Beyond the sunflowers and wheatfields, Van Gogh painted borrowed scenes and strange experiments that show how his famous style and color took shape.
Gérôme returned from Cairo with carpets and photographs, then built a market so convincing in his Paris studio that critics spent decades untangling it.
Families first sat for painters to prove their power and piety, until later artists turned the same gathered poses into studies of tension and satire.
For two centuries, Italian painters chased the dream of turning a flat wall into a window, until perspective, light, and oil paint finally made it real.
A Hanoi-trained sculptor reached Paris in 1931, lost access to bronze during the war, and remade himself as a painter of silk and Riviera light.
Picasso returned continuously to the unassuming theme of motherhood, reworking it each time through a different technical vocabulary.
Instagram has become the place where painters share new work before it ever reaches a gallery wall, and these are the names worth the follow.
Vienna's opera house has a legal requirement for a fire curtain, until museum in progress turned it into contemporary art's most unlikely stage.
Botero's fame rests on volume and satire, but a handful of his still lifes, portraits, and history paintings carry stories his popular reputation hides.
Hans Memling based this Annunciation on Rogier van der Weyden's altarpiece, then swapped the kneeling Virgin for one collapsing into two angels' arms.
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