Metropolitan Museum of Art — New York, NY, USA

Mezzetino was a stock character in the old Italian travelling comedies — a servant type, always in love with someone who isn't having it. From what I can find, this sat in the collection of a friend who had prints made of everything, and a few decades later it was bought up for the Empress of Russia's palace.

This was a commission — her parents were rich Viennese patrons who put money behind a lot of the design world there. The story goes she was nine, and that she picked how she wanted to stand herself.

He'd never seen a jungle. From what I've read the closest he got was the glasshouses at the botanical gardens in Paris, and he built the plants up from there. He had a day job and taught himself, and the critics gave him a hard time for it.

Ensor's family ran a souvenir shop in Ostend that sold carnival masks, and he never really stopped painting them after that. This one comes out of the war years, when food was short across occupied Belgium — which the title seems to be having a go at.

Apparently this is from a stretch in the mid-1920s when Lissitzky put the geometric shapes aside for a while and started cutting up photographs instead, trying to get a still picture to hold something moving. People point to this kind of layering as an early step toward the collage-heavy propaganda photography that came out of the Soviet Union not long after.

A study head, apparently — one of a pile made while wrestling with a monument to a writer who'd been dead about forty years. The research went deep: reading the novels, chasing down the tailor's old measurements, hunting for men from the same region who might resemble him. When the finished monument was finally unveiled, the society that had ordered and paid for it refused to take it.

He painted apples over and over for most of his working life, dozens of times. The line everyone quotes is that he meant to astonish Paris with one — though nobody seems certain he ever actually said it.

Mezzetino was a stock character in the old Italian travelling comedies — a servant type, always in love with someone who isn't having it. From what I can find, this sat in the collection of a friend who had prints made of everything, and a few decades later it was bought up for the Empress of Russia's palace.

This came from a string of coastal landscapes painted while recovering from a breakdown — a much quieter stretch than the work he's known for.

From what I can find, this was painted while he was still wanted for killing a man years earlier, waiting on a pardon that never came in time — some people who write about this see Peter's denial as an odd echo of his own situation, though that's speculation, not something he ever said himself.

It came out of a huge doorway commission — bronze doors for a museum that was never actually built, so they never got hung anywhere. He kept picking at that project for decades and casting single figures out of it along the way, and this is one of those. The debt to Michelangelo is one he apparently never bothered to hide.

A ropewalk is just a very long straight lane — apparently the rope has to be stretched out full length before it can be twisted, so the workshop ends up being the length of the rope. He spent summers over in Holland for years, painting the same small trades again and again.

From what I can find this is a page out of a picture-book of Edo views — comic poems up top, a small scene printed underneath, the whole thing bound and sold to be flipped through rather than hung anywhere. The verses are by several different people, not by the one who drew the pictures.

The museum doesn't seem certain this is actually his. There's a very close version of the same scene elsewhere and, from what I've read, people have argued for a century about which came first and who painted which. The two young women are majas — a working-class Madrid style that rich families copied.

Supposedly Marinetti's Futurist manifesto singled out exactly this kind of quiet, moonlit mood as something painters needed to get over — funny seeing the movement's own future star drawing it a few years earlier.

Apparently the man in the suit is Eakins's own brother-in-law, painted late in his career as one of a handful of life-size standing portraits he made around then.

He spent his career on music halls and rented rooms rather than polite society portraits, and the sitter here was apparently a young Belgian woman he painted more than once around that time. There's also a small industry of writers who've tried to pin the Whitechapel murders on him — nothing proved, but the story trails his name around.

Apparently this was one of six paintings a merchant banker in Antwerp commissioned to track the months of the year — this one's high summer. Only five are known to survive.

She's the one who ordered this, according to Wikipedia — not just a sitter but his working partner, translating English chemistry into French and drawing the plates for his book. He made his money collecting taxes, which is what got him executed a few years after this was painted.

Apparently this was the first of his paintings to ever reach America — some collector picked it up in Paris for about $800, back when almost nobody had heard of him.