Édouard Manet painted his wife Suzanne at the piano in 1868: a small, quiet picture of a trained musician at work, and very likely his answer to a Degas portrait he had cut in half.

A burial in the snow, a ruined Gothic church and a grove of dead oaks: Caspar David Friedrich painted The Abbey in the Oakwood as the dark companion to The Monk by the Sea.

Paul Gauguin painted Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? between December 1897 and February 1898 in his Tahiti studio at Punaauia, after the September 1897 death of his beloved daughter Aline at age 19 in Copenhagen and the subsequent four-month-long depressive episode that culminated in Gauguin's attempted suicide by arsenic on the afternoon of the painting's completion.

Leonardo da Vinci began the Mona Lisa in 1503 in Florence on a poplar-wood panel approximately 77 × 53 cm. The sitter is Lisa Gherardini, the 24-year-old wife of the Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo. Leonardo worked on the painting for sixteen years across his moves from Florence to Milan to Rome to France — he carried the panel with him from 1503 until his 1519 death in the French Loire-valley castle of Clos Lucé, and he never delivered the painting to its com

Claude Monet painted Impression, Sunrise in ~1 morning session in late autumn 1872 from a Le Havre hotel window. 48 × 63 cm oil on canvas shows the rising sun over the industrial harbour. Exhibited April 1874 at the first Impressionist Exhibition where critic Louis Leroy mocked it as 'mere impression' — and the insult became the movement's name.

Paul Cézanne painted ~270 still lifes between 1865 and his 1906 death — the largest still-life corpus of any 19th-century European painter. The c.1893 Paris-collection canvas shows seven apples and a small jug on a tilted brown tabletop. The painting carries Cézanne's specific contribution: deliberate flattening of pictorial space that Picasso and Braque would extend into Cubism 14 years later.

Michelangelo Buonarroti painted The Creation of Adam in 1511 as one of nine narrative panels along the central spine of the Sistine Chapel ceiling in the Vatican palace, on commission from Pope Julius II. The 280 × 570 centimetre fresco shows the bearded God-the-Father reaching toward the reclining naked Adam across an approximately two-centimetre gap between their two extended forefingers.

Frans Hals painted what is now called The Laughing Cavalier in 1624 in his Haarlem workshop. The 83 × 67 centimetre oil-on-canvas portrait shows a 26-year-old Dutch textile merchant in elaborately-embroidered silk doublet with an upturned moustache and a half-smile, looking down at the viewer from a slight elevated perspective. The painting's commonly-used English title is wrong on two counts: the sitter is not a cavalier (he is a merchant) and he is not laughing.

Katsushika Hokusai published Mishima Pass in Kai Province in 1830-32 as part of his Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji series, the project that established him as the most internationally-influential Japanese artist of the nineteenth century. The print shows a single ancient cedar tree at the centre of the composition with three travellers attempting to encircle its enormous trunk on the road to Mount Fuji.

Vincent van Gogh painted his first major cypress canvas in late June 1889 from his second-floor bedroom window at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum near the Provençal village of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where he had voluntarily admitted himself in May 1889 following the December 1888 Arles ear-cutting episode. The 93.4 × 74 centimetre oil-on-canvas was one of approximately fifteen cypress paintings Van Gogh would complete in the next thirteen months.

Caravaggio painted Bacchus in approximately 1596 in his Rome workshop in the Palazzo Madama household of Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, his first major Roman patron. The 95 × 85 centimetre oil-on-canvas shows a teenage boy in classical Roman drape and an oversized ivy-and-grape garland, offering a glass of red wine directly out of the canvas. The 1922 conservation analysis found Caravaggio's own face in the mirror reflection on the carafe.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler painted Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 in his London Chelsea studio in autumn 1871. The 144.3 × 162.4 centimetre oil-on-canvas shows the artist's 67-year-old mother Anna Matilda McNeill Whistler seated in profile against a flat grey wall. Whistler titled the painting NOT as a portrait of his mother but as an arrangement of two colours — the work that began the late-19th-century 'art for art's sake' movement.

Gustave Courbet painted The Stone Breakers in autumn 1849 in his studio at Ornans, a small village in the Doubs valley of eastern France. The 165 × 257 centimetre oil-on-canvas showed two figures breaking stones beside a country road for the construction of the Ornans-Pontarlier rural highway. The painting was the central exhibit in Courbet's 1849-50 Paris Salon and was the inaugural document of the French Realism movement.

Eugène Delacroix painted Liberty Leading the People between October and December 1830, three months after the Three Glorious Days of the July Revolution (27-29 July 1830) that overthrew King Charles X of France. The 260 × 325 centimetre oil-on-canvas hangs in the Paris collection that purchased it from the Salon of 1831 for 3,000 francs.

Jacques-Louis David painted The Death of Marat in approximately three months between July and November 1793, immediately after the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat in his Paris bath on 13 July 1793. The 165 × 128 centimetre oil-on-canvas hangs Marat dead in the green-curtained wooden tub he used to soothe his chronic skin disease, the murder weapon — Charlotte Corday's small kitchen knife — visible on the floor.

Titian painted the Venus of Urbino in 1538 in Venice on commission from Guidobaldo II della Rovere, the 24-year-old heir to the Duchy of Urbino, almost certainly as a wedding gift for his 10-year-old bride Giulia Varano. The 119 × 165 centimetre oil-on-canvas shows a naked young woman lying on a red velvet daybed inside a Renaissance bedroom, looking directly out of the picture at the viewer with calm self-possession.

Jan van Eyck painted what is now called the Arnolfini Portrait in 1434 in Bruges, almost certainly on commission from the Italian merchant Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini for an unknown purpose that has been debated continuously for almost 600 years. The 82.2 × 60 centimetre oak-panel painting carries Van Eyck's painted signature on the rear wall above a convex mirror — Johannes de Eyck fuit hic 1434 — and the convex mirror reflects two additional figures the rest of the compos

Pontormo painted the Deposition from the Cross 1525-1528 as the altarpiece for the small Capponi family chapel in the Florence church of Santa Felicita. The 313 × 192 cm panel is the canonical post-Raphael Mannerist break from High Renaissance composition: ten figures in an unstable vertical pyramid, no Cross visible anywhere, no landscape, no architecture, no perspectival depth.

Mary Cassatt painted the same domestic ritual — two women at afternoon tea in a respectable upper-middle-class drawing-room — three times across the decade 1880-1891: an oil canvas in 1880 (currently in a Boston collection), a tonally cooler 1890 version held in a Washington collection, and the well-known 1891 color drypoint-and-aquatint print, the seventh of her ten-print Japonisme series.

Francisco de Goya painted Saturn Devouring His Son directly onto the dining-room wall of his country house, the Quinta del Sordo, outside Madrid in 1819-1823. It was one of fourteen 'Black Paintings' Goya made on the interior walls of the house in the last four years of his Spanish residency. He never signed them, never titled them, never exhibited them, and almost certainly never intended anyone outside his immediate household to see them.