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.

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.

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.

From around 1882 until his death in 1906, Paul Cézanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire — a limestone ridge twenty kilometres east of his house in Aix-en-Provence — more than sixty times in oil and another forty in watercolour. The hundred-image obsession is the most concentrated motif-study in nineteenth-century European painting and the visible record of how Cézanne worked his way, picture by picture, into the language that the entire twentieth century would inherit.

Rembrandt van Rijn painted, drew, and etched roughly eighty self-portraits across his forty-year career — more than any major painter before him and almost certainly more than any since. The sequence is the most sustained autobiographical project in the history of European painting. A career-arc essay through six representative self-portraits, from the 1628 young etcher to the year of his death.

Francisco Goya worked through fifty years of Spanish history, from cheerful tapestry cartoons for the royal palace in 1777 to the Black Paintings he applied directly to the walls of his country house in 1820. Across the same career he was court painter to four successive kings, a witness to the French invasion, a publisher of satirical etchings, a portraitist of the most fashionable women in Madrid, and the inventor of the modern picture of fear.

Between 1897 and 1926, Claude Monet painted roughly two hundred and fifty pictures of the water lily pond at his garden in Giverny. The series began as an observational study, slowly dissolved its bridge and bank into pure reflection, and ended in the panoramic Orangerie panels where water, sky, willow, and lily blur into a single continuous surface. How the project began, why it kept going, and the moment it stopped being a study of a pond.

In September 1848 three young London art students — Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt — founded a secret society in a Bloomsbury bedroom and signed their pictures with the initials PRB. They were attacking three centuries of European academic painting. Seven paintings from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and its second-generation followers.

France produced more major Western painters between 1700 and 1900 than any other country. Ten of them — Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard, David, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec. The two-century arc from the court at Versailles to the cabarets of Montmartre.

Johannes Vermeer painted somewhere between thirty-four and thirty-six pictures across a working life of twenty-two years. Almost every one of them is now considered a small masterpiece of light, glass, and stillness. Nine of the paintings — the milkmaid, the girl with the pearl, the geographer at his window, the music lesson in a Delft interior — and what each picture is actually doing.

Caspar David Friedrich painted a single subject for forty years — the human figure, usually small, usually seen from behind, standing in a landscape too large to contain. The figure is alone. The landscape is the argument. Eight paintings from the German Romantic painter whose pictures have become shorthand for solitude itself.

In the autumn of 1905, a small group of French painters hung a room of pictures at the Paris Salon d'Automne in colours nobody had used before. A critic called the room a cage of wild beasts. The name stuck. The movement was two years long, the colour decisions were permanent, and almost every painter who broke from the academy in the next twenty years walked through the door the Fauves opened.

Painting in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe was an apprenticed trade, and women were largely barred from the workshop training that made apprenticeship possible. Eight women did the work anyway. Their paintings survive, hang in major collections, and have been recovered into the canon over the last forty years. Here is what they painted, and why the survival was almost an accident.

From El Greco's compressed cosmos in late-sixteenth-century Toledo to Antoni Tàpies's matter paintings in late-twentieth-century Barcelona, ten Spanish painters built the visual vocabulary the rest of Europe and the Americas borrowed from. The decisions each one made, and the line between them.

A muse is not a model. A model sits for one painting. A muse sits for thirty, and slowly the painter's whole way of seeing rearranges itself around her face. The women below are the ones who reorganised the careers of the men who painted them.

When Vincent van Gogh died in the summer of 1890, he had sold almost nothing. Today his name sits beside the handful of painters everyone can name from memory. The strange part of that story is that the person who made it happen never picked up a brush. Her name was Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, and for a long time art history barely mentioned her. This is the story of how a young widow turned a room full of unsold canvases into one of the most beloved names in painting. A Painter

Surrealism began as a Paris literary movement in 1924 and turned into the most globally recognised modern art style of the twentieth century. The ten painters below are the ones the movement could not have existed without — and the ancestors they were quietly building on.

Pleasure, intimacy, asymmetry, pastel. The hundred-year style that Watteau began, Boucher polished, and Fragonard perfected — and that the French Revolution swept off the walls.

Two hundred years of Italian painting, sculpture, and architecture in the names that still matter — Giotto, Masaccio, Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and the three painters who carried the late Renaissance into Venice and beyond.

After Raphael died in 1520, Italian painting got stranger. Necks lengthened, bodies twisted into spirals, colour grew acidic, space stopped behaving. Reading the painters who closed the High Renaissance — Pontormo, Parmigianino, Bronzino, El Greco — and the movement we now call Mannerism.