The stories behind famous paintings, the painters who made them, and the movements that shaped them. Every work here can be recreated by hand in oil on canvas.
Ulysses and Argus depicts the moment from the Odyssey of Homer in which the long-absent hero, returned to Ithaca in disguise, is recognised only…
The scariest paintings ever made, ranked by how often people search for them: Saturn Devouring His Son, The Scream, The Nightmare, the Garden of…
The scariest paintings in art history, thirteen of them, behind thirteen doors: Goya's Saturn, Fuseli's Nightmare, Munch's Scream, the Witches'…
Witches' Sabbath (El Aquelarre) shows the Devil as a great black goat crowned with leaves, receiving children from a circle of witches under a…
The Nightmare shows a woman asleep across a bed with her head thrown back, an incubus squatting on her chest and looking out at the viewer, and a…
Explore A Flood (1883) by Briton Rivière at Manchester Art Gallery. Victorian Realism depicting survivors on a rooftop. History and full analysis.
The Trojan Horse paintings and the burning of Troy: Bramer's quarrel over the armour, Tiepolo's procession, Corinth's horse, Elsheimer and de…
The famous Achilles paintings in story order: Chiron, the girls of Skyros, the wrath of Achilles, the forge of Vulcan, the death of Hector and…
The Trojan War before the war, painting by painting: the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, the golden apple, the Judgement of Paris in Rubens, Cranach…
The Penelope paintings and the homecoming of Odysseus: the dog Argus, the nurse and the scar, the loom, the bow no suitor could string and the bed…
The Circe paintings, the Sirens paintings and Calypso's island, painting by painting: Waterhouse, Rivière, Draper, Fuseli, Böcklin, Rubens and…
Every famous painting of Homer's Odyssey, in story order. Part 1: the sacrifice of Iphigenia, Achilles, the Trojan Horse, the bag of winds and the…
The last scene of Marriage A-la-Mode: in her father's house by old London Bridge the Countess has taken laudanum after reading of Silvertongue's…
The fifth scene of Marriage A-la-Mode: in a room at the Turk's Head bagnio after the masquerade, the Earl has drawn his sword on the lawyer and…
The fourth scene of Marriage A-la-Mode: the old Earl is dead, the new Countess holds a morning levée while her hair is dressed, an Italian singer…
The third scene of Marriage A-la-Mode: the Viscount brings a very young girl to a quack doctor's consulting room and complains that the pills have…
The second scene of Marriage A-la-Mode: it is twenty past noon, the Viscount has come home with a broken sword and a woman's cap in his pocket,…
The first of Hogarth's six scenes of Marriage A-la-Mode: the Earl of Squander sells his son, a City Alderman buys a title, the money is already on…
Hogarth's Marriage A-la-Mode explained as one story in six rooms: the settlement, the morning after, the doctor, the levée, the bagnio and the…
