Articles

Feature image: Paul Gauguin, The Loss of Virginity, 1890/91, via Google Arts & Culture

Eleanor Brooks

An Art History Brain Dump for the Beginning of ...

Seven paintings from five centuries and four continents, collected here without ranking or theme, gathered simply for the sake of loving them and knowing why.

Giovanni Andrea Sirani, Ulysses and Circe (detail), c. 1650-55, Capitoline Museums, Rome. via Wikimedia Commons.

Samuel Reed

Homer's Odyssey in Art, Ranked by Dramatic Inte...

Ten depictions of Homer's Odyssey in art history, curated and ranked from least to most intense, tracing four centuries of painters staging the same epic.

Michelangelo, The Fall and Expulsion from Garden of Eden (detail), 1510 via WIkipedia/Public Domain

Arthur Kingsley

Ten Essential Depictions of Adam and Eve in Art...

From Masaccio's expulsion to Haitian modernism, ten paintings trace how artists have reimagined the first sin across five centuries.

Leonora Carrington, Les Distractions de Dagobert, 1945, © 2026 Estate of Leonora Carrington / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, via Sotheby’s

Margaret Allen

Inside Leonora Carrington's Les Distractions de...

Leonora Carrington's 1945 egg tempera cosmology in four quadrants, painted in Mexican exile, set the 2024 auction record for a British-born woman artist.

Lee Krasner, Palingenesis, 1971. Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York © The Pollock-Krasner Foundation via Kasmin Gallery, New York

Eliza Warren

Lee Krasner Destroyed Her Own Paintings to Keep...

Lee Krasner was already an established New York painter before Jackson Pollock. Inside a career built on destruction, reinvention, and grief.

Ferdinand Hodler, Die Lebensmüden (The Tired of Life), 1892 via Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain

Nathan Cole

Parallelism: The Symbolist Theory Hiding in Pla...

Ferdinand Hodler built Parallelism from a Geneva Symbolist circle few people talk about. Meet the painters who carried the theory across Europe.

Gustav Klimt, Faculty Paintings, 1900-1907 via Wikimedia Commons

Jack Lowry

Three Klimt Masterpieces, Rejected by Vienna, E...

Three paintings rejected by the university that commissioned them, bought back by Klimt himself, and destroyed by retreating troops in 1945.

Three-faced Trinity, Church of Saint Quiriace of Provins (France), mural painting (detail), 16th century via Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Rebecca Levenson

How the Trifacial Trinity Became a Forbidden Image

Long before Trinity iconography was standardized, artists painted God with three faces on one head, until the Vatican banned the imagery outright.

Paul Signac, The Port of Saint-Tropez via Wikimedia Commons/Google Arts & Culture

Louisa Penrose

Matching Summer Travel Destinations to Famous P...

Explore a selection of famous paintings we recommend if you are traveling to these summer destinations, or just looking for a vehicle to transport your mind.

Salvador Dalí, Portrait of Mrs. Ann W. Green and her Son Jonathan, 1963 via WikiArt/Public Domain

Eleanor Brooks

Salvador Dalí's Portraits Ranked by the Backlas...

A ranking of Salvador Dalí's most controversial society portraits, from subtly unflattering likenesses to a commission the sitter's own family rejected.