Raphael

The Three Graces come out of Greek and Roman myth — three sisters standing in for charm, beauty and good cheer, and painters kept returning to them for centuries as a reason to put a trio of women together in one frame. Past that I couldn't turn up much on this particular one; even the photo of it going around is black and white.

This was made for a church altar rather than a gallery. According to what I found, Pope Julius II was the one who commissioned it — about as prestigious a job as a painter could land back then.

A lot of the faces in this crowd are said to be portraits of Raphael's own circle - the bald figure slumped over a block up front is supposedly Michelangelo, added in after Raphael got a peek at the Sistine ceiling next door, and the man crouched down sketching on a slate at the right is thought to be a stand-in for the architect Bramante.

This one got mistaken for a Raphael self-portrait for a long time. Turns out it's actually a portrait of one of his patrons — a wealthy Florentine banker who helped fund some of his other work.

The odd name comes from the Cowper family, who used to own it — nothing to do with the subject. Like a lot of British collections, it eventually made its way into an American museum in the early 1900s.

This one has had an odd trip: it belonged to the Russian imperial collection at one point, and the Soviet government sold it off in the 1930s to raise cash — that's apparently how it ended up in Washington.

The candles in this one apparently weren't just decorative — real ones were meant to burn in front of it, so the painted flames would blur together with the real light in a dim room.