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.

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.

Amedeo Modigliani painted approximately thirty-five Reclining Nudes between 1916 and 1919 in his Paris studios in Montparnasse. Thirty-two of them were exhibited at the Galerie Berthe Weill on 3 December 1917 — and the show was closed by the Paris police six hours after opening on the grounds of public indecency. The reason: Modigliani had painted his nudes with visible pubic hair, which no major French canvas of the previous three hundred years had done.

Artemisia Gentileschi painted Judith Slaying Holofernes twice — first in Rome c.1612-13 at age nineteen, then in Florence c.1620-21 at age twenty-seven. The two canvases are the closest thing 17th-century European painting produced to autobiographical history-painting: Artemisia had been raped at seventeen by her father's collaborator Agostino Tassi in 1611 and testified at the trial of 1612 while painting the first Judith.

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.

Hieronymus Bosch finished The Garden of Earthly Delights between c.1490 and 1510 in his workshop in 's-Hertogenbosch. The triptych is enormous — 220 by 389 centimetres when fully open — and contains more than two hundred and thirty distinct figures across three panels: Eden on the left, an earthly garden of nude humans and oversized fruit in the centre, and the most-detailed depiction of Hell in the entire Northern Renaissance on the right.

Gustav Klimt finished The Kiss in 1908 in his Vienna studio at Josefstädter Straße 21. The painting is 180 by 180 centimetres, oil and gold leaf on canvas, painted at the exact mid-point of his five-canvas Golden Period. The gold on the surface is not paint pretending to be metal. It is real twenty-three-and-a-half-carat gold leaf, hammered to a thickness of approximately one ten-thousandth of a millimetre and applied to the canvas in three different alloys for three differen

Light academia is the cream-and-linen counterpart of dark academia — the same library-and-letters reading mood but in warm muted neutrals instead of black-and-burgundy. A light-academia bedroom takes its colour register from old library wallpaper, faded linen drapery, vintage Italian books, and the natural cream of a candle-lit afternoon. The Old Master canon has six paintings that hold this aesthetic without breaking it.

Édouard Manet finished A Bar at the Folies-Bergère in March 1882 in his Paris studio, six months before his fifty-first birthday and twelve months before his death. The painting shows a young barmaid standing behind a marble counter in a Paris cabaret, with the entire scene behind her reflected in a mirror that occupies almost the full width of the canvas. The mirror does not show what it should. The geometry is wrong on purpose.

A fine-dining room is one of the hardest spaces in commercial interior design to dress. The lighting is low, the conversation must be the loudest sound, and the wall art has to read at a distance of three to twelve metres from a seated guest while staying invisible enough that no one accidentally describes it as the reason they came. Six paintings from the European canon are unusually well-suited to this brief.

John Singer Sargent exhibited Portrait of Madame X at the Paris Salon of 1884 — a six-foot-tall standing portrait of the American expatriate beauty Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau in a black evening gown. The original version of the painting had one of the gown's two thin diamond shoulder-straps slipping off the sitter's right shoulder. The Paris reaction destroyed Sargent's French career. Within six months he had repainted the strap and moved permanently to London.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted Two Sisters (On the Terrace) in five working sessions on the terrace of a Chatou restaurant beside the Seine in April 1881. The two figures in the painting are not actual sisters — they are professional models — and the picture was finished in approximately twenty hours of total painting time. It is the single canvas in which the entire vocabulary of mature Impressionism appears at once: broken brushwork, saturated colour, outdoor light, modern l

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.

Johannes Vermeer's Lacemaker (c. 1669-71) is the smallest signed painting in his surviving catalogue — twenty-four by twenty-one centimetres, the size of a hardback book. The picture shows a Delft lacemaker bent over her cushion of pins, her hands resolved into two yellow-white blurs as she works at a speed the painter could not freeze. Salvador Dalí spent forty years copying, analysing, and lecturing on it — calling it 'the most aesthetically violent painting in the world.'

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

Francisco de Goya painted two pictures of the same reclining woman on the same green couch in the same Madrid year — La Maja Desnuda (c. 1797-1800) and La Maja Vestida (c. 1800-05). The two paintings are the first un-mythological reclining nude in the European canon since classical antiquity. They hung in the private cabinet of the Spanish Prime Minister Manuel Godoy on a sliding mechanism that let visitors see either the clothed version or the naked one underneath at the pul

Caravaggio painted Judith Beheading Holofernes in Rome in about 1602, at the height of his Roman fame. The picture is the most violent biblical scene in the entire Caravaggio canon — Holofernes pinned to a bed with his throat half-sliced, Judith pulling the sword in the second of two strokes, the elderly servant Abra holding the linen cloth for the head. The painting set the template for every European Judith of the next century, including Artemisia Gentileschi's career-defin

Gustav Klimt's 1907 portrait of the Viennese hostess Adele Bloch-Bauer is the most expensive single painting Klimt ever made. Commissioned by Adele's husband Ferdinand, hung in Vienna until 1938, looted by the SS during the Anschluss, displayed in a Vienna museum for 58 years, and returned in 2006 to Adele's niece Maria Altmann after an eight-year US Supreme Court case that changed international restitution law.

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.