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.

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.

Bruegel, Botticelli, Honthorst, Monet, Carl Larsson and more: eight public-domain paintings that make a room feel like Christmas, with advice on scale, rooms and frames.

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.

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.

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.

Bruegel, Monet, Friedrich, Hiroshige, Avercamp and more: eight classic snow scenes that make a living room feel warm in winter, with advice on where each one hangs best.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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