Los Angeles County Museum of Art — Los Angeles, CA, USA

He spent the last stretch of his career painting the same face over and over — hundreds of versions, from what I've read, each one flatter and more stripped back than the one before it.

Stettheimer's better known for her chaotic party scenes and portraits of New York's art crowd. This is a rare quiet one — just a bowl of zinnias against a curtain.

For a long time this was just filed as 'Portrait of a Man' — someone eventually managed to make out the barely-legible letter he's holding, addressed to himself, and that's apparently how they worked out who he was.

From what I've read, he spent his last summers teaching and painting around a fishing harbor in Massachusetts, and the pictures from those years got looser and looser — apparently people argued even then about whether some were done. He died not long after this one.

Apparently a wealthy backer had been funding his trips east for years — it started with a magazine job illustrating the Holy Land — and Morocco kept turning up in his paintings long after. They say he did a whole run of these night scenes there.

He painted so many of these letter-rack scenes that forgers later scrubbed off his signature and added a rival's, since that name sold better.

He moved to Paris partly to get away from how Black artists got treated back home, and this moody, almost colorless lighting became the thing he was known for there.

He kept African and Pacific carvings around his studio and painted them into scenes like this one — the bowl in the title is one of them.

This shows Czech Legion troops marching into Vladivostok in 1918, deep in the chaos of the Russian Civil War. Luks was usually known for gritty city scenes, not history painting on this scale.

This one, from what I can find, was painted as a companion to another Watteau scene called The Surprise — the two were meant to hang as a pair.

He'd been a newspaper cartoonist and a barroom brawler who liked to claim he'd once boxed under a made-up name. He ran with the painters who got called the Ashcan School — supposedly as an insult — for picking ordinary city people over polite subjects.

Apparently he painted a whole string of these — a woman, a window, light coming through — enough of them that people talk about it as a series. It's named after the china rather than the person, which tells you something about where he was looking.

She died young, in 1924, not long after she'd started moving from paintings like this one into textile and stage design.

He trained in Paris alongside the modern crowd, and apparently the woman he later married went on to run one of the big New York galleries that sold this whole generation of American painters. This one came out of time spent in Spain.

Wikipedia doesn't say much beyond names — apparently this is a real family, painted by a Czech-born LA artist who mixed hard cubist edges with a hazy hill-town backdrop.

This is one stretch of a long handscroll — apparently there are eleven of these sections, meant to be unrolled a bit at a time rather than hung on a wall. The painter was, they say, a samurai retainer who did this on the side.

The title's a whole sentence, which I've never seen before. They say he and his wife were both painters working in Los Angeles — I couldn't find out for sure whether that's the two of them standing there, but everyone seems to assume it is.

A mill-race is the channel that carries water to a mill wheel — I had to look that up. From what I've read he made his name painting working places like this, canals and quarries and construction, when everyone else wanted pretty ones.

According to Wikipedia he starved himself on purpose, trying to see colours nobody else could see, and it killed him at thirty-five. That's presented as fact, not legend, which makes a vase of flowers feel like higher stakes than it should.

This is believed to be Matisse's own garden outside Paris, with what's said to be his daughter and a friend having tea — that flat, saturated color was already becoming his signature.