Rembrandt

Nobody's actually sure who these two are, or which couple from the Old Testament they're dressed up as — the title only got attached by a dealer a couple of hundred years later and stuck. Van Gogh supposedly said he'd give ten years of his life to sit in front of it for a fortnight with nothing but a dry crust to eat.

They say this was painted late in his career, for the guild that checked the quality of dyed cloth — literally the men grading everyone else's fabric. It was meant to hang in their own guild hall.

This is meant to be an Old Testament prophet mourning Jerusalem's fall to Babylon — the city's still burning in the corner, and those gold objects are supposedly temple treasure he saved. Apparently this is from very early in his career, well before the more famous group portraits.

They say the title's a bit of a mix-up — old varnish darkened over the centuries until the scene looked like night, though it's really broad daylight. It was also trimmed down on all four sides at some point, apparently to fit between two doors.

Apparently this wasn't the only time he painted his wife dressed up as a goddess - it was something he kept coming back to.

This is where the phrase about the writing on the wall comes from — a king throws a feast using treasure taken from a temple, and a hand turns up mid-party to spell out how it ends for him. The Hebrew, according to Wikipedia, came from a learned neighbour in Amsterdam, and it's laid out in columns rather than the usual direction, which people have been arguing about ever since.

According to Wikipedia he came back to this years after finishing it and reworked large parts, including her face. It was also attacked with acid in a museum in the 1980s and took more than a decade to put right.

I read that some people who've studied this closely think the older man's two hands look different on purpose - one softer, like it's meant to read as a mother's touch, the other firmer. Once you notice it, it's hard to unsee.

The name it goes by comes from money — the story is that a copy once changed hands for a sum that was outrageous for a print, and it stuck. It isn't one moment either: from what I've read he packed several separate things from the same chapter of the Bible into a single scene, so people are being healed, argued with and turned away all at once.

Prints like this come in states: you print a few, then go back and cut into the metal plate again, so the same picture exists in versions that don't match each other. Supposedly he gouged out whole sections of this one between printings and redrew them, and the later version came out far darker than the first.

The name it goes by wasn't his — someone attached it later, and the museum now prefers a slightly different one. There's apparently a long-running argument about whether he painted it at all, or a pupil did. French writers in the 1800s were mad about it, mostly because of the staircase.