A specialty coffee shop is a commercial interior optimised for the twenty-minute visit. The five paintings below are chosen for that audience: paintings that register from across the room while the visitor is ordering at the counter, reward a second look from the seated position at the small table, and survive the warm pendant lamp-light most specialty cafes use after sunset.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler painted Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 in his London Chelsea studio in autumn 1871. The 144.3 × 162.4 centimetre oil-on-canvas shows the artist's 67-year-old mother Anna Matilda McNeill Whistler seated in profile against a flat grey wall. Whistler titled the painting NOT as a portrait of his mother but as an arrangement of two colours — the work that began the late-19th-century 'art for art's sake' movement.

Between 1793 and 1867 five French and Spanish paintings changed what political subject matter could look like in Western canvas painting. The five — David's Death of Marat, Goya's Third of May 1808, Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, Courbet's Stone Breakers, and Manet's Execution of Maximilian — together form the load-bearing seventy-four-year sequence in which Western political painting moved from Neoclassical allegory to documentary Realism.

Gustave Courbet painted The Stone Breakers in autumn 1849 in his studio at Ornans, a small village in the Doubs valley of eastern France. The 165 × 257 centimetre oil-on-canvas showed two figures breaking stones beside a country road for the construction of the Ornans-Pontarlier rural highway. The painting was the central exhibit in Courbet's 1849-50 Paris Salon and was the inaugural document of the French Realism movement.

Eugène Delacroix painted Liberty Leading the People between October and December 1830, three months after the Three Glorious Days of the July Revolution (27-29 July 1830) that overthrew King Charles X of France. The 260 × 325 centimetre oil-on-canvas hangs in the Paris collection that purchased it from the Salon of 1831 for 3,000 francs.

A shared bedroom is the rare interior where wall art has to satisfy two people whose visual preferences may not perfectly overlap. The six paintings below are chosen for that constraint: each carries a quiet emotional register that neither partner reads as imposed, a controlled palette that survives both morning sun from the east window and warm evening lamp-light, and subject matter that is intimate without being romantic in any sentimental sense.

Jacques-Louis David painted The Death of Marat in approximately three months between July and November 1793, immediately after the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat in his Paris bath on 13 July 1793. The 165 × 128 centimetre oil-on-canvas hangs Marat dead in the green-curtained wooden tub he used to soothe his chronic skin disease, the murder weapon — Charlotte Corday's small kitchen knife — visible on the floor.

Titian painted the Venus of Urbino in 1538 in Venice on commission from Guidobaldo II della Rovere, the 24-year-old heir to the Duchy of Urbino, almost certainly as a wedding gift for his 10-year-old bride Giulia Varano. The 119 × 165 centimetre oil-on-canvas shows a naked young woman lying on a red velvet daybed inside a Renaissance bedroom, looking directly out of the picture at the viewer with calm self-possession.

Jan van Eyck painted what is now called the Arnolfini Portrait in 1434 in Bruges, almost certainly on commission from the Italian merchant Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini for an unknown purpose that has been debated continuously for almost 600 years. The 82.2 × 60 centimetre oak-panel painting carries Van Eyck's painted signature on the rear wall above a convex mirror — Johannes de Eyck fuit hic 1434 — and the convex mirror reflects two additional figures the rest of the compos

A hotel lobby is the rare commercial interior where wall art is read by a moving audience at varying distances over a four-to-fifteen second window. The six paintings below are chosen for those constraints: a large legible compositional centre that registers from across a check-in counter, a palette that survives both daylight from the entrance and warm evening lamp-light, and subject matter that signals the hotel's positioning without describing it in words.

Pontormo painted the Deposition from the Cross 1525-1528 as the altarpiece for the small Capponi family chapel in the Florence church of Santa Felicita. The 313 × 192 cm panel is the canonical post-Raphael Mannerist break from High Renaissance composition: ten figures in an unstable vertical pyramid, no Cross visible anywhere, no landscape, no architecture, no perspectival depth.

A reading-room wall needs paintings that hold attention without competing with a book. The six paintings below — drawn from the Northern European seventeenth-century interior, French Impressionist portraiture, and Danish quiet-modernism — share three qualities: a single legible focal point, a controlled palette that survives lamp-light, and subject matter that rewards a second look after the reader has set the book down. Each one is available as a fine print in the Zocine arc

Mary Cassatt painted the same domestic ritual — two women at afternoon tea in a respectable upper-middle-class drawing-room — three times across the decade 1880-1891: an oil canvas in 1880 (currently in a Boston collection), a tonally cooler 1890 version held in a Washington collection, and the well-known 1891 color drypoint-and-aquatint print, the seventh of her ten-print Japonisme series.

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