted Brassaï as a single-name pseudonym.

• Charles C. Ebbets
  • Lunch atop a Skyscraper — Lunch atop a Skyscraper is the famous 1932 photograph of eleven construction workers eating lunch while seated on a steel girder high above Manhattan. Taken by Charles C. Ebbets during the construction of Rockefeller Center, it is often noted for the men’s casual pose over the city skyline.
    • eating lunch — Eating lunch is the action shown in the famous construction photograph Lunch atop a Skyscraper. The image captures ironworkers perched on a steel beam high above New York City.

• Eddie Adams — Eddie Adams was a photojournalist famous for his Tet Offensive image of Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing Nguyen Van Lem. He also documented the Vietnamese boat people in The Boat of No Smiles.

• Magnum Photos — Magnum Photos is the international photography cooperative founded in Paris by figures including Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Clues often name members such as Eve Arnold or Sebastião Salgado and point to its role in modern photojournalism.

• Mathew Brady — 19th-century American photographer best known for documenting the Civil War and helping make battlefield photography famous in the United States. He created the Gallery of Illustrious Americans, a portrait collection of early American leaders, and photographed figures including Daniel Webster, Edgar Allan Poe, Abraham Lincoln, and earlier presidents. He employed Alexander Gardner and Timothy O’Sullivan; Gardner’s battlefield images were issued as The Dead of Antietam. His Antietam photographs and broader body of work made him a foundational figure in photojournalism.

• Richard Drew
  • The Falling Man — “The Falling Man” is Richard Drew’s haunting 9/11 photograph of a man in free fall from the World Trade Center. The image later inspired a documentary and was referenced in Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man.
• Robert Capa — Robert Capa was the Hungarian war photographer famed for The Falling Soldier and the D-Day images known as The Magnificent Eleven. He co-founded Magnum Photos with Henri Cartier-Bresson and David Seymour, and he died after stepping on a landmine in French Indochina. The surviving D-Day photographs are noted for their blurred, chaotic appearance.
  • The Falling Soldier — The Falling Soldier is Robert Capa’s iconic Spanish Civil War photograph of a loyalist militiaman at the instant of death. Capa became one of the defining war photographers of the twentieth century, later associated with D-Day images, Magnum Photos, and photojournalism in places such as France and Indochina. His work is often discussed alongside Gerda Taro and David Seymour.

• Robert Doisneau — Robert Doisneau was a French street and photojournalism photographer best known for the staged image The Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville. His Paris scenes often capture ordinary people in cafés, on bridges, and in the streets with a playful, humanist eye.

• Robert Frank — This Swiss-born photographer’s best-known book, The Americans, critically documents postwar U.S. society and was introduced by Jack Kerouac. He also made film work such as Pull My Daisy and photographed scenes ranging from street life to a flag at a Democratic National Convention.
  • The Americans — The Americans is Robert Frank’s 1958 photography collection of images of everyday life in the United States. Its famous photographs include Parade—Hoboken, New Jersey and scenes of diners, trolleys, and other stark urban moments.
• Steve McCurry — Steve McCurry is an American photojournalist best known for National Geographic’s Afghan Girl, the portrait of Sharbat Gula. His work also includes dramatic conflict photography such as the Ahmadi Oil Fires and widely circulated travel and portrait images.
  • “Afghan Girl” — Steve McCurry’s National Geographic portrait of Sharbat Gula is best known as “Afghan Girl.” The photograph is famous for the subject’s striking green eyes and red headscarf.

• Tina Modotti — Tina Modotti was an Italian-born photographer and activist who worked in Mexico and documented laborers, the Mexican Communist Party, and muralists such as Diego Rivera. Her photographs often emphasize working people and indigenous women.

• Larry Clark — Larry Clark is a photographer and filmmaker known for raw depictions of youth, drugs, and alienation. His photographic books Tulsa and Teenage Lust helped establish his reputation, and his films include Kids and Bully.

• Nick Ut — Nick Ut is the Vietnamese-born American photographer who made The Terror of War, the famous Vietnam War image of children fleeing a napalm attack. The photograph shows Phan Thi Kim Phuc among the fleeing children near Trang Bang.

• Stanley Forman — Stanley Forman was a photojournalist who won consecutive Pulitzer Prizes in the mid-1970s. His best-known images include Fire Escape Collapse and The Soiling of Old Glory.
  • The Soiling of Old Glory — The Soiling of Old Glory is Stanley Forman’s 1976 photograph of Joseph Rakes confronting Ted Landsmark during a Boston anti-busing protest. The image became a famous symbol of racial tension and the violence surrounding school desegregation debates in Boston.

• Vivian Maier — Vivian Maier was a prolific street photographer whose work was discovered only after her death, when thousands of negatives and prints surfaced from storage. While working as a nanny in New York and Chicago, she made images that later inspired exhibitions and the documentary Finding Vivian Maier.

• Walker Evans — Walker Evans was an American photographer famous for his Farm Security Administration images of the Great Depression, including his work with James Agee on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. He is also known for his subway portraits, his Alabama sharecropper photographs, and the later influence of his documentary style on photographers like Robert Frank.

• War photographs
  • Raising a Flag — The famous Joe Rosenthal photograph from Iwo Jima shows six men raising a flag atop Mount Suribachi in 1945. Related images include the flag raising at the Reichstag and the image of firefighters at the World Trade Center site.

• Weegee — Weegee was the flash-happy New York crime photographer born Arthur, or Ascher, Fellig, known for stark 1930s and 1940s street and night scenes, murder victims, and the phrase “f/8 and be there.” His best-known work includes Naked City, The Critic, Distortions, and On the Spot; his nighttime flash style was sometimes described as “Rembrandt lighting.”

• Francesca Woodman — Francesca Woodman was an American photographer known for blurred self-portraits, nude figures, and bodies dissolving into their surroundings. She died by suicide at age 22 after publishing only Some Disordered Interior Geometries.

• Nan Goldin — Nan Goldin is an American photographer known for diaristic images of her New York scene, especially gay, drag, and no-wave subcultures, collected in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Her work often features drag queens, bruised self-portraits, intimate self-images, and flash-lit nightlife portraits such as Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a taxi, NYC. She has also been active in the anti-Sackler group P.A.I.N.

• Jeff Wall — Jeff Wall is a Canadian conceptual photographer known for carefully staged large-scale photographs. His works include Picture for Women, Mimic, The Destroyed Room, A Sudden Gust of Wind, and Restoration.

• Alberto Korda — Alberto Korda was the Cuban photographer who took Guerrillero Heroico, the famous portrait of Che Guevara. The image was taken at a memorial for the victims of the La Coubre explosion and later became one of the most reproduced photographs in the world.
  • Guerrillero Heroico — Guerrillero Heroico is Alberto Korda’s famous photograph of Che Guevara. The image became an iconic revolutionary symbol and was widely reproduced in stylized adaptations.

• Alexander Gardner — Alexander Gardner was a Scottish-born photographer who managed Matthew Brady’s studio before breaking away in 1863. He is known for his Civil War photography, including the staged image at Devil’s Den and the two-volume Photographic Sketch Book of the War.

• Alfred Eisenstaedt — Alfred Eisenstaedt was a major 20th-century photojournalist best known for his V-J Day kissing photograph in Times Square. He also photographed J. Robert Oppenheimer and numerous public figures for Life magazine.
  • V-J Day in Times Square
    • kissing a nurse — The action is the famous postwar kiss in Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photograph V-J Day in Times Square. The image is often associated with sailor George Mendonsa and nurse Edith Shain.

• Joe Rosenthal — Joe Rosenthal was the photographer of the famous Iwo Jima flag-raising image from World War II. That picture won him a Pulitzer Prize in the same year it was taken and became one of the most iconic wartime photographs in American history.

• Julia Margaret Cameron — Julia Margaret Cameron was a pioneering British/Victorian photographer known for soft-focus portraits of writers, scientists, and friends such as Charles Darwin and John Herschel. Her images often use staged, ethereal effects, and she also produced Arthurian illustrations for Tennyson’s Idylls of the King; her work is connected to Tennyson and Virginia Woolf’s Freshwater.

• Gordon Parks — He was a photographer, filmmaker, writer, and composer who worked for Life magazine after his photographic essay on a gang leader named Red Jackson. He directed Shaft and The Learning Tree, and also made Half Slave, Half Free. His photographs include American Gothic, Washington, D.C., and the famous doll test image of a child choosing a white doll.
  • Ella Watson — Ella Watson was a government worker photographed by Gordon Parks in a famous image that echoes American Gothic. She appears holding cleaning tools in front of an American flag.

• Graciela Iturbide — Graciela Iturbide is a Mexican photographer known for black-and-white images of indigenous life, especially in Juchitán and the Sonora desert. Her work includes Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas, Magnolia, Angel Woman, and portraits of muxe subjects.

• Gregory Crewdson — Gregory Crewdson is an American photographer known for highly staged, cinematic images built as elaborate tableaux. His works include Twilight and Dream House, both of which place isolated figures in uncanny scenes that resemble film stills.

• Hans Namuth — Hans Namuth was a German-American photographer known for documenting Jackson Pollock and the New York School. His films and photographs captured Pollock’s action painting process in progress.

• Helmut Newton — Helmut Newton was a German-born fashion photographer known for stark black-and-white images in Vogue and elsewhere. His famous works include SUMO, Big Nude II, and portraits featuring women in provocative poses such as Le Smoking.

• Herb Ritts — This fashion photographer became known for stark black-and-white images, especially celebrity and advertising work for Richard Gere, Calvin Klein, Madonna, Janet Jackson, and Chris Isaak. He also moved into directing music videos before his death in 2002.

• Irving Penn — Irving Penn was an American fashion and portrait photographer best known for his Vogue work, corner portraits, and elegant studio compositions. His subjects included figures such as Truman Capote, Igor Stravinsky, and W. H. Auden, and he also made nudes, still lifes, and ethnographic-looking series.

• Richard Avedon — Richard Avedon was a major American fashion and portrait photographer whose work ranged from Dovima with Elephants to the American West series. He made iconic images for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue and photographed celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Twiggy, and the Beatles.

• Robert Mapplethorpe — Robert Mapplethorpe was an American photographer known for stark, highly staged black-and-white images of flowers, portraits, nudes, and explicit homoerotic and BDSM subjects from New York’s downtown art and underground scene. He photographed Patti Smith for Horses and made self-portraits with a cane or whip. His retrospective The Perfect Moment became central to controversies over censorship and National Endowment for the Arts funding, especially after his death from AIDS complications, and the exhibition drew attention from the Corcoran Gallery.

• Sally Mann — Sally Mann is an American photographer known for intimate black-and-white images of her children and for the series Immediate Family. She also made landscapes and Southern documentary work such as Deep South, and her photos of children have sometimes provoked censorship controversies.
  • What Remains — What Remains is Sally Mann’s controversial photography book built around images of decay, bodies, and mortality. Its sections include material from the University of Tennessee body farm, along with sequences titled “Antietam” and a self-portrait section.

• William Wegman — William Wegman is an American conceptual artist and photographer best known for his staged images of Weimaraner dogs. His recurring canine models include Man Ray and Fay Ray, and his work ranges across photography, film, and painting.

• Wolfgang Tillmans — Wolfgang Tillmans is a German photographer and artist who became the first photographer and first non-British recipient of the Turner Prize. His work ranges from early Berlin nightlife and queer subculture photography to later installations such as Truth Study Center and the Silver series.

• Yousuf Karsh — Yousuf Karsh was the Armenian-Canadian portrait photographer famed for his 1941 image of Winston Churchill and for other dramatic celebrity portraits. He is especially associated with the story of removing Churchill’s cigar before taking the iconic scowling portrait.

• Andres Serrano — Andres Serrano is an American photographer known for controversial religious imagery and bodily-fluid series. He made Piss Christ by submerging a crucifix in urine, and related works such as Blood and Semen III drew further notoriety, including use on a Metallica cover.
  • Piss Christ — Piss Christ is Andres Serrano’s controversial photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine. The image became notorious in debates over public funding for art and standards of decency.

• Anne Geddes — Anne Geddes is an Australian-born, New Zealand-based photographer best known for whimsical portraits of infants in costumes and props. Her 1996 book Down in the Garden brought her international fame and became closely associated with her baby photography brand.

• Arnold Newman — Arnold Newman was an American photographer famous for environmental portraits that place sitters within meaningful settings. His subjects included John F. Kennedy, Igor Stravinsky, and Alfried Krupp, and one of his early shows brought him national attention.

Illustration and Printmaking

• Charles Dana Gibson — Charles Dana Gibson was an American illustrator whose elegant, athletic women defined the Gibson Girl ideal of the 1890s and early 1900s. His drawings helped popularize the high pompadour and hourglass silhouette associated with turn-of-the-century femininity.
  • Gibson Girls — The Gibson Girls were late-19th-century American ideals of feminine beauty, marked by narrow waists, abundant hair, and a polished, high-society look. They were popularized in drawings by Charles Dana Gibson, and models such as Evelyn Nesbit and Camille Clifford became associated with the image.

• drypoint — Drypoint is an intaglio printmaking technique in which a needle scratches directly into a metal plate, rather than using acid as in etching. The scratched lines often leave a burr that holds ink and produces especially dark, soft marks, though those lines can wear away after repeated printings.

• Engraving tools
  • Burin — A burin is an engraving tool used to cut lines into a metal plate. It typically has a metal shaft with a sharpened diagonal tip and a rounded end for the engraver’s palm.

• Ernest Shepard — E. H. Shepard was a British illustrator born in 1879 who drew for Punch and illustrated classic children’s books. His best-known work includes illustrations for The Wind in the Willows and Winnie-the-Pooh.

• Howard Pyle — Howard Pyle was a Delaware illustrator and teacher who helped found the Brandywine School of illustration. His works include The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, Otto of the Silver Hand, Men of Iron, and The Book of Pirates.

• illustration
  • illustrator — An illustrator creates visual art for books and other texts, especially in children’s publishing. In My Name Is Red, the central artisans are book painters and miniaturists working in a tradition tied to colors and manuscript art.

• Randolph Caldecott — Randolph Caldecott was a 19th-century English illustrator whose work appeared in Punch and in books such as The Diverting History of John Gilpin. He is the namesake of the Caldecott Medal, awarded for distinguished American picture-book illustration.

• Sir John Tenniel — Sir John Tenniel was the English illustrator best known for his drawings for Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. His work is especially associated with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.

• Print media

  • magazine cover — A magazine cover is the printed front image used to promote a publication, often featuring photographs, illustrations, or other artworks. It can be repurposed for iconic images and portraits, including Steve McCurry’s Afghan Girl on National Geographic, Annie Leibovitz’s portrait of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and Hassan Hajjaj’s stylized photo-collages. Examples include covers from publications such as National Geographic and Rolling Stone.

  • posters — Posters are a common print medium for advertising and political art, especially in the work of Toulouse-Lautrec and Alphonse Mucha. Quizbowl clues often point to Moulin Rouge, Le Chat Noir, and Sarah Bernhardt imagery. They also appear in modern political and propaganda art, including Shepard Fairey’s Obama image and Barbara Kruger’s “your body is a battleground.” These are usually identified as poster art rather than paintings.

• Printmaking techniques
  • woodblock printing — Woodblock printing is the technique behind ukiyo-e prints such as Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji and The Great Wave off Kanagawa. It uses carved blocks, ink, and a baren to transfer images onto paper, and mokuhanga is the Japanese form of the process.
    • Woodblocks — Woodblocks, or woodcuts, are the carved printing blocks used in East Asian printmaking traditions such as ukiyo-e. Artists ink the block and press it to produce the image, with techniques like bokashi used for shading.
  • woodcuts — Woodcuts are prints made from carved blocks of wood, a medium used by artists from Durer and Hokusai to German Expressionists like Kollwitz and Nolde. The form also includes woodblock printing and wood engraving, and it was important for works such as wordless novels and Japanese ukiyo-e.
• printmaking
  • engraving — Engraving is an intaglio printmaking technique in which artists cut lines into a metal plate with burins and fill the grooves with ink. It was used by Albrecht Dürer for master prints such as Melencolia I and Knight, Death, and the Devil.
    • engravings — Engravings are print artworks made by incising a design, often on a metal plate such as copper. Dürer and other Renaissance artists used the medium for works such as St. Jerome in His Study and Knight, Death, and the Devil.

  • lithography — Lithography is a printmaking and printing process invented by Alois Senefelder in which an image is drawn with grease or oil on a flat surface, usually a flat stone or plate. It relies on the repulsion of oil and water, and it became important in art through chalk and later stone-based methods; artists such as Goya and Ingres used it in the early nineteenth century.

  • Little Masters — The Little Masters, or Kleinmeisters, were German printmakers associated with small-format engravings and woodcuts in the early sixteenth century. Artists such as Barthel Beham, Sebald Beham, and Hans Brosamer belonged to the group and drew on the example of Albrecht Durer.

  • Mezzotint — Mezzotint is an engraving method that uses a copper plate roughened with tiny pits so it can hold ink and produce rich tonal images. It is especially associated with reproducing paintings and is sometimes described as being made with a rocker.

  • prints — Prints are artworks made by transferring an image from a carved block or incised plate onto paper. They include woodcuts, etchings, and engravings; notable examples are Dürer’s Saint Jerome in His Study, Melencolia I, and Knight, Death, and the Devil, as well as Holbein’s Dance of Death and related series.

  • silk screening — Silk screening is the printmaking technique Andy Warhol used to produce repeated images such as soup cans, Marilyn Monroe portraits, and the Death and Disaster series. The method forces ink through a mesh stencil to make near-identical copies.
    • silk-screen printing — Silk-screen printing forces ink through a stencil on a mesh screen, producing a thick layer on materials like fabric, wood, paper, and circuit boards. In fine arts, this process is also called serigraphy.
  • woodcut — A woodcut is a printmaking medium created by carving an image into a block and printing from the raised surfaces. Artists such as Käthe Kollwitz, Emile Nolde, and Hokusai used woodcuts or related woodblock prints.
• serigraph
  • a serigraph — A serigraph is a color print made by forcing pigment through a stenciled silk screen. The term literally means “to write with silk.”
• José Guadalupe Posada — José Guadalupe Posada was the Mexican printmaker and lithographer who created La Calavera Catrina. He is often identified from Diego Rivera’s Dream of a Sunday Afternoon at Alameda Central Park, where he appears near Frida Kahlo.
  • La Calavera Catrina — La Calavera Catrina is the elegant skeleton woman associated with Mexico’s Day of the Dead. The figure was popularized from José Guadalupe Posada’s satirical art and later appeared in Diego Rivera’s mural Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park.

• Arthur Rackham — Arthur Rackham was an English illustrator known for fairy-tale and fantasy imagery, especially gnomes, fairies, and delicate pen-and-ink work. He illustrated editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Peter Pan, A Christmas Carol, Rip Van Winkle, and Aesop’s Fables.

• Edward Gorey — American illustrator and writer known for macabre, mock-Victorian imagery, ornate eerie pen-and-ink drawings, and darkly comic books. His works include The Gashlycrumb Tinies, The Curious Sofa, The Inanimate Tragedy, The Doubtful Guest, and The Object-Lesson. He also illustrated children’s books by John Bellairs, did the PBS Mystery! title sequence, and won a Tony Award for his Dracula costumes.
  • The Gashlycrumb Tinies — The Gashlycrumb Tinies is Edward Gorey’s illustrated alphabet book of macabre children’s deaths. Each letter pairs a child’s name with a gruesome fate, from bears to awls to ennui.

• William Steig — This New Yorker cartoonist and children’s author won the Caldecott Medal and was later known as the creator of Shrek through his book work. His titles include Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, Abel’s Island, and Dr. DeSoto.

• Currier and Ives — Currier and Ives was a nineteenth-century American lithography firm founded by Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives. The company became famous for popular prints of winter scenes, skating in Central Park, and other mass-produced images of American life.

• Book illustration
  • illustrations — Illustrations are images made to accompany texts, especially books, title pages, frontispieces, and cover art. The clues point to illustrated works by artists such as Aubrey Beardsley, N. C. Wyeth, and William Blake.

• David Macaulay — David Macaulay is an author and illustrator known for richly detailed nonfiction books about architecture, engineering, and technology. His titles include Cathedral, City, Pyramid, Castle, Mill, Underground, and The Way Things Work.

• George Cruikshank — George Cruikshank was a major British caricaturist and illustrator associated with Dickens and other popular nineteenth-century works. His satirical prints and novel illustrations helped shape the visual tradition for works such as Oliver Twist, Robinson Crusoe, and Don Quixote.

• Lithographers
  • Nathaniel Currier and James Ives — Nathaniel Currier and James Ives were the famous New York lithographers behind highly popular hand-colored prints of nineteenth-century American scenes and events. Their partnership began in 1857 and lasted for decades.
• Nicholas Hilliard — Nicholas Hilliard was the English Tudor court miniaturist best known for intimate portraits of Elizabeth I such as the Pelican and Phoenix portraits. He wrote The Art of Limning and often painted on vellum with watercolor. His portraits are often identified by jewelry, pearl dress, and elaborate symbolic details, including emblems like a pelican feeding its young.

Cartooning and Comics

• Belgian cartoonists
  • Peyo — Peyo was the Belgian cartoonist Pierre Culliford, the creator of the Smurfs. His one-word pen name is the answer expected when those blue characters are asked after their creator.

• Carl Barks — Carl Barks was the classic Disney comics artist who created Scrooge McDuck and much of Duckburg. He worked anonymously for years and is closely associated with the Donald Duck comic tradition.

• Cartoonists

  • Daniel Clowes — Daniel Clowes is the American cartoonist and writer behind Eightball and the graphic novel Ghost World. His work also includes David Boring, Art School Confidential, Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, and Ice Haven. He also drew album covers and illustrations, including work for Urge Overkill, Sub Pop, and the failed Coca-Cola product OK Soda.

  • Lynn Johnston — Lynn Johnston is the Canadian cartoonist behind For Better or For Worse. Her comic follows the Patterson family, and it has run since 1979.

  • Political cartoonists — Dennis Renault, Herbert L. Block, Paul Conrad, and Pat Oliphant were all political cartoonists. Their work is often identified by satirical commentary on public affairs.

  • Rube Goldberg — Reuben Lucius “Rube” Goldberg was an American cartoonist known for satirical invention drawings and absurdly elaborate machines that perform simple tasks, giving rise to the phrase “Rube Goldberg machine.” He also created the comic strips Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts, Boob McNutt, and Foolish Questions, and won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning.

• Cathy Guisewite — Cathy Guisewite is the cartoonist who created the comic strip Cathy, centered on a recurring female title character. The strip featured characters such as Andrea, Electra, and Irving.

• Charles Addams — Charles Addams was the New Jersey-born cartoonist famous for his macabre New Yorker cartoons and the Addams Family characters they inspired. His work is marked by gothic humor, oddball households, and comic images of menace rendered as elegant suburban satire.

• Charles Monroe Schulz — Charles Monroe Schulz was the cartoonist who created Peanuts and drew it entirely on his own for decades. He was nicknamed Sparky and died in 2000.

• Chester Gould — Chester Gould was the cartoonist who created Dick Tracy. He also worked on earlier comic strips such as Fillum Fables and The Radio Lanes.

• Comic book creators
  • John Byrne — John Byrne is a comic book writer and artist known for his influential run on X-Men and The Fantastic Four. He is especially associated with the Man of Steel reboot, which made Superman less invulnerable and recast Lex Luthor as a businessman.

• Evan Dorkin — Evan Dorkin is a comics writer and artist known for works such as Dork! and Milk and Cheese. His comics mix humor, surreal violence, and underground sensibility.

• Fritz Freleng — Fritz Freleng was an American animator and cartoon director who worked for Warner Bros. and later created the Pink Panther. He helped define characters such as Sylvester, Tweety Bird, Speedy Gonzales, and Yosemite Sam.

• Garretson Beekman Trudeau — American cartoonist and writer best known as the creator of Doonesbury, the long-running political comic strip featuring characters such as Mark Slackmeyer and Zonker Harris. He was the first person to win the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. He also wrote the HBO political satire Tanner ‘88 and has satirized figures such as George W. Bush through his art.

• George Herriman — George Herriman was the cartoonist behind Krazy Kat, the strip famous for Ignatz Mouse’s brick-throwing obsession. He also illustrated Don Marquis’s Archy and Mehitabel and was a pioneering biracial cartoonist.

• Jeff MacNelly — Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist best known as the creator of the comic strip Shoe. He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1972, 1978, and 1985 while working for the Richmond News-Leader, later drew political cartoons for major newspapers, and illustrated Dave Barry’s columns before his death.

• John Tennell
  • Dropping the Pilot — “Dropping the Pilot” is John Tenniel’s Punch cartoon showing Bismarck leaving the German imperial ship of state as Wilhelm II looks on. It is commonly used as a clue for Bismarck’s forced resignation under Wilhelm II.

• Rob Liefeld — Rob Liefeld is the comic artist associated with New Mutants, X-Force, and the Image Comics era of exaggerated musculature and heavy weaponry. He was one of the founders of Image Comics and is especially linked to Youngblood and Cable.

• Roz Chast — Roz Chast is a cartoonist long associated with The New Yorker, where she has published since the late 1970s. Her memoir Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? recounts the decline of her elderly parents.

• Sergio Aragonés — Sergio Aragonés is the Spanish cartoonist famous for his marginalia drawings in Mad magazine. He also created Groo the Wanderer and built a long career on rapid-fire visual gags.

• Steve Ditko — Steve Ditko was the reclusive comic artist who helped create Spider-Man with Stan Lee. He also created Doctor Strange, Mr. A, and The Question, and his style is often linked to odd, surreal, anxiety-filled imagery.

• Bil Keane — Bil Keane was the cartoonist who created The Family Circus, the long-running single-panel comic strip about the Keane family. King Features distributed the strip, and it was one of Keane’s most recognizable works.

• Bob Kane — Bob Kane was the comic artist credited with creating Batman, first appearing in “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate” in 1939. He also worked on early strips such as Peter Pupp, Clip Carson, and later cartoon projects like Courageous Cat and Cool McCool.

• Todd McFarlane — Comic artist and entrepreneur best known for creating Spawn and co-founding Image Comics. He became famous as a comic artist before expanding into toys, publishing, and other entertainment ventures, made money from baseball memorabilia, and had a long run on Spider-Man that helped introduce Venom. He was also central to legal disputes over Miracleman and co-authorship claims with Neil Gaiman.

• Larry Gonick — Larry Gonick is a cartoonist known for explanatory works such as The Cartoon History of the Universe. His books have covered subjects from tax reform and statistics to genetics, physics, computers, and American history.

• Darby Conley — Darby Conley is the cartoonist who created the comic strip Get Fuzzy, about a bachelor and his two pets, Rob Wilco, Bucky Katt, and Satchel Pooch. He is a Concord, Massachusetts native who studied at Amherst and has been described as drawing inspiration from classic newspaper cartoonists.

• Don Martin — Don Martin was MAD magazine’s ‘Maddest Artist,’ famous for elaborate cartoon sound effects such as ‘PLORTCH’ and ‘GLORK!’. He later worked for Cracked and became known for grotesque characters and exaggerated noises.

• Doug Marlette — Doug Marlette was a Pulitzer-winning cartoonist best known for creating the comic strip Kudzu. He also created Reverend Will B. Dunn, a recurring character from his political satire.

• Hank Ketcham — American cartoonist best known for creating the comic strip Dennis the Menace. He also produced the strip Half Hitch and later painted alongside his comic work. He died in 2001 at age 81.

• Hergé — Hergé was the Belgian cartoonist who created Tintin and pioneered the clear-line style. His works include The Blue Lotus, The Secret of the Unicorn, and Red Rackham’s Treasure.

• Herblock — Herblock was the pen name of Herbert Block, the long-serving chief editorial cartoonist for The Washington Post. He won multiple Pulitzer Prizes and became famous for cartoons attacking McCarthyism, the arms race, the Vietnam War, and Nixon; he also coined the term “McCarthyism.” Notable cartoons include Here He Comes Now and Strange—They All Seem to Have Some Connection with This Place. His work often targeted secrecy and used sewer imagery.

• Ted Rall — Ted Rall is a cartoonist known for editorial work and for contributing to mainstream publications. He drew attention for the cartoon “Terror Widows.”

• Al Hirschfeld — American caricaturist and illustrator best known for fluid line drawings, especially of Broadway and theater performers. He drew for The New Yorker and The New York Times, often hid his daughter Nina’s name in his line work, was the subject of the documentary The Line King, and was later honored as a living landmark in New York City.

• Will Eisner — Will Eisner was a pioneering American cartoonist, comics artist, and writer often called the father of the graphic novel. He created The Spirit, wrote A Contract with God, helped popularize the term “graphic novel,” and later became a major figure in comics criticism and education. The Eisner Awards were named after him.

• Mike Luckovich — Mike Luckovich is a political cartoonist born in Seattle who has drawn for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution since 1989. He became known nationally through widely syndicated editorial cartoons and later the strip Super Zeros.

Design and Typography

• Charles Eames — Charles Eames was an American designer and filmmaker best known for his work with Ray Eames on molded plywood furniture. He also made the IBM film Powers of Ten and is associated with the Eames House in Pacific Palisades.

• fonts — Fonts, or typefaces, are designed systems of letterforms used in printing and digital display. Examples include Helvetica, Times New Roman, Futura, Garamond, and Didot. They may be classified by features such as serifs, x-height, kerning, and hinting in digital rendering, and discussion may also mention font foundries or styles such as Fraktur and Antiqua.

• Raymond Loewy — Raymond Loewy was a Franco-American industrial designer often called the “father of industrial design.” His designs and logos are associated with the Coca-Cola bottle, the GG1 locomotive, Skylab, and corporate identities such as Hoover, Exxon, Shell, and Nabisco.

• Saul Bass — Saul Bass was a graphic designer known for iconic film title sequences, posters, and corporate logos. His work is associated with films such as Vertigo, The Shining, and The Man With the Golden Arm, as well as brands like AT&T and Kleenex.

• Alexander McQueen
  • (Lee) Alexander McQueen — Alexander McQueen was a British fashion designer known for his provocative runway shows, low-rise bumsters, and armadillo shoes. He worked briefly at Givenchy and later became the subject of the Met exhibition Savage Beauty after his death in 2010.

• Virgil Abloh — Virgil Abloh was a Chicago-based fashion designer who founded Off-White and later became Louis Vuitton’s first Black artistic director. He was known for quotation-mark-heavy streetwear, high-profile collaborations with Nike and Serena Williams, and the album art for Watch the Throne.

• Advertising
  • billboards — Billboards are large outdoor roadside advertising structures. They are central to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and have strong associations with Pop Art and commercial imagery, including James Rosenquist’s painted advertisements and the roadside billboards seen in Depression-era photography.

• Giambattista Bodoni — Giambattista Bodoni was an Italian printer and type designer associated with the modern Roman-style Bodoni typeface. He worked for the duke of Parma and became famous for elegant printing editions and sharply contrasted letterforms.

• Graphic design
  • poster — A poster is a printed publicity image, used both for advertisements and for political or recruitment imagery. Famous examples include Uncle Sam’s “I Want You” image and Art Nouveau designs by Alphonse Mucha.

• Milton Glaser — Milton Glaser was an American graphic designer best known for the I Love New York logo and the psychedelic Bob Dylan poster. He also helped found New York magazine and had a long career in magazine design, branding, and illustration.

• Furniture
  • tables — Tables appear as a sculptural and decorative motif in modern art, from Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party to Brâncuși’s Table of Silence and related design works. They also show up in photography and collage as everyday domestic objects, especially in works by Carrie Mae Weems, Mary Beth Edelson, and other twentieth-century artists.

Decorative and Applied Arts

• Bernard Leach — Bernard Leach was a major English studio potter often called the father of British studio pottery. His work reflects years spent in Japan and frequently shows the influence of East Asian ceramic traditions.

• Carl Fabergé — Carl Fabergé was a Russian jeweler famous for the jeweled Easter eggs made for the Romanov dynasty. His Imperial eggs for Alexander III and Nicholas II are among the best-known examples, and dozens of his eggs survive.

• della Robbia — The della Robbia were a Florentine family famous for glazed terracotta sculpture, especially the work of Luca, Andrea, and Giovanni. Their pieces include the cantoria for Florence Cathedral and roundels for the Ospedale degli Innocenti.

• Earrings
  • pearl earring — A pearl earring is the jewel identified with Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, whose central figure wears a blue-and-yellow headscarf and looks directly at the viewer. The accessory is rendered with only a few highlights and also appears on a woman in yellow and blue in another Vermeer portrait. It is the title accessory of the Mauritshuis tronie often called the “Mona Lisa of the North,” and it is also associated with Tracy Chevalier’s novel imagining the maid Griet.
• engraved gems
  • cameos — Cameos are engraved gems with a raised relief image cut from layered stone such as sardonyx or agate. Roman examples include the Great Cameo of France and the Portland Vase, and the format contrasts with intaglio carving.
• Lanterns
  • Chinese lanterns — Chinese lanterns are paper lanterns with a light source inside, often released into the sky during festivals. They are associated with Chinese decorative art and appear in paintings such as Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.

• Maria Martinez — Maria Martinez was a Tewa potter famous for black-on-black ceramics from San Ildefonso Pueblo. Working with her husband Julian and later with her son Popovi Da, she helped popularize burnished Pueblo pottery with matte-and-gloss designs.

• Paint
  • acrylic — Acrylic paint is a fast-drying synthetic medium whose pigments are suspended in a polymer-based vehicle. It is valued for versatility, water resistance when dry, and use in everything from crafts to Color Field and pop art.
• Painting and drawing media
  • Pastel — Pastel is a drawing and painting medium made from powdered pigments compressed into sticks. It produces soft, luminous colors and was especially popular in eighteenth-century portraiture and Rococo portraiture; artists such as Rosalba Carriera, Maurice-Quentin de la Tour, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, and Edgar Degas used it for quick, subtle works and layered effects.

• Peter Carl Fabergé — Peter Carl Fabergé was the Russian goldsmith and jeweler famous for the Imperial Easter eggs made for the Romanov court and czars. His workshop also produced ornate luxury objects such as the Cockerel automaton and other imperial commissions. He died in exile after the Russian Revolution destroyed his workshops and business.

• Decorative arts
  • decoupage — Decoupage is the craft of applying paper cutouts to a surface and sealing them with varnish or lacquer. The finished object is often sanded to a smooth, glossy surface.

• Louis Comfort Tiffany — Louis Comfort Tiffany was an American designer and artist associated with Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts movement. He was famous for stained glass, especially decorative lamps and windows, and pioneered Favrile glass, prized for its iridescent surface and naturalistic designs. His workshop and store in New York produced opalescent glass and other decorative works.

• Metalwork
  • salt cellars — Salt cellars are ornate containers for salt that appear in both luxury metalwork and carved ivory export art. Famous examples include Benvenuto Cellini’s gold salt cellar for Francis I and Sapi-Portuguese pieces made for export to Portugal.
• Medallic art
  • medals — Medals are commemorative metal artworks, often round, that honor notable people or events. In art history, they are associated with Renaissance portrait medals by Pisanello and later with decorative relief work and military decorations.

Folk and Outsider Art

• Grandma Moses (Anna Mary Robertson Moses) — American; Folk/Naïve; Sugaring Off (1943); farm landscapes of upstate New York; began painting at 78 and became one of the most reproduced American artists of the 20th century. Arthritis helped prompt his turn from embroidery to painting; Louis Caldor promoted her work. Other paintings include Battle of Bennington and Out for the Christmas Trees.

• Folk art installations
  • Salvation Mountain — Salvation Mountain is Leonard Knight’s colorful desert folk-art installation near Slab City and the Salton Sea in California. Quizbowl clues emphasize its painted Bible verses, plaster walls, cross-topped main structure, and maintenance by nearby squatters after Knight’s death.
• Henry Darger — Henry Darger was a reclusive Chicago janitor who became famous only after his death for the massive illustrated fantasy manuscript The Story of the Vivian Girls. His watercolors and collage work helped make him a classic figure of outsider art.

Techniques, Media, and Making

• anamorphosis — Anamorphosis is a distorted image technique that becomes legible only from a special viewpoint or with a mirror. It appears in Renaissance and early modern art, most famously in Holbein’s The Ambassadors and in other perspectival tricks.

• Artistic techniques
  • Drapery — Drapery is the artistic term for the depiction of folds in clothing in drawing, painting, and sculpture.
• art materials
  • elephant dung — Elephant dung is the unconventional material associated with Chris Ofili’s controversial paintings, especially The Holy Virgin Mary. It also appears in works from the Sensation exhibition and in the installation The Upper Room.
• bronze casting
  • Lost Wax Method — The lost wax method is a bronze-casting technique in which a wax model is surrounded by a mold, the wax is melted out, and molten metal is poured into the cavity. It is widely used for making repeated casts of sculpture.
• drawing and painting techniques
  • stippling — Stippling is a drawing or painting technique that builds tone or texture using many small dots or dabs. It can create a dappled effect without relying on overlapping lines.
• Drawing media
  • pastels — Pastels are a drawing medium made from pigment sticks, historically held together with binders such as gum arabic. They were favored in eighteenth-century portraiture by artists like Rosalba Carriera and later revived by the Impressionists.
• Foreshortening
  • Sotto in su — Sotto in su is a ceiling-painting technique that uses extreme foreshortening to make figures appear to float overhead. The phrase literally means ‘under on up’ and is associated with painters such as Correggio.
• fresco
  • fresco secco — Fresco secco is a wall-painting technique in which pigments are applied to dried, lime-soaked plaster rather than to wet plaster. It is also called fresco finito.
• Glassworking
  • glassblowing — Glassblowing is the process of shaping molten glass with air, tools like punty rods and marvers, and careful annealing. It is strongly associated with Murano, with Harvey Littleton’s studio-glass revival, and with artists such as Dale Chihuly.
• Hatching
  • cross-hatching — Cross-hatching is a drawing technique that uses intersecting lines to create shading and the illusion of depth. Tighter spacing produces darker values, while wider spacing makes the area lighter.
• Materials in art
  • Wood
    • Wood in art — Wood serves both as a carving material and as the block used in relief printing. Donatello carved his Penitent Magdalene in it, and Tilman Riemenschneider used it for the Altar of the Holy Blood. Dürer’s Apocalypse series and Rhinoceros are major woodcut clues.
• metal casting
  • lost-wax casting — Lost-wax casting is a metalworking method in which a wax model is covered with mold material, then melted out to leave a cavity for molten metal. It is used for objects such as bronzes, bells, ritual staffs, and other cast artworks, including versions developed independently in the Americas and Africa.
• Monochrome art
  • monochrome — Monochrome art is painting or design done in a single color or a very limited range of closely related tones. The clue set points to artists such as Malevich, Rodchenko, and Yves Klein, who made works built around one color field.
    • black and white — Black and white refers to monochrome art and photography using only those two tones. The color scheme appears in works by artists such as Robert Motherwell, Bridget Riley, and Man Ray, and it is also characteristic of Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills.

• mosaic — A mosaic is an artwork made from small pieces such as tesserae, arranged to form images or patterns. Notable examples include Roman and Byzantine works at Ravenna, San Vitale, and the House of the Faun.

• mosaics — Mosaics are artworks or images assembled from small pieces called tesserae, usually of stone, glass, ceramic, or pottery. They are common in Roman floor decoration, Byzantine church interiors such as Hagia Sophia and San Vitale, and the Alexander Mosaic from Pompeii depicting the Battle of Issus. The medium is defined by its piecework construction rather than painting or sculpture, and later examples include decorative work by Gaudí, modern artists, and street art; gold-background mosaics are especially associated with churches.

• Mural painting

  • ceiling paintings — Ceiling paintings, often frescoes, are interior works painted on vaults or ceilings, from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel to Tiepolo’s Würzburg Residence. Baroque examples by Correggio, Rubens, Cortona, and Andrea Pozzo are common clues for this decorative format.

  • fresco — A fresco is a wall painting made by applying pigment to wet plaster so the color bonds as the wall dries. The true method is buon fresco; a related technique is fresco secco. In buon fresco, artists work in daily sections called giornate after preparatory sinopia cartoons. The medium was used for major works such as Giotto’s Arena Chapel cycle, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Raphael’s Vatican rooms including the Stanza della Segnatura and works like The School of Athens and The Disputation of the Holy Sacrament, the Ajanta caves, the Tomb of Nebamun, and Minoan scenes such as bull-leaping.

  • fresco — A wall painting technique in which pigments are applied to freshly laid wet plaster so the color becomes part of the surface as it dries. Its durability made it a major Renaissance medium, with commonly cited examples including Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling and works such as The School of Athens and Leonardo’s The Last Supper.
    • lime plaster — Lime plaster is the wet lime-based surface used in fresco painting, especially the intonaco layer. Its related techniques include secco painting, which is less durable because pigments flake off a dry plaster surface.
  • mural — A mural is a painting made directly on a wall or other architectural surface. Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco are strongly associated with the form, as are large works by Thomas Hart Benton. The term can also be used loosely for a wall-sized painting not necessarily painted in fresco, such as Jackson Pollock’s Mural.

• tapestry — A tapestry is a woven textile art form, often produced as a wall hanging and prepared from a cartoon before weaving. Famous examples include the Bayeux Tapestry, the Unicorn tapestries, and the Angers Apocalypse series.

• Textile arts
  • quilts — Quilts are layered textile works made by stitching fabric pieces together, often as patchwork bedcovers or commemorative art. In art, they are associated with Faith Ringgold’s story quilts, Harriet Powers’s biblical quilts, the Gee’s Bend quilts, and the AIDS Memorial Quilt made by the NAMES Project; some historical treatments also connect quilts to coded messages about the Underground Railroad. Named varieties include crazy quilts and album quilts.
    • story quilts — Story quilts are textile artworks that tell narratives through quilting, and Faith Ringgold is especially known for using them. Earlier examples of the form also appear in the work of Harriet Powers.
• Textiles in art
  • Oriental rugs — Oriental rugs are a decorative subject in Venetian and Northern Renaissance painting, often shown as rich imported textiles. Artists such as Lorenzo Lotto and Hans Holbein the Younger used them prominently in portraits.

• Vermilion — Vermilion is a vivid bright red pigment made from mercury sulfide. Historically expensive, it was sometimes mixed with cheaper materials or otherwise tempered to prevent darkening; in this sense it was historically called cinnabar when used as a pigment source. It was favored by artists such as Titian and is also the bright red-orange color commonly used for Shinto torii gates.

• wax
  • Beeswax — A wax produced by bees and used historically for writing tablets, sculpture, and encaustic painting. It is a traditional artistic medium in encaustic work and in cast sculpture techniques such as lost-wax casting, and it appears in works ranging from Fayum mummy portraits to modern installations and museum wax figures. Because it can hold pigment and form precise molds, it has long been important in both ancient and contemporary art; mythic and artistic references also connect it to the story of Daedalus and Icarus and to the casting of the Benin bronzes.
• Sculpture materials

  • Bronze — Bronze is the copper-tin alloy used in famous sculptures, including Donatello’s David, Rodin’s Thinker, the Charging Bull, and the Fearless Girl. Art-history clues also invoke bronze bells, ancient Chinese ritual vessels, Benin heads, and the Bronze Age as a broader cultural marker.

  • gold and ivory — Chryselephantine sculpture is made from gold and ivory, often with a wooden core. Phidias’s Athena Parthenos and Zeus at Olympia were famous chryselephantine statues.

  • terracotta — Terracotta is fired clay or earthenware used for sculpture, roofing tiles, figurines, and pottery. It is associated with the Terracotta Army of Qin Shi Huangdi, Tanagra figurines, the Burney Relief, haniwa, Nok sculpture, and bozzetti and other modeled works in European art.
    • Vases — Vases are decorative or utilitarian vessels, often made of pottery or ceramics and shaped for display or storage. Ancient Greek painters decorated them in black-figure and red-figure styles. Common ancient examples include amphorae, kraters, hydriae, and other storage or display vessels; Chinese traditions also produced famous varieties such as meiping.
  • wire — Wire is a versatile material used in sculpture, especially in the work of Ruth Asawa and Gego. Alexander Calder also used it for his Circus and related wire figures and acrobats.
• Sculpture techniques
  • modeling — Modeling is the sculpture technique of building forms by adding pliable material such as clay. The word also refers to the profession of posing for fashion photography and runway work.
• sculptural techniques
  • Non finito — Non finito is a sculptural technique in which parts of the figure are deliberately left unfinished in the stone. It creates the effect of a form struggling to emerge and is closely associated with Donatello and Michelangelo.

Subjects, Patrons, and Interpretation

Connect subjects, patrons, and interpretation to specific objects and artists.

Subjects, Motifs, and Genres in Art

• Christian art
  • Altarpieces — Altarpieces are religious works of art designed for placement behind or near the altar of a church. They are often paneled and may take the form of diptychs, triptychs, or polyptychs; famous examples include the Ghent Altarpiece, the Isenheim Altarpiece, and the Merode Altarpiece.

    • Maestà — A maestà is an Italian depiction of the Virgin enthroned with the Child, often surrounded by saints and angels. Famous examples include works by Cimabue, Duccio, and Simone Martini, especially in Tuscan panel painting.

    • triptych — A triptych is a three-paneled work of art, often used as an altarpiece with a central panel flanked by hinged wings. Famous examples include The Garden of Earthly Delights and several works by Max Beckmann.

      • triptychs — A triptych is a three-panel work of art, often used as an altarpiece. Clues may reference works by Otto Dix, Francis Bacon, Hugo van der Goes, or Bosch that are arranged in three parts.
  • Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin Mary
    • the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin Mary — The Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin Mary is the scene in which Gabriel announces Jesus’s birth to Mary. Fra Angelico versions and altarpieces such as the Portinari and Ghent often feature this scene with lilies and a hortus conclusus setting.
  • Crucifixion
    • the crucifixion — The crucifixion is the scene of Jesus dying on the cross, a favorite subject in Christian art. Quizbowl clues often invoke INRI, the Isenheim Altarpiece, Masaccio’s Holy Trinity, and paintings by Gauguin, Chagall, and Bacon.

  • Lamentation of Christ — The Lamentation of Christ is the Christian art scene showing Mary and other mourners grieving over Jesus’ dead body. Famous examples include Giotto’s Arena Chapel fresco, with the body of Christ laid out amid distressed figures and angels, and Mantegna’s foreshortened painting.

  • Madonna and Child — Madonnas are paintings depicting the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus, a major subject in Christian and Renaissance art. Notable examples include works by Jan van Eyck, Raphael, Botticelli, Parmigianino, and Salvador Dalí, as well as variants such as the Madonna of the Goldfinch and the Sistine Madonna.

    • Madonnas by Jan van Eyck — Jan van Eyck’s Madonnas are a group of paintings of the Virgin Mary that includes the celebrated Madonna with Chancellor Rolin. These works often feature richly detailed interiors or landscapes and demonstrate his skill at rendering devotional scenes with startling realism.

    • Madonnas by Raphael — Raphael’s Madonnas are Renaissance paintings of the Virgin and Child, often identified by details such as flowers, saints, or a striking arrangement of angels. Examples include the Sistine Madonna, the Aldobrandini Madonna, and the Madonna of the Pinks.

  • The Flight Into Egypt — The Flight into Egypt shows Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus fleeing Herod to safety, a scene often associated with a donkey, landscape painting, and the miracle of the corn. Artists such as Caravaggio, Annibale Carracci, and Adam Elsheimer painted famous versions of this New Testament journey.

• ecstasy — Ecstasy is a major artistic and religious subject, appearing in sculptures and paintings such as Bernini’s Saint Teresa and Scriabin’s The Poem of Ecstasy. The clues point to moments of rapture, mystical transport, and ecstatic transcendence in art and music.

• facial expressions
  • smiles — Smiles are the facial expressions highlighted by the Mona Lisa’s enigmatic look and by the archaic smile of Greek sculpture. Art-history clues about this feature often contrast ancient examples with later portraits that deliberately include it.
• history painting
  • history paintings — History painting, or historical painting, was the highest genre in the French Academy’s hierarchy of genres. It depicts major historical, biblical, or legendary events, as in works like Entry of Alexander Into Babylon and The Death of General Wolfe.
• landscape painting — Landscape painting depicts natural scenery rather than figures, buildings, or narrative action. It is associated with artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, Camille Corot, Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, and Joachim Patinir.

  • Capriccio — Capriccio is an Italian term for a fanciful landscape or townscape that mixes real architecture with imagined elements. The word also titles Strauss’s last opera, and it names instrumental works by Ravel and Tchaikovsky.

  • landscape paintings — Landscape paintings depict natural scenery as their main subject, from rivers and valleys to mountains and forests. Altdorfer, John Constable, and the Hudson River School all made major contributions to the genre.

  • Landscapes — In art history, landscapes are paintings centered on natural scenery such as forests, rivers, hills, rocks, trees, or bodies of water. Dutch and Netherlandish examples are associated with artists such as Patinir, Ruisdael, Altdorfer, and Brueghel, and notable scenes include Pieter Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Joachim Patinir’s world landscapes are an important development in the genre.

  • The Harvesters — The Harvesters is a landscape by Pieter Bruegel the Elder showing peasants at work and rest in a late-summer wheat field. Its scene includes men cutting grain with scythes, figures eating under a tree, and a small background detail of people throwing sticks at a tied-up goose.

• Portrait — A portrait is an image or description of a person, especially a painting or photograph of a face or figure. Quizbowl clues often point to famous examples such as Gilbert Stuart’s portrait on the one-dollar bill and van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet.

  • presidential portraits — Presidential portraits are official paintings of United States presidents, from Gilbert Stuart’s Lansdowne Portrait to Kehinde Wiley’s Barack Obama portrait. The genre’s clues often include artists such as Elaine de Kooning, Nelson Shanks, and Simmie Knox.

  • Sanders portrait — The Sanders portrait is a disputed painting claimed by some to depict Shakespeare. Its attribution has been questioned because of later labeling, though tests on the panel suggested the wood itself is old.

• Portraits — Portraits are paintings or other images depicting people, especially identifiable individuals, often commissioned to capture a likeness in a formal or miniature format. The genre includes self-portraits and literary examples such as the image in The Picture of Dorian Gray. It ranges from grand manner society pictures to three-quarter and profile views, and artists such as Velázquez, Copley, Modigliani, and Reynolds are strongly associated with it; Reynolds especially used the Grand Manner in portraits of actors and public figures.

  • self-portrait — A self-portrait is a work in which an artist depicts themself, often using mirrors or imaginative self-staging. Famous examples include Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits, Norman Rockwell’s Triple Self-Portrait, and the many versions by Cindy Sherman and Sofonisba Anguissola.

  • the artist’s mother — The artist’s mother is a frequent subject in portraiture, including Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1. Modernist painters also used that relation as a subject, as in Futurist and expressionist portraits of the artist’s mother.

• self-portraits — A self-portrait is an artwork in which an artist depicts themself. The form ranges from straightforward likenesses to allegorical or psychologically charged works, including mirror-based, Christ-like, or overtly symbolic examples, and can present the artist as an allegory of painting. It is especially associated with artists such as Dürer, Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Frida Kahlo, Parmigianino, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Van Dyck.

  • Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits — Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits often present her own face and body in stylized, symbolic scenes, frequently with her distinctive unibrow, surreal symbols, animals such as monkeys or cats, thorns, and references to bodily pain, her accident, and medical treatment. Works such as The Broken Column, The Wounded Deer, and Time Flies are among the best-known examples.

  • self-portraits of Frida Kahlo — These are self-portraits by Frida Kahlo, often marked by her unibrow and surreal personal symbolism. Clues point to works like The Two Fridas, The Broken Column, and self-portraits with monkeys, thorns, and a dead hummingbird.

  • Self-portraits of Gustave Courbet — These are self-portraits by Gustave Courbet, including works such as The Wounded Man and The Desperate Man. They show Courbet using the self-portrait genre for psychological intensity rather than formal idealization.

  • Self-portraits of Rembrandt — These are self-portraits by Rembrandt, including images of him in fanciful costume, in old age, and in roles borrowed from classical and biblical subjects. The series is a major record of how Rembrandt repeatedly represented himself across his career.

  • Self-Portraits of Rembrandt Harmenszoon von Rijn — Rembrandt’s self-portraits are a large group of paintings in which he repeatedly depicted himself across his career. Several famous examples show him in costume, as a laughing figure, or holding painting tools.

  • the self-portraits of Vincent van Gogh — Vincent van Gogh’s self-portraits are a famous series of paintings that trace his changing appearance and style. They include works with the bandaged ear, the gray felt hat, and the fiery orange hair of his Saint-Rémy period.

• Smoking
  • smoking a cigarette — Smoking a cigarette is a frequent artistic motif in portraits and self-portraits, from Van Gogh’s skeleton to Dix’s and Beckmann’s modern sitters. The image also appears in photography and pop art, including works by Hans Namuth, Mary Ellen Mark, and others.

• smoking a pipe — The figure in Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte is smoking a pipe. The clue also matches a common motif in 19th-century portraiture, including Manet’s depictions of intellectuals and writers.

• Dead Christ — The Dead Christ is a title used for works depicting the body of Jesus after the crucifixion, including Andrea Mantegna’s famous foreshortened painting. Another version is Hans Baldung Grien’s woodcut, which shows the figure lying prone beside a tree.

• American West
  • the American West — The American West is the broad U.S. region central to manifest destiny imagery, frontier painting, and the mythology of settlement. Artists associated with it include Charles Marion Russell, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, Frederic Remington, and John Gast.

• black cats — Black cats are a common symbol of witchcraft, bad luck, and nocturnal menace in literature and art. They appear in Poe’s stories and in Steinlen’s famous cabaret poster Le Chat Noir.

• casta paintings — Casta paintings are colonial Latin American genre scenes that classify mixed-race families and social groups into a hierarchy of ancestry. They are especially associated with New Spain and with labels such as mestizo and Spaniard across successive generations.

• Cherubs and putti
  • putti — Putti are nude or chubby winged child figures used in Renaissance and later art, often as Cupid-like cherubs in sculpture and painting. They are common in Renaissance and Baroque works by artists such as Ghirlandaio, Raphael, Rubens, Watteau, and Fragonard, including The Swing and Embarkation for Cythera, and they also appear in Mughal paintings influenced by European iconography.
• Christian art subjects

  • Last Judgment — The Last Judgment is the Christian apocalyptic scene in which Christ returns to judge the living and the dead, separating the saved from the damned. In art it is often shown with angels, Hellmouth imagery, the weighing of souls, and references to Revelation and the Book of Life. Notable depictions include Michelangelo’s monumental fresco on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, Rogier van der Weyden’s Beaune Altarpiece, and works by Bosch, Memling, and Gislebertus.

  • Marriage of the Virgin

    • The Marriage of the Virgin — The Marriage of the Virgin, also called Lo sposalizio della Vergine, is a Renaissance painting of Mary and Joseph’s wedding. Versions by Perugino, Raphael, and Campin depict the priest, the broken rod, and the miraculous blooming that marks Joseph as chosen.
• Christian iconography

  • haloes — Haloes are the circular sacred marks used in Christian art to identify holy or divine figures. They often appear as gold circles or inscribed glories around Christ and the saints, including in Byzantine icons and early Italian painting.

  • Saint George and the Dragon — Saint George and the Dragon is the Christian legend and painting subject in which the armored saint rescues a princess by spearing a dragon. Quizbowl clues often point to Paolo Uccello, Raphael, or Tintoretto, especially versions where the princess holds a leash and the horse charges into the beast.

• Christian saints
  • Saint Sebastian — Saint Sebastian is the Christian martyr most often shown tied to a tree or column and pierced by arrows. Art historical clues frequently invoke Mantegna, El Greco, and depictions of him tended by Saint Irene.

    • St. Sebastian — Andrea Mantegna’s St. Sebastian depicts the martyr tied to a column and pierced with arrows against a classical ruin-filled landscape. The figure is a favorite subject for painters such as Botticelli, Guido Reni, and Pollaiuolo, whose versions emphasize the saint’s arrow-riddled body.

    • The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian — The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian shows the Roman soldier-saint tied up and pierced with arrows. Renaissance artists such as Andrea Mantegna, Antonello da Messina, and Piero del Pollaiolo painted versions of the scene, often adding figures like Irene or Castulus.

• Colors
  • pink — Pink is a non-primary color that appears in art titles, fashion, and pop culture, from Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of Sarah Moulton to works by Fragonard and Guston. It is also the color of cherry blossoms, Jaipur’s palace stone, and the “shocking” shade associated with Elsa Schiaparelli and the singer P!nk.
• Devotional paintings
  • retablos — Retablos are devotional or votive paintings, especially associated with Latin American religious art. In Peru they often appear as small painted wooden box scenes, and modern artists have used the form to depict contemporary subjects as well as traditional nativity imagery.

• Diptych — A diptych is an artwork made of two joined panels, usually hinged together, and is one panel short of a triptych. Quizbowl examples include Warhol’s Marilyn works and Renaissance devotional pairs such as Cranach’s paintings and Piero della Francesca’s portraits.

• Funerary art
  • death masks — Death masks are casts of a dead person’s face, often made in gold, wax, plaster, or similar materials, and are used as funerary face-covering burial artifacts placed on the dead. Examples include the Mycenaean mask of Agamemnon, the mask of Tutankhamun, and the supposed face of L’Inconnue de la Seine, which inspired the Resusci Anne mannequin. Similar traditions appear in Egyptian burial goods and in studies of social status in other cultures’ funerary art.

• goldfinch — The goldfinch appears in famous Renaissance and Dutch paintings, including Raphael’s Madonna of the Goldfinch and Carel Fabritius’s chained bird. It is especially associated with the Baby Jesus passing one to John the Baptist and with small, chained depictions in trompe-l’oeil still lifes.

• handprints — Handprints appear in cave art and also on the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre as celebrity imprints. Jackson Pollock also echoed prehistoric hand stencils when signing one of his paintings with handprints.

• Market scenes
  • butcher shops — Butcher shops are the market settings depicted in a number of Renaissance and modern paintings. Works by Pieter Aertsen, Annibale Carracci, and Francis Bacon all use these spaces to stage still-life abundance or unsettling social scenes.
• Mary Magdalene
  • Penitent Magdalene — The Penitent Magdalene is an artistic subject showing Mary Magdalene in repentance, often with a skull, candle, or devotional pose. Versions by Caravaggio, Titian, Murillo, de la Tour, and others explore her remorse after her conversion from a life associated with sin.
• Memento mori
  • skeletons — Skeletons are a common memento mori image and personification of death in art, literature, and games, especially in dance-of-death imagery and death scenes. They appear in works by Holbein, Bruegel/Brueghel, Masaccio, Munch, Ensor, and José Guadalupe Posada, and can also refer to characters like Sans and Papyrus or to the Day of the Dead’s death imagery.

• mother — A mother is the female parent of a person or animal, a common art-historical subject and literary motif. Famous depictions include Whistler’s portrait of his mother, as well as works by Dürer, Gorky, Hockney, and others.

• mustache — A mustache is the strip of facial hair below the nose that artists and photographers often use for parody or disguise. Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. famously adds one to the Mona Lisa, and Ana Mendieta also used the feature in a series of self-conscious prints.

• Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine of Alexandria — The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine of Alexandria is a devotional art theme in which the Christ Child mystically joins Saint Catherine in marriage. It appears in works by Memling, Cranach, Lotto, Parmigianino, Murillo, and others.

• Mythological scenes
  • The Rape of Europa — The Rape of Europa is Titian’s famous depiction of Zeus, in bull form, abducting Europa. Quizbowl clues often reference the white bull, the red cloth, cherubs, and other versions by artists such as Veronese, Guido Reni, Rubens, and Tiepolo.
• Nativity scenes
  • Adoration of the Shepherds — The Adoration of the Shepherds is a nativity scene showing shepherds visiting the infant Jesus instead of the Magi. It appears in major paintings by artists such as Hugo van der Goes, Giorgione, Mantegna, Domenichino, and the Le Nain brothers.
• nude — In art, nude figures are shown without clothing, from Greek kouroi to Michelangelo and Botticelli. The term also appears in discussions of the male gaze and in Guerrilla Girls posters about museum collections.

  • Odalisque — An odalisque is a reclining female nude associated with harem imagery in Western art. The subject appears in works by Ingres, Boucher, Bonington, and others, often emphasizing exoticism and eroticism. Ingres’s The Grand Odalisque is the best-known example.

  • Reclining nude — A reclining nude is an erotic artistic subject showing a woman lying down, often nude or nearly nude. Famous examples include Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque, Manet’s Olympia, and Modigliani’s use of the title nude for a painting that sold for $170 million.

• Poses
  • reclining — Reclining is the pose behind a wide range of nudes and religious images, from Manet’s Olympia to Canova’s Venus Victrix and many depictions of the Buddha at rest. The pose also appears in Henry Moore’s reclining figures and in related classical and modern sculpture and painting.
• Symbolism
  • Lilies — Lilies are often used in art and literature as symbols of purity, and they appear in titles such as Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose and Sesame and Lilies. They also recur in modernist and Rayonist painting, where floral imagery can be used as a bright decorative motif.
• Symbols

  • an hourglass — An hourglass is a common vanitas symbol for time and mortality in painting and printmaking. It appears in works such as Dürer’s Melencolia I and Knight, Death, and the Devil. Artists use the hourglass to personify Time or to reinforce the passing of earthly life. Its presence often signals a meditation on transience.

  • playing cards — Playing cards are the 52-card objects that appear in many paintings, especially scenes of cheating, gambling, and tavern quarrels. Quizbowl clues often point to Caravaggio’s Cardsharps, Cézanne’s card players, C.M. Coolidge’s Dogs Playing Poker, and historic card sets from the Mamluks or early German engravers. They are a standard artistic symbol of games, deception, and chance.

• Symbols of time
  • hourglasses — Hourglasses are symbolic objects of time used widely in art and allegory. They often appear with Death, Temperance, or Time itself in Renaissance and later paintings.
• Underwater art
  • underwater — Underwater settings are favored in photography, museum installation, and art associated with the sea. Clues include Jacques Cousteau’s The Silent World, David Doubilet’s split-field images, and museums or works placed beneath the water’s surface.
• Urban subjects
  • streets — Streets are a frequent subject of art, photography, and literature, from Paul Strand and Vivian Maier to David Hockney’s photo-collage of Pearblossom. They also appear in iconic works such as Caillebotte’s rainy Paris scene, the Beatles’ Abbey Road cover, and Bruce Springsteen’s songs about city streets.
• Watercraft
  • boats or ships — Boats and ships are common subjects in art, from naval paintings to mythic vessels like Jason’s Argo and Norse ships such as Naglfar and Skidbladnir. They also appear in famous paintings by Homer, Leutze, Turner, and others.
• death in art
  • dying — Dying is a recurring artistic and literary theme, but this set of clues especially points to the classical motif of the Dying Gaul, a Hellenistic sculpture of a mortally wounded warrior. The same adjective also appears in other art-historical titles, including works about a dying slave, dying warrior, and the Dying Slave by Michelangelo.
• Bubbles
  • blowing bubbles — Blowing bubbles is the subject of several Dutch and French paintings that use the activity as a symbol of transience and childhood. Chardin painted a boy doing it, and Manet later echoed the scene in a work with Léon Leenhoff.
• portrait types
  • triple portrait — A triple portrait shows one person depicted three times from different viewpoints or poses in a single work. Quizbowl clues often point to van Dyck’s portrait of Charles I, which later inspired Bernini’s bust and also links this form to Norman Rockwell.
• Anatomical lessons
  • anatomy lessons — These are anatomy lessons, the kind of medical demonstrations depicted in Rembrandt’s painting of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. The same subject appears in The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Deijman and in a later work featuring the cadaver Aris Kindt.
• burial in art
  • a burial — A burial is the placing of the dead in a grave or tomb, a subject often painted in religious and historical art. Famous examples include El Greco’s Burial of the Count of Orgaz and Courbet’s Burial at Ornans.
    • burials — Burials are a favorite subject in art, from Courbet’s enormous “Burial at Ornans” to El Greco’s “The Burial of the Count of Orgaz.” Goya’s sardine-themed procession and Girodet’s “Burial of Atala” also point to funeral imagery and ceremonial interment.

• seascapes — Seascapes are paintings that depict the ocean, ships, or other maritime scenes. The genre includes works by Hokusai, Winslow Homer, J. M. W. Turner, and Ivan Aivazovsky.

• peasantry
  • gleaners — The gleaners are the peasant women who collect leftover grain, most famously in Jean-François Millet’s The Gleaners. They recur in later art and film, including Agnès Varda’s documentary The Gleaners and I and Banksy’s altered version of Millet’s painting.

• boating — Boating is the activity celebrated in Impressionist paintings such as Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party. The clue set also points to related scenes by Manet and others in which figures row, sail, or linger on the water.

• Flowers
  • sunflower — A bright yellow flower in the genus Helianthus. It is famously depicted in Vincent van Gogh’s still-life Sunflowers paintings, associated with the Yellow House in Arles, Paul Gauguin’s portrait of van Gogh painting them, and later controversies over damaged or vandalized versions. It also appears in Blake and Ginsberg poems and in anime-related clues.
• still life — A still life is a painting of inanimate objects such as fruit, flowers, food, and household items, often arranged on a table or indoors. The genre is especially associated with realism and with Spanish bodegón painting, where ordinary pantry goods become the subject.
  • Still life painting — Still life painting is the genre devoted to depictions of inanimate objects such as vessels, books, and fruit. Artists associated with it include Chardin, Cézanne, Morandi, William Harnett, and Spanish still-life painters like Juan Sánchez Cotán and Luis Meléndez.
    • still lifes — Still lifes are paintings of inanimate objects such as fruit, flowers, skulls, and table settings. The genre includes Dutch and Spanish bodegónes and vanitas works that stress mortality, was especially important in Dutch art, and was long ranked low in the academic hierarchy of painting. Artists associated with the genre include Clara Peeters, Rachel Ruysch, Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Faith Ringgold.

      • Cézanne’s apples — Apples are one of the signature still-life subjects in Paul Cézanne’s painting, often appearing alongside pears and other fruit. The clues allude to essays and paintings that treat ordinary fruit as a central motif of Cézanne’s art.

      • Paul Cezanne’s still lifes — Paul Cézanne’s still lifes depict everyday objects such as apples, bottles, skulls, and plaster casts. These works are closely tied to his late style and to his broader post-Impressionist interest in structure and color.

  • vanitas paintings — Vanitas paintings are Dutch still lifes that use skulls and other symbols of mortality to emphasize the emptiness of worldly life. They were especially associated with seventeenth-century Leiden and artists such as Jan Davidsz de Heem and David Bailly.

• circus performers — Circus performers such as acrobats and clowns are a frequent subject in modern painting, especially in works by Degas, Renoir, Picasso, and Toulouse-Lautrec. Clues often refer to saltimbanques, the Family of Saltimbanques, or scenes from the circus and cabaret world.

• food in art
  • fried eggs — Fried eggs appear in art and surrealist or domestic scenes as a recognizable food motif, sometimes treated as symbols or transformed into other shapes. They are notably featured in Diego Velázquez’s Old Woman Frying Eggs, as well as in later works by artists such as Salvador Dalí and Sarah Lucas.

• temptation of Saint Anthony — The Temptation of Saint Anthony is a recurring art-historical scene showing the saint beset by grotesque demons and hallucinations in the desert. It appears in works by Bosch, Grünewald, Michelangelo, and Salvador Dalí, where the images range from medieval horror to surrealist fantasy.

• The Temptation of St. Anthony — The Temptation of St. Anthony is a favorite subject in art, especially in the Surrealist version by Salvador Dalí. The scene shows the saint holding up a cross against grotesque temptations, including spindly-legged elephants and other bizarre visions. Other versions of the same subject include works by Leonora Carrington, Bosch, and earlier religious painters. The title refers to Anthony’s struggle against demons and seductive apparitions in the desert.

• swimming pools — Swimming pools are a recurring setting and symbol in literature and art. They appear in John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” where Neddy Merrill moves through a chain of suburban pools, and in David Hockney’s paintings such as A Bigger Splash. They also title Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library and figure in stories by J. D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut, including Billy Pilgrim’s story. In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby’s body is found in a pool. They are often used in modernist and suburban scenes.

• Studio scenes
  • artist’s studios — An artist’s studio is a common setting in painting, from Courbet’s self-conscious depictions of artistic life to later modern works by Matisse, Braque, Freud, and Lichtenstein. These images often turn the studio into a theatrical space for self-portraiture, models, props, and reflection on the act of making art.

Collectors and Patrons

• Art collectors
  • Isabella Stewart Gardner — Isabella Stewart Gardner was the Boston socialite and art collector who founded the museum named after her, Fenway Court, now famous for the still-unsolved 1990 robbery of 13 artworks. Her collection includes works such as El Jaleo, and portraits by Sargent and Anders Zorn memorialize her as a major patron of art.

• Peggy Guggenheim — Peggy Guggenheim was an American art collector and patron of modern art who ran the Art of This Century gallery. She was a patron of Jackson Pollock and the wife of Max Ernst, and her collection is housed at the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice.

• Portinari — Portinari is the surname shared by Brazilian modernist Cândido Portinari and the Florentine family that commissioned the Portinari Altarpiece. Clues here range from Portinari’s murals and chapel decoration to Beatrice Portinari, Dante’s beloved, and Tommaso Portinari’s Bruges altarpiece.

• Albert Barnes — Albert Barnes was an industrialist and art collector whose fortune from Argyrol funded the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. He is also associated with educational seminars at his factory and with a collection notable for Renoirs and major modern French paintings.

• Ambroise Vollard — Ambroise Vollard was a Parisian art dealer and patron who gave Cézanne and Picasso their first major one-man shows. He is also remembered as the subject of cubist portraits by Picasso and portraits by Renoir.

• art dealers — Art dealers are people who buy, sell, and promote works of art, often shaping the market through galleries and private patronage. Figures such as Theo van Gogh, Ambroise Vollard, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, and Leo Castelli are especially associated with the role.

• donors — In Renaissance art, donors or patrons are the people who pay for a work and are often shown kneeling at the edges of altarpieces. They can appear in votive portraits, sometimes with their families, as part of the devotional scene.

• Leo Castelli — Leo Castelli was the influential Italian-American art dealer who helped launch Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism through shows like the Ninth Street Show. He gave Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein their first solo shows and was known for supporting artists with stipends.

• Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler — Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler was a French art dealer and writer closely associated with Cubism. He promoted Braque, Léger, and Gris, wrote one of the early books on cubism, and was painted by Picasso.

Art History and Criticism

• Ernst Gombrich — Ernst Gombrich was an art historian best known for Art and Illusion and the popular survey The Story of Art. His writing treated Western art as a search for more vivid realism and introduced ideas such as “schemata,” while also criticizing historicism and the idea of an “innocent eye.”

• Erwin Panofsky — Erwin Panofsky was a major twentieth-century art historian who helped define iconology as the study of images and their cultural meaning. He wrote Early Netherlandish Painting, Studies in Iconology, and Meaning in the Visual Arts, and is especially associated with iconography and the Arnolfini Portrait.

• Alfred H. Barr, Jr. — Alfred H. Barr, Jr. was the first director of the Museum of Modern Art and an influential art critic. He wrote the catalogue Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art and later produced a major biography of Matisse.

• Anthony Blunt — British art historian and Soviet spy who became known as the Fourth Man in the Cambridge spy scandal. He served as director of the Courtauld Institute and later as Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures. After his confession, he was stripped of his knighthood and publicly exposed. He wrote on Poussin and on baroque art in Rome and Sicily.

• Art historians
  • Kenneth Clark — Kenneth Clark was the British art historian who directed the National Gallery during World War II and allowed concerts to be broadcast from it. He later presented the television series Civilisation and wrote The Nude.
• Art magazines
  • Artforum — Artforum is an American art magazine founded in San Francisco and later moved to New York. Its history includes the Lynda Benglis ad controversy, Rosalind Krauss’s departure, and later debates over the magazine’s editorial direction.

• Meyer Schapiro — Meyer Schapiro was a Columbia-based art historian and critic noted for Marxist approaches to medieval art and for work on illuminated manuscripts and style. He also influenced artists such as Robert Motherwell and wrote on topics ranging from Mozarabic to Romanesque art to the relationship between words and pictures.

• Conservation and restoration
  • art restoration — Art restoration is the field devoted to repairing damaged artworks and removing grime while preserving the original object. It is closely associated with conservation and with reference works on pigments and studio techniques.
• Art crime
  • art forgery — Art forgery is the creation and sale of artworks falsely attributed to more famous artists. Han van Meegeren, Elmyr de Hory, Wolfgang Beltracchi, and Eric Hebborn are famous for this activity.
    • Elmyr de Hory — Elmyr de Hory was a Hungarian art forger famous for passing off his own paintings as authentic works. He became known through Fake and F for Fake, and he was associated with Clifford Irving.
• Forgery
  • forgeries — Forgeries are fake artworks made to imitate genuine works and deceive buyers or collectors. Quizbowl clues often mention Han van Meegeren, Elmyr de Hory, and Orson Welles’s F for Fake.

Objects, Makers, and Context

An artist-centered list needs to be read alongside objects whose makers are unnamed or whose production was collaborative. Compare the Palette of King Narmer, Mesopotamian palace reliefs, and Greek temple sculpture through material, political or religious function, and original setting. The Core art study list includes these traditions within the AP Art History work sequence; attribution to a named individual is only one kind of art-historical evidence.⁹

• a statue — A statue is a three-dimensional sculptural object, often made of stone, bronze, or other durable material. Famous examples can be used in wordplay or thought experiments, such as Rodin’s The Thinker and Condillac’s isolated-senses statue.

• Albert Einstein
  • Sticking Out His Tongue — This famous 1951 portrait of Albert Einstein shows him sticking out his tongue at the photographer’s request. It is one of the best-known Einstein images.

• altarpiece — An altarpiece is a church artwork placed behind the altar, often in the form of a triptych or multi-panel painting. Famous examples include the Ghent Altarpiece, the Isenheim Altarpiece, and other Renaissance works by Jan van Eyck, Matthias Grünewald, and Mantegna.

• Architectural motifs
  • ruins — Ruins are the subject of paintings by artists such as Hubert Robert and Giovanni Panini, who often set imaginary or classical landscapes among broken structures. The theme also appears in literature and poetry as a sign of decay, antiquity, or imperial aftermath.
• Architecture and built environment
  • gas station — A gas station is a roadside business that sells fuel for motor vehicles. It appears in modern art and literature, from Hopper’s Gas to Robert Frank’s photographs and Ed Ruscha’s photobook Twentysix Gasoline Stations.
• art
  • art history — Art history is the study of the development and interpretation of visual art, and Giorgio Vasari is often treated as its early founder. Important names in the field include Erwin Panofsky, E. H. Gombrich, Heinrich Wölfflin, and Hans Belting, whose work explores style, iconography, and the history of the discipline itself.

    • Iconography — Iconography is the use or study of images and symbols, especially in religious art. Van Dyck’s Iconography was a famous 1645 series of engraved portraits of contemporary figures.

    • iconology — Iconology is the art-historical study of symbolic meaning and cultural content in images, especially in the work of Erwin Panofsky. It is contrasted with iconography, which classifies images and motifs more descriptively.

• art academies
  • The Royal Academy of Arts — The Royal Academy of Arts is the London art institution founded in 1768 and associated with Joshua Reynolds as its first president. Its early history includes founders such as Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser, and later figures like Benjamin West and John Soane were connected with it.

• artist — An artist, especially a painter, is the kind of figure at the center of several works ranging from The Picture of Dorian Gray to The Moon and Sixpence and The Artist’s Life in Early Modern Europe. These clues often stress the tension between art, morality, and technique, from Basil Hallward to forgers, guilds, and the materials used in painting.

• artists — Artists are creators of visual art, especially painters and other image-makers. The profession includes painters and illustrators, and is associated with figures such as Diego Velázquez, Lavinia Fontana, and Michelangelo from the European tradition. Artists are central to works ranging from The Picture of Dorian Gray to An Artist of the Floating World, and appear in art-world contexts involving sculpture, portraiture, and modern painting.

• artists’ colonies
  • Taos art colony — The Taos art colony was a New Mexico artists’ colony patronized by Mabel Dodge Luhan. It drew painters and photographers such as Paul Strand and Akseli Gallen-Kallela, who documented its life around Luhan’s Big House. The colony took its name from the ancient pueblo town of Taos.

• artist’s studio — An artist’s studio is the setting of several famous paintings by Courbet, Matisse, Freud, and others. Quizbowl clues often point to the studio as a symbolic workplace where the artist’s self-image and materials are displayed.

• Boxing venues
  • Tom Sharkey’s Club — Tom Sharkey’s Club was a New York boxing venue associated with several famous bouts. It appears in the title of George Bellows’s painting Both Members of This Club.
• British painting
  • Ladies Adorning a Term of Hymen and The Strawberry Girl — These are works associated with a chain of artistic influence: a prominent Englishman, his American successor, and a younger artist they encouraged. The cited works include Ladies Adorning a Term of Hymen and The Strawberry Girl.
• Calligraphy
  • Arabic calligraphy — The Islamic art of beautiful handwriting in Arabic, used in Quran manuscripts, mosque decoration, and other religious objects. It is commonly done with a qalam and includes styles such as Kufic, Naskh, thuluth, Nastaʿlīq, and stylized forms like tughra and pseudo-Kufic imitation.

• cave painting — Cave paintings are prehistoric artworks made on cave walls and ceilings, especially famous at sites such as Lascaux and Altamira. They often include hand stencils and animal figures and are important evidence for Stone Age artistic culture.

• French royalty
  • kings of France — Kings of France appear in art history as common subjects of official portraiture, caricature, and funerary memorials. Daumier and Rigaud both depicted French monarchs, and royal hearts were sometimes separately buried in reliquaries.

• Haarlem — Haarlem is a Dutch city associated with Frans Hals, Judith Leyster, and Willem Claeszoon Heda, all linked to its Guild of St. Luke. It is also known for the Frans Hals Museum and for panoramic views by Jacob van Ruisdael.

• Loggia dei Lanzi — The Loggia dei Lanzi is the open-air sculpture gallery on Florence’s Piazza della Signoria. It houses works such as Cellini’s Perseus with the Head of Medusa and Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Women.

• Magazines
  • Illustrated magazines
    • Saturday Evening Post — An American magazine for which Norman Rockwell created many famous cover illustrations, including Rosie the Riveter, Freedom from Want, and the Four Freedoms series. It also first published works by writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and O. Henry, and was a major outlet for J. C. Leyendecker’s illustrations.
• Music
  • playing music — Playing music is a common subject in painting, from Vermeer interiors to Chagall and Picasso. The clues point to figures performing instruments or otherwise making music, including Orpheus and the violinist or guitarist imagery of modern art.

• painter — A painter is a visual artist whose work appears in Robert Browning monologues and in novels and films about Vincent van Gogh and other creators. The clues point to a profession associated with characters like Lily Briscoe, Basil Hallward, and Charles Strickland.

• visual art
  • painting — Painting is the art of applying pigment to create works like Vermeer’s allegories, Courbet’s The Artist’s Studio, and Lily Briscoe’s final canvas in To the Lighthouse. It is also the subject of TV and art-history clues centered on artists, brushes, and the making of visual images.

    • a painting — A painting is a work of visual art central to novels and plays about artistic creation, ownership, and interpretation. Common clues include Dorian Gray’s portrait, Magritte’s puzzles about representation, and Yasmina Reza’s play Art.

    • formats
      • tondo — A tondo is a circular painting or relief, especially a Renaissance work made in a round format. Tondos are often small in scale and used for devotional scenes or portraits. The format was popular in Renaissance Italy and appears in works such as circular Madonna scenes and decorative reliefs; famous examples include Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo and Taddei Tondo, both commissioned as round private devotional works.
    • media
      • oil paint — Oil paint is a slow-drying medium made with pigments suspended in oil, especially linseed oil, and it largely supplanted tempera in European art. Quizbowl clues often point to Jan van Eyck, Venetian painting on sailcloth, and the cracking problems of aging oil works.

    • Miniature painting — Small-scale painted illustrations in illuminated manuscripts and related album art, especially in Persian, Mughal, Safavid, Ottoman, and Rajput traditions. Miniature painting often uses flattened perspective and fine contour lines, and works were commonly collected in muraqqas (albums). Subjects range from royal portraits to narrative scenes such as Alexander in a glass diving bell. The form also includes portrait miniatures and was adapted in Europe by artists such as Nicholas Hilliard; later artists associated with the tradition include Reza Abbasi and Shahzia Sikander.

    • Paintings — Paintings are artworks made by applying pigment to a surface, often canvas. They are flat visual artworks and may appear as portraits, murals, or frescoes. Examples include Renaissance religious scenes, famous museum pieces such as the Mona Lisa and Battle of Anghiari, modern masterpieces like Guernica, and the level-entry images in Super Mario 64. They are also associated with restoration and forgery.
• William Blake

  • Ancient of Days — Ancient of Days is William Blake’s image of God as an old man measuring or creating the world from within a fiery sphere. The figure’s name comes from the Book of Daniel.

  • Europe, a Prophecy
    • The Ancient of Days — This Blake illustration for Europe, a Prophecy shows a powerful bearded figure with compass-like tools creating the world. It is one of William Blake’s most famous engraved images.
  • The Great Red Dragon — The Great Red Dragon is William Blake’s apocalyptic figure from Revelation, shown in several watercolors with the woman clothed with the sun. These works portray the dragon among beasts from the sea and other Revelation imagery, including the number 666.

Further Painters and Artistic Connections

• Painters — Painters are visual artists who create works on canvas or other surfaces, including portraits and landscapes. Figures connected to the profession in literature and art history include Paul Gauguin, Basil Hallward, and Charles Strickland, and painters are also invoked in poems by Auden, O’Hara, and Ferlinghetti.

  • Alice Neel — Alice Neel was a twentieth-century American painter best known for expressive portraits of friends, neighbors, and cultural figures in Spanish Harlem and the Upper West Side. Her work includes portraits of Andy Warhol and Joe Gould, as well as late self-portraits marked by bold outlines and unfinished backgrounds. She is often discussed as a major feminist portraitist with a socially observant style.

  • Charles Le Brun — Charles Le Brun was the chief painter and principal decorator of Louis XIV’s court, especially at Versailles. He helped shape the Gobelins manufactory and painted major works on Alexander the Great as well as the Hall of Mirrors ceiling.

  • Daniele da Volterra — Daniele da Volterra was a painter and sculptor nicknamed Il Braghettone, the “breeches-maker,” for adding coverings to Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. He also painted religious works such as the Assumption of the Virgin and the Descent from the Cross.

  • Dirk Bouts — Dirk Bouts was an Early Netherlandish painter known for The Last Supper and the panels of Justice of Emperor Otto. He is often identified by the careful perspective and vanishing-point technique used in his religious and civic altarpieces.

  • Ernest Meissonier — Ernest Meissonier was a 19th-century French painter noted for tiny, meticulous historical scenes and Napoleonic battle pictures. He won major Salon honors for The Brawl and painted works such as The Campaign of France and Friedland.

  • Everett Shinn — Everett Shinn was an American painter associated with the Ashcan School. His urban scenes include works such as A Winter’s Night on Broadway, Concert Stage, and Fire on Twenty-Fourth Street.

  • Giuseppe Arcimboldo — Giuseppe Arcimboldo was an Italian Mannerist painter known for portraits assembled from fruits, vegetables, books, and other objects. He served the Habsburg court under Maximilian II and Rudolf II, and works like Vertumnus and The Librarian are among his most famous images.
    • The Librarian — The Librarian is one of Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s composite-head portraits, in which the figure’s face is made from stacked books. Arcimboldo is also known for cabinet portraits such as Vertumnus, which turn fruits, vegetables, and other objects into faces.

  • Henri Fantin-Latour — Henri Fantin-Latour was a French painter known for flower still lifes and large group portraits of artists and writers. He also made lithographs inspired by Wagner and other Romantic composers and painted fellow artists such as Manet, Whistler, Chabrier, and d’Indy.

  • Ilya Repin — Ilya Repin was a leading Russian realist painter and member of The Wanderers. He painted Barge Haulers on the Volga, Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, Ivan the Terrible Killing His Son, and portraits of major Russian cultural figures.

    • Barge Haulers on the Volga — Barge Haulers on the Volga is Ilya Repin’s painting of exhausted laborers pulling a boat along the river. The work is also known as The Volga Boatmen and helped establish Repin’s reputation among the Wanderers.

    • Ilya Efimovich Repin — Ilya Repin was a major Russian realist painter known for works such as The Volga Boatmen and Religious Procession in the Kursk District. He also painted the dramatic Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks and Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan.

    • Religious Procession in Kursk Province — Religious Procession in Kursk Province is a Russian realist painting showing an Orthodox procession carrying an icon of the Virgin Mary. Its crowded rural scene includes a red-haired priest, a hunchback boy, and a man in orange amid the procession.

  • Ilya Yefimovich Repin — Ilya Repin was a major Russian realist painter associated with the Peredvizhniki. His best-known works include Barge Haulers on the Volga, Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, and Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan.

  • Jacob Isaakzoon van Ruisdael — Jacob Isaakzoon van Ruisdael was a Dutch Golden Age landscape painter from Haarlem and a member of the Guild of Saint Luke. He is especially remembered for dramatic skies, waterfalls, wooded scenes, and moody landscapes such as The Jewish Cemetery, Bentheim Castle, and Winter Landscape.
    • The Jewish Cemetery — The Jewish Cemetery is Jacob van Ruisdael’s landscape of a ruined Christian churchyard and graveyard at Ouderkerk on the Amstel. The painting exists in Detroit and Dresden versions, with a rainbow and stream in the composition and a fallen tree in the Detroit version. Its mood makes it one of the Dutch master’s best-known moralizing landscapes.

  • Jean Frédéric Bazille — Jean Frédéric Bazille was a French Impressionist painter who died young in the Franco-Prussian War. His paintings include Family Reunion, The Pink Dress, La Toilette, and The Artist’s Studio, along with portraits and scenes of figures in the open air.

  • Max Beckmann — Max Beckmann was a German Expressionist painter known for dark, angular works such as The Night and the Departure triptych. His paintings often feature crowded, allegorical scenes with figures like Perseus, Medea, and the Fisher King, and he fled after the Nazis labeled his art degenerate.
    • Departure — Departure is a 1933 triptych now at MoMA whose panels show tortured figures, fish imagery, and a central boat with a crowned fisherman and woman holding a child.

  • Nabil Kanso — Nabil Kanso was a Lebanese-American painter known for large mural series such as The Split of Life and America: 500 Years. His work often addresses war, oppression, and remembrance through monumental, brightly colored figurative imagery.

  • Nicolas Poussin and Peter Paul Rubens — Nicolas Poussin and Peter Paul Rubens anchor the famous French Academy debate between drawing and color. Poussin is associated with classical composition, while Rubens is known for rich color and fleshy Baroque figures.

  • Nikolai Ge — Nikolai Ge was a Russian painter associated with dark, psychological religious scenes and with the Wanderers. He is best known for his dramatic Last Supper, along with works on Christ, Tolstoy, and biblical themes that drew criticism from censors.

  • Robert Delaunay — Robert Delaunay was a French Orphist painter associated with simultanism and colorful circular forms. He painted Eiffel Tower subjects and series such as the Saint-Severin works and Simultaneous Contrasts, and he cofounded a movement with his wife Sonia.

  • Thomas Eakins — Thomas Cowperthwaite Eakins was an American realist painter best known for The Gross Clinic, a dramatic surgery scene at Jefferson Medical College. He also painted rowing scenes such as Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, athletic and medical subjects like The Swimming Hole and The Agnew Clinic, The Concert Singer, and other portraits with meticulous naturalism. His work often depicts Philadelphia medical scenes, rowing on the Schuylkill River, boxing, and posed nude studies.

  • Victor Hartmann — Victor Hartmann was the Russian painter memorialized by Mussorgsky in Pictures at an Exhibition. His lost paintings inspired one of the best-known orchestral suites of the nineteenth century.

  • Winslow Homer — Winslow Homer was an American painter and former Harper’s Weekly illustrator known for scenes of boys at play, Civil War imagery, seaside and boating subjects, and dramatic marine works. His best-known paintings include Snap the Whip, Breezing Up, The Gulf Stream, The Life Line, and The Fog Warning. His work is associated with his Prouts Neck and Cullercoats periods and is held in major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

    • Breezing Up — Breezing Up, also known as A Fair Wind, is Winslow Homer’s painting of a bearded sailor and three boys in a small boat. The scene emphasizes rough water and youthful movement, with the oldest boy steering the sailboat Gloucester.

    • Breezing Up: A Fair Wind — Winslow Homer’s Breezing Up: A Fair Wind shows a father and three boys aboard a Gloucester sailboat. The painting is one of Homer’s best-known marine scenes and is often identified by the boat’s name and the lively, wind-filled composition.

    • Prisoners from the Front — Prisoners from the Front is a painting by Winslow Homer from 1866. It depicts Union soldiers presenting three Confederate captives to their commander.

    • Right and Left — Winslow Homer’s Right and Left depicts two goldeneye ducks struck by a shotgun blast as they rise from the water. The work’s title refers to the directions the birds face, and it is often discussed as part of Homer’s late sporting scenes.

    • Snap the Whip — Snap the Whip is a Winslow Homer painting of boys linked together while playing the title game. The work is often identified by the falling child at the left edge and by the rural schoolhouse in the background.

    • The Fog Warning — “The Fog Warning” is a Winslow Homer painting from 1885. It shows a lone fisherman in a dory hauling a halibut while trying to reach his ship as night falls.

Museums and Collections

• Art Institute of Chicago — Founded in 1879, this major museum on Michigan Avenue is known for its exceptional Impressionist collection. Its holdings include American Gothic, Nighthawks, and A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Its building is associated with the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, and its Modern Wing was designed by Renzo Piano.

• Capitoline Museums — The Capitoline Museums are a complex of art galleries on the Capitoline Hill in Rome. Founded by Pope Sixtus IV, they include buildings designed around Michaelangelo’s Palazzo dei Conservatori and related collections of Roman sculpture.

• Corcoran Gallery — The Corcoran Gallery was a major Washington, D.C. art museum that closed in 2014. It became famous in quizbowl for controversies over Robert Mapplethorpe’s Perfect Moment exhibition and other censored works.

• de Young Museum — The de Young Museum is a major fine arts museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Its modern building with a copper skin and Hamon Tower was designed by Herzog & de Meuron, and it hosted the first f/64 exhibition.

• Frick Collection — A New York museum of Western European art housed in the former mansion of industrialist Henry Clay Frick on East 70th Street. Its holdings include major Old Master works such as Vermeers and Rembrandt’s debated Polish Rider, and it has been associated with the temporary Frick Madison venue.