Snow, oxen and a stone calvary, painted by a man living under palm trees. In Christmas Night, Gauguin looked back from the far side of the world to a Breton winter he had known years earlier.

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.

The Three Kings are here, the Holy Family is here, and almost nobody in the picture notices. Bruegel set the Epiphany in a Flemish village in a heavy snowfall, and the miracle is the easiest thing in it to miss.

A practical guide to choosing art print size: the two-thirds rule, hanging height, and what Vermeer, Monet and Hokusai teach about scale.

Blood-red walls, a sour green ceiling, four lamps buzzing with yellow halos and a few lonely drinkers. Van Gogh stayed awake three nights to paint The Night Café in Arles, and wanted it to feel like a place where you could go mad.

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.

A boat tilts on a huge wave, sailors fight the ropes, and Christ sleeps at the stern. Rembrandt painted only one seascape, in 1633, and in 1990 it was cut from its frame and stolen. It has never been found.

Fragonard's The Swing (1767) hides a lover in the bushes and sends a shoe flying. Who commissioned it, what the details mean, and why it defines the Rococo.

Bruegel, Botticelli, Honthorst, Monet, Carl Larsson and more: eight public-domain paintings that make a room feel like Christmas, with advice on scale, rooms and frames.

A man sleeps under a pear tree, his friends eat bread and porridge, and the wheat stands taller than the people who cut it. Bruegel's The Harvesters of 1565 is one of the first paintings to make ordinary work in a landscape its whole subject.

The January page of the Très Riches Heures shows the Duc de Berry at his New Year feast. Here is how to read the table, the dogs, the tapestry and the gold ship.

In Correggio's Holy Night there is no lamp, no moon and no fire. The light comes from the newborn Child, and it is so strong that a shepherd girl shields her eyes. Here is how one Christmas painting taught Europe to paint the dark.

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.

Botticelli signed only one painting, and he signed it with a warning. The Mystic Nativity of 1500 mixes a joyful Christmas scene with angels, embraces and fleeing devils, painted in a Florence that thought the world was ending.

The ox, the ass, the lily and the star in Old Master Christmas paintings are coded sentences. Hugo van der Goes's Portinari Altarpiece shows how to read them.

One subject, six movements. Follow the dogs in famous paintings from Van Eyck to Seurat and you learn to spot Northern Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Romanticism, Impressionism and Pointillism at a glance.

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 vanitas painting reminds the viewer that life is short. Harmen Steenwijck's table of about 1640 shows what each skull, shell, lamp and flute meant.

Four Nativity paintings that shaped how the West pictures Christmas night: Giotto, Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Botticelli and Gerard van Honthorst, read through light, scale and a single newborn child.

Agnolo Bronzino painted Eleonora of Toledo, wife of Duke Cosimo I de' Medici, in a gold-brocaded gown beside her young son. The cool, flawless surface is the message: a dynasty that expected to last.