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.

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

Dutch and Flemish flower paintings never wilt because they were never real bouquets. Between about 1600 and 1720, painters gathered blooms that open in different months into a single vase, then held them still forever. The flower piece, as this kind of still life is called, was part botany, part luxury object, and part quiet lesson on how fast beauty passes. This guide walks through seven Golden Age masters of the form, from Jan Brueghel the Elder to Jan van Huysum, and expla

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

Between 1550 and 1700, five women ran professional painting studios in cities that were closed to them by custom and often by law: Artemisia Gentileschi, Lavinia Fontana, Judith Leyster, Giovanna Garzoni, and Mary Beale. This survey of their careers runs from the theatrical violence of Roman history painting to the first woman to keep an open workshop, a master of the Haarlem guild, and the English painter who took 83 commissions in a single year.

Judith Leyster ran her own painting workshop in the golden age of Dutch art, signed her canvases with a hidden five pointed star, and lit her musicians and self-possessed women by single candles. For more than two centuries her work hung under other men's names. Here is how a brewer's daughter built a signature style, and how her monogram was finally read again in 1893.

Between 1803 and 1805 William Blake took a single passage from the Book of Revelation and turned it into a monster. The Great Red Dragon watercolours, four sheets made for the patron Thomas Butts, gave prophecy a body, a turned back, and a will, and they remain among the most frightening images the age of Romanticism produced.

Eight images from William Blake’s private mythology, from the compass-wielding creator of The Ancient of Days to the Red Dragon of Revelation and the tiny gold-flecked Ghost of a Flea. What each vision shows, how Blake made it, and where each fits in the strangest career in British art.

In 1539 Henry VIII chose a wife he had never met, and he chose her from a picture. Hans Holbein's portrait of Anne of Cleves, a panel of about 65 by 48 centimetres, arranged a royal marriage, helped end one within six months, and left behind the most fortunate of the king's six wives.

Julia Beck was one of the very few women of her generation to earn a living from her art, and she did it in France. Born in Stockholm in 1853, she turned the quiet river reflections and water lilies of Grez-sur-Loing into the center of her work. How a bookbinder daughter became a plein-air landscape painter, and why France remembered her before Sweden did.

Four allegorical heads built entirely from blossoms, ripe produce, the harvest, and the bark of a bare tree. What each of Giuseppe Arcimboldo's Four Seasons is actually made of, why a court painter assembled faces from vegetables for the Habsburg emperors, and the imperial message hidden inside the harvest.

Ten portraits made between 1434 and 1884, from van Eyck’s mirror-lit Arnolfini couple to the Paris scandal of Sargent’s Madame X. What each painting shows, how it was made, and why the face still holds the eye.

Around 1615 the painters of Antwerp invented a new subject: the collection itself. From Frans Francken's jewel-like cabinets to David Teniers's 1660 catalogue of an archduke's gallery, here is how the picture of a room full of pictures became one of the strangest and most influential genres in European art.

Eight paintings Edvard Munch finished before 1925, from the deathbed Sick Child of 1885 to the sanatorium Golgotha of 1900. What each one shows, how he made it, and how together they trace a life shadowed by illness, desire, and grief.

A muse is not a model. A model sits for one painting. A muse sits for thirty, and slowly the painter's whole way of seeing rearranges itself around her face. The women below are the ones who reorganised the careers of the men who painted them.

Michelangelo spent his twenties dissecting cadavers by candlelight in a Florentine monastery. The bodies he was looking at became, fifteen years later, the figures on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He always said he was a sculptor, never a painter. The paintings prove him right.

Surrealism began as a Paris literary movement in 1924 and turned into the most globally recognised modern art style of the twentieth century. The ten painters below are the ones the movement could not have existed without — and the ancestors they were quietly building on.

Before Goya, European painters showed war as triumph. After Goya, they could no longer pretend. The Third of May 1808 ended the heroic battle picture and invented the painting of senseless violence — a tradition that runs through Manet, Picasso, and every photograph of war we have made since.