Louvre — Paris, Île-de-France, France

Nobody commissioned this one. It was, from what I've read, a deliberate swing at getting noticed — built out of long conversations with two men who lived through the wreck, plus a scale model of the raft set up in the studio. The disaster itself was a national scandal, mostly because the captain had got his command through connections rather than any skill at sea.

The government reportedly bought this almost right away, then kept it out of public view for years — a painting cheering on revolution apparently made the people now in charge nervous.

It was made for the dining hall of a monastery in Venice — a whole wall of feasting to eat your own supper under. French troops carried it off in 1797 and, it's said, cut it in half to get it out of the building.

The story behind it came from a Byron play about an Assyrian king who, with defeat coming, has everything he owns destroyed in front of him rather than let anyone else have it. Apparently the critics went for it hard when it was first shown, and it did him no favours with the officials who handed out state commissions.

The Latin cut into the tomb is death talking — roughly 'I'm here too', even in a perfect countryside that never existed anywhere. He'd apparently painted the same idea years earlier in a much bleaker version, and this one is the calm rethink.

This was made to order as a ceiling for one of the Louvre's own rooms — a museum commissioning itself a giant tribute to the classics, more or less. The crowd is supposedly a roll-call of great names from across the centuries, all painted turning up to worship one man.

Wikipedia says he painted this to get himself into the French academy, and they couldn't fit it into any category they already had, so they invented one — well-off people mucking about outdoors in silk. People still argue about whether this lot are setting off or coming home.

The scene comes straight out of Dante — the poet being rowed across a river in hell, steadied by his old Roman guide, while the drowned try to climb aboard. From what I've read it was the first big thing he ever showed in public, and it more or less made his name on the spot.

Someone apparently kept coming back to this same grouping - grandmother, mother, child - for something like twenty years without ever quite finishing it. An earlier version reportedly pulled crowds for two days straight when it first went on public show.

This one only really got talked about after it was stolen from the Louvre in 1911 — apparently investigators even brought Picasso in for questioning during the search.

This whole series was apparently made as a diplomatic gift for an emperor, with each season meant to stand for a stage of a life - summer being someone in their prime. Look closely at the woven collar and there's said to be a name stitched right into the wheat.

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.

Painted in Rome on a commission from the French crown, from what I can find, and people queued to see it. The oath itself doesn't seem to appear in any of the old Roman accounts — it looks like he made the moment up — and it got read later as a call to give everything up for your country, which supposedly wasn't the plan back when a king was footing the bill.