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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Caspar David Friedrich finished The Monk by the Sea in 1810 in his Dresden studio. The canvas is 110 by 172 centimetres and contains, in terms of actual painted content, almost nothing: a narrow strip of pale beach at the bottom, a wider band of dark Baltic Sea in the middle, an enormous expanse of cloudy grey sky filling the upper two-thirds, and a single small figure of a Capuchin monk standing on the beach in left profile, dressed in a brown robe.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder finished Hunters in the Snow in early 1565 in his Brussels workshop. The canvas is one of six surviving panels from a 'Months of the Year' cycle commissioned by the Antwerp merchant Niclaes Jongelinck for a country house outside the city walls. Hunters in the Snow is the December-and-January panel — and it is the first major Western painting in which winter is not the background of a religious or genre scene but the actual subject of the picture.

Caspar David Friedrich painted Two Men Contemplating the Moon in his Dresden studio in 1819 — a small canvas of two cloaked figures standing on a forest path before a fallen oak, looking up at a crescent moon rising over the trees. Samuel Beckett saw the painting at the Dresden gallery in 1937 and named it, almost forty years later, as the direct visual source for the staging of Waiting for Godot.

Vincent van Gogh painted his bedroom at the Yellow House in Arles three times between October 1888 and September 1889 — first in the room itself, then twice from memory in a Saint-Rémy asylum nine months later. The three canvases are nearly identical in subject and composition, almost identical in colour, yet describe three different mental states: the painter at home, the painter in crisis, and the painter looking back.

Between February 1892 and the spring of 1894 Claude Monet painted approximately thirty canvases of the west façade of Rouen Cathedral, all from the same upper-floor window across the cathedral square, all of the same architectural subject, all differing only in the light, the hour, and the weather. The series is the most concentrated demonstration in European painting of the Impressionist principle that the subject of a picture is the light falling on a thing, not the thing i

Hokusai's Fine Wind, Clear Morning — known in the West as Red Fuji — is the second-most-famous print of his Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji series, c. 1831. The picture shows Mount Fuji at first light when the south-east face of the volcanic cone turns brick-red. The phenomenon happens on only two or three mornings a year. A close reading of the composition, the Prussian-blue sky, the geological reality behind the red, and the print's afterlife as the second face of Japan abro

In short: for nearly two centuries, European academies ranked painting not by skill but by subject. This order was called the hierarchy of genres. History painting stood at the top, followed by portrait, everyday genre scenes, landscape, and still life at the base. The seven works below trace that ladder, from Benjamin West in 1770 to George Stubbs in 1762. A Ladder of Subjects The ranking was set down in 1667, when the critic André Félibien wrote a preface to the lectures of

Johannes Vermeer painted his hometown of Delft from the south bank of the river Schie in about 1660-61. The picture is the only major townscape Vermeer ever produced. It shows a five-second moment of weather over the city just after a rainstorm. Marcel Proust saw it in 1902 and again in 1921, called it "the most beautiful painting in the world," and used it for his greatest passage on art and mortality in In Search of Lost Time.

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.

TL;DR: For four centuries European painters treated animals with the same care they gave to kings and saints. This is a slow look at seven works, from a 1502 watercolour hare to an 1824 Newfoundland dog, and at why a rabbit, a goldfinch, a bull, a swan, a horse, a lion and a dog earned the full attention of the Old Masters. The Old Masters painted animals like portraits because a convincing animal proved a painter’s eye better than almost any other subject. A hare will not ho

Caspar David Friedrich's Das Eismeer (The Sea of Ice, 1823-24) is the most uncompromising painting in the German Romantic canon: a wrecked ship buried under a pyramid of shattered Arctic ice, painted in Dresden from sketches of the Elbe river breaking up in winter. A close reading of the composition, the Parry expedition that inspired it, the painting's link to Monk by the Sea and Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, and the work's twentieth-century afterlife.