Carl Larsson turned his family home at Sundborn into Sweden's best-known domestic picture. His Christmas scenes show the warm side of Nordic light.

The ox, the ass, the lily and the star in Old Master Christmas paintings are coded sentences. Hugo van der Goes's Portinari Altarpiece shows how to read them.

One subject, six movements. Follow the dogs in famous paintings from Van Eyck to Seurat and you learn to spot Northern Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Romanticism, Impressionism and Pointillism at a glance.

A vanitas painting reminds the viewer that life is short. Harmen Steenwijck's table of about 1640 shows what each skull, shell, lamp and flute meant.

Six Adoration of the Magi paintings, from Gentile da Fabriano's gold-leaf procession of 1423 to Bruegel's snowfall of 1563, with what to look for in each.

Caravaggio's dark, dramatic light changed European painting. Five of his works explained, from the Boy Bitten by a Lizard to the Seven Works of Mercy, each with a full article.

Johannes Vermeer left only a few dozen paintings. Here are six of them explained, from the Girl with a Pearl Earring to the View of Delft, each with a full article.

Gustav Klimt (born 14 July 1862) made Vienna's most recognisable paintings, from the gold of The Kiss to the late portraits. Six of his works explained, each with a full article.

The Pre-Raphaelites formed in London in September 1848 to paint with the bright colour and sharp detail of art before Raphael. This guide explains five of their key paintings.

A god eating his child on the wall of a dining room, a severed head painted on a parade shield, skeletons tending a garden: eight paintings that have unsettled viewers for centuries, and what their painters meant by them.

Between 1863 and 1907 — forty-four years across three French regimes and one global imperial network — six paintings produced the formal vocabulary of Western modernism. Manet's 1863 Olympia, Monet's 1872 Impression Sunrise, Cézanne's 1890s still lifes, Van Gogh's 1889 Cypresses, Gauguin's 1898 Tahiti canvases, and Picasso's 1907 Les Demoiselles d'Avignon form the load-bearing sequence in which European painting moved from academic-Salon convention to abstract formal modernis

Between 1793 and 1867 five French and Spanish paintings changed what political subject matter could look like in Western canvas painting. The five — David's Death of Marat, Goya's Third of May 1808, Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, Courbet's Stone Breakers, and Manet's Execution of Maximilian — together form the load-bearing seventy-four-year sequence in which Western political painting moved from Neoclassical allegory to documentary Realism.

Western painting changed in seven clear steps between 1509 and 1866, from the Renaissance and Baroque to Realism and Impressionism. A short guide to each.

From a single candle to a low moon on wet stone, eight masters between 1640 and 1897 found different answers to one problem: how do you make darkness visible?

Seven portraits, from Leonardo in 1489 to Sargent in 1892, show how each school reinvented the human face: poise, breath, daylight, clarity, feeling, and the modern gaze.

Turner painted the killing storm, Aivazovsky the moment of survival, Sorolla the blaze of noon, Krøyer the pale northern dusk: seven canvases, seven faces of the sea.

Dutch and Flemish flower paintings never wilt because they were never real bouquets. Between about 1600 and 1720, painters gathered blooms that open in different months into a single vase, then held them still forever. The flower piece, as this kind of still life is called, was part botany, part luxury object, and part quiet lesson on how fast beauty passes. This guide walks through seven Golden Age masters of the form, from Jan Brueghel the Elder to Jan van Huysum, and expla

They are not the same painter. Édouard Manet (1832-1883) and Claude Monet (1840-1926) met at the Paris Salon of 1865 by accident — Manet had walked in furious to find his Olympia hung beside a seascape signed "Monet" that he had not painted. Eighteen years later Monet would be a pallbearer at Manet's funeral. A reading of the eight years of friendship between them, the painting they each gave the other, and why their names are confused to this day.

American Luminism ran for barely twenty-five years, yet it produced some of the stillest light in Western painting. Here is how Frederic Edwin Church and Martin Johnson Heade made glow itself the subject.

In 1937 Theodor Adorno coined the term Spätstil — late style — for the paintings, drawings, and music a great artist makes in the last decade of life, when the rules they had spent half a century mastering begin to dissolve. A reading of five painters working in old age: Rembrandt's last self-portraits, Goya's late self-image, Hokusai's eighty-eighth year, Cézanne's final Mont Sainte-Victoire, and Monet's water lilies at the Orangerie.