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.

On the back wall of Las Meninas there is a small mirror, and inside the mirror are two heads — the king and queen of Spain. They should not be there. The painting has been arguing about why they are for three hundred and seventy years.

Pleasure, intimacy, asymmetry, pastel. The hundred-year style that Watteau began, Boucher polished, and Fragonard perfected — and that the French Revolution swept off the walls.

A young woman in a blue and yellow turban, in three-quarter view against a black ground, turning toward the painter with her mouth half-open as if she has been called for. No story, no setting, no narrative. Reading the small Dutch picture that has become one of the four or five most reproduced paintings in the world.

Two hundred years of Italian painting, sculpture, and architecture in the names that still matter — Giotto, Masaccio, Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and the three painters who carried the late Renaissance into Venice and beyond.

A severed head, mouth open in a scream, eyes wide, snakes alive in the hair, blood spilling from the neck — painted on a wooden shield in 1597 by a twenty-six-year-old Caravaggio. Reading the painting that took an ancient story and turned it into a face caught at the moment of its own death.

After Raphael died in 1520, Italian painting got stranger. Necks lengthened, bodies twisted into spirals, colour grew acidic, space stopped behaving. Reading the painters who closed the High Renaissance — Pontormo, Parmigianino, Bronzino, El Greco — and the movement we now call Mannerism.

A naked woman stands on a scallop shell, blown ashore by two flying wind gods, while a maid waits with a flowered cloak. Reading the painting that put a pagan goddess back on the wall of a Christian house in 1485.

There is not one Sunflowers painting. There are seven, painted in two intense bursts over fourteen months in Arles. They were a decoration for a house that was supposed to hold a school of painters and never did.

The powder room is the smallest, most concentrated wall in the house. Six painting choices that earn their place on it — small enough to read at a glance, considered enough to hold up to close looking.

A young woman in a yellow bodice and blue apron pours milk from a brown jug into a low earthenware bowl. The window is on her left, the bread is on the table, and the wall behind her is doing more work than almost anything else in seventeenth-century painting. A reading of Vermeer's Milkmaid.

Edouard Manet painted A Bar at the Folies-Bergere in 1882, the year before he died. He was 50 and already ill with the locomotor ataxia that would kill him at 51. He had a small studio set up at the Folies-Bergere cabaret in Paris and a model, Suzon, who actually worked behind one of the bars there. He posed her in his studio with a marble counter, bottles, and a mirror, and built the whole composition from those props. The result is one of the most quietly impossible paintin

Johannes Vermeer painted The Astronomer in 1668. It is one of only two paintings he signed and dated with the year, one of only two male portraits he ever produced, and the only one of his known interiors where the subject is reading a book. Vermeer painted thirty-six pictures in his lifetime. He gave very few of them to men. This is one. A scholar in a long blue-and-gold robe leans over a table. His right hand reaches forward and rests on a celestial globe; his left holds th

In the autumn of 1851, John Everett Millais set up his easel beside a slow tributary of the Hogsmill River in Surrey and began to paint a stretch of riverbank twelve feet wide. He worked there eleven hours a day, six days a week, through autumn rain and winter cold, for four months. He painted every plant in front of him from life: the dog rose, the loosestrife, the meadowsweet, the willow, the forget-me-nots, refusing to invent a single leaf. There was no figure in the paint

On a damp London evening in the summer of 1875, James McNeill Whistler took a small wooden panel out into a riverside pleasure garden in Chelsea and watched a firework burst over the trees. He carried the panel home, set it on his easel, and painted what he had seen as a smear of gold sparks falling through a dark blue mist — the rocket itself reduced to a flicker, the audience below to two indistinct figures, the night to a wash of weather and smoke. He titled the work Noctu