Rijksmuseum — Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands

The village in the title had turned into an artists' colony by then — painters moving out to a farming place on the heath specifically to paint the people already living there. From what I read, whole careers got built on that arrangement. The farmers mostly stayed farmers.

Amsterdam was throwing up entire new neighbourhoods around this time, and supposedly he was out in it constantly — he took hundreds of photographs of the city and worked from them indoors afterwards, which was not a normal way to paint back then.

The blue in her jacket is ultramarine — ground lapis lazuli that reportedly cost more than gold at the time. Not the obvious choice for a plain house dress, if that's what this even is.

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.

He obviously tilted these on purpose — turning the square to a diamond was meant to clash with the flat walls and floors of whatever room it ended up in.

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.

Supposedly he once said he didn't paint animals, he painted light — which is a funny thing to claim when, from what I can tell, his whole career was ducks and cows beside ditches.

This is a home scene rather than a commission, as far as I can tell — a painter putting her own household on canvas. Beyond that I came up short. I couldn't find who the two students were or what the lesson was supposed to be. If anyone knows the rest of it, I'd love the story.

Apparently this is one of a series where van Doesburg took a nude model and kept flattening her into blocks and lines, step by step, until almost nothing human was left — part of what pushed him toward the grid paintings De Stijl is known for.

He apparently spent most of his life painting one stretch of the IJssel around Hattem — same water, same skies, over and over. And cows in a wet field is about as standard a Dutch subject as there is; they say buyers have wanted that exact view since the 1600s.

They say the French painters who'd worked in these woods half a century earlier were heroes to the Dutch landscape crowd, and apparently he only made the trip himself right at the end of his life — to paint the forest they'd all been admiring from a distance.

The Dutch painters of this moment get filed under Amsterdam Impressionism, which sounds a lot sunnier than what they actually put on canvas: sleet, back canals, half-built streets. They say the point was the city on an ordinary bad day rather than the postcard version.

They say she's technically a kitchen maid, not a dairy worker — the milk here is just breakfast, not her job. It's been called one of the finest paintings of everyday life there is, though I'm never sure who gets to decide that.

From what I've read he was the youngest of three brothers who all painted — the other two went off to town views and stranger things, and he stuck with cows in wet fields for his entire life.

From what I could find, this dot-by-dot way of painting came over from France, and he was one of the few Dutch painters who really committed to it. The village is real, on the Zeeland coast — these days it's mostly a beach holiday town.

Small oil studies like this were the everyday output for painters of his school — knocked out fast on a board, often outdoors, and plenty of them were never meant to be finished pictures at all. A good number got sold anyway, and a good number ended up in collections.

The person who painted this later became known for stripping everything down to grids of flat colour — no fog, no moonlight, nothing like this left in it at all. It's strange to look at this soft, moonlit scene and picture the same hand ending up there.

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.