A mountain of hay on wheels, pulled towards hell while the crowd fights over every wisp. In The Haywain, Bosch turned greed into a procession, and put a calm angel and an empty-handed Christ above it all.

Hendrick Avercamp, a deaf and mute painter from Kampen, filled a frozen Dutch river with hundreds of people around 1608. Look closely and the crowd hides lovers, a dead horse and a man relieving himself.

Snow, oxen and a stone calvary, painted by a man living under palm trees. In Christmas Night, Gauguin looked back from the far side of the world to a Breton winter he had known years earlier.

In the summer of 1869 two poor friends set up easels at a floating restaurant on the Seine. Their paintings of La Grenouillère are often called the birthplace of Impressionism.

The Three Kings are here, the Holy Family is here, and almost nobody in the picture notices. Bruegel set the Epiphany in a Flemish village in a heavy snowfall, and the miracle is the easiest thing in it to miss.

Blood-red walls, a sour green ceiling, four lamps buzzing with yellow halos and a few lonely drinkers. Van Gogh stayed awake three nights to paint The Night Café in Arles, and wanted it to feel like a place where you could go mad.

Caspar David Friedrich treated snow as a language for faith, death and survival. From the discarded crutches of 1811 to a lone oak in 1829, here is a guide to his winter landscapes and the one that was lost.

A boat tilts on a huge wave, sailors fight the ropes, and Christ sleeps at the stern. Rembrandt painted only one seascape, in 1633, and in 1990 it was cut from its frame and stolen. It has never been found.

Fragonard's The Swing (1767) hides a lover in the bushes and sends a shoe flying. Who commissioned it, what the details mean, and why it defines the Rococo.

Socrates reaches for the cup of hemlock without looking at it, one finger raised, still making his point. Jacques-Louis David's 1787 painting turned a death scene into a lesson about thinking, courage and dying for what you believe.

A man sleeps under a pear tree, his friends eat bread and porridge, and the wheat stands taller than the people who cut it. Bruegel's The Harvesters of 1565 is one of the first paintings to make ordinary work in a landscape its whole subject.

The January page of the Très Riches Heures shows the Duc de Berry at his New Year feast. Here is how to read the table, the dogs, the tapestry and the gold ship.

In Correggio's Holy Night there is no lamp, no moon and no fire. The light comes from the newborn Child, and it is so strong that a shepherd girl shields her eyes. Here is how one Christmas painting taught Europe to paint the dark.

Monet painted The Magpie outdoors in the snow at Étretat in 1868-69. Its blue and lilac shadows were so radical that the Salon jury turned it down.

Botticelli signed only one painting, and he signed it with a warning. The Mystic Nativity of 1500 mixes a joyful Christmas scene with angels, embraces and fleeing devils, painted in a Florence that thought the world was ending.

In 1566 Pieter Bruegel the Elder set the Roman census of the Nativity in a snowbound Flemish village at sundown. Mary and Joseph are easy to miss.

Four Nativity paintings that shaped how the West pictures Christmas night: Giotto, Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Botticelli and Gerard van Honthorst, read through light, scale and a single newborn child.

A rowboat, a white figure, a coffin and a rock of cypresses: Arnold Böcklin's Isle of the Dead became the most reproduced dark picture of its day.

Agnolo Bronzino painted Eleonora of Toledo, wife of Duke Cosimo I de' Medici, in a gold-brocaded gown beside her young son. The cool, flawless surface is the message: a dynasty that expected to last.

Parmigianino painted the Madonna with the Long Neck for a chapel in Parma and died before finishing it. Its stretched Virgin, sprawling child and columns going nowhere defined Mannerism.