Cleveland Museum of Art — Cleveland, OH, USA

Apparently he painted this same setup - seated, facing forward, hands folded - close to 200 times, and barely ever named who he was painting. Supposedly one of the other versions is so similar it's been mistaken for the same sitter.

This apparently isn't a finished painting on its own — it's a sketch for a mural, so somewhere there might have been meant to be a full-size version on an actual wall. The gold sky, the ruins, the goats: all of it seems to be reaching for 'ancient Greece.'

This print was meant for an illustrated Bible — Marc was working through the Genesis story with animals standing in for it. The other one in the set showed horses; museum notes call this one the more menacing of the two.

According to what I found, he only managed to paint full-time after winning something like 100,000 francs in a state lottery — before that it was a government day job on the side. He kept coming back to this same river valley for years, apparently, enough that people credit him with putting it on the map.

This one's grouped with two other Dürer engravings as his 'Master Prints,' from what I've read — three prints meant to show off everything the medium could do.

It's said that he photographed sites like this and then rebuilt the scene back in the studio, so what looks grabbed in a single moment was actually pieced together afterward. He ran in the same circles as Van Gogh and, from what I've read, wanted to paint ordinary working people rather than grand subjects.

Apparently this is a small preparatory sketch for a bigger, finished painting - the kind of quick study made to work out a mood before committing to the real canvas. I couldn't track down much more about it.

Apparently this view comes from a shot in an early experimental film Sheeler made with the photographer Paul Strand, about lower Manhattan — he was already thinking in stacked, simplified shapes before he ever touched a brush to it.

According to the museum, the painter was hurt in a gas attack at Verdun during WWI — this one's supposed to be a tribute to pilots and flying machines in general, not a portrait of any one of them.

He liked painting Paris from a window looking down like this — a habit he supposedly kept up for years. He got lumped in with the 'Fauves' at the scandal-causing show of 1905, though you'd never call this one wild or loud.

Apparently he was born in Warsaw and only picked up a French name after a friend talked him into it once he'd settled in Paris and started running with Picasso and Braque — the little balloon and flag tucked in here are supposedly his own nod to the country he adopted.

I couldn't find much on this particular scroll, but Bugaku is an old Japanese court dance tradition - apparently dancers have performed in costumes like this one for well over a thousand years.

They say he knew Munch's work from early on, and was after a feeling more than an accurate view — this reads like a mood he wanted you to sit in, not a real place.

They say he mixed the loose, bright color of the Fauves with the more broken-up shapes of the Cubists, and ran with a Moscow group trying to fuse that French style with older Russian folk prints.

I read that Matisse painted this from inside a moving car — had his son pull over on a drive to an airport near Paris in 1917, then worked through the windshield with the windows shut while passing traffic rocked the car back and forth.

They say Kirchner and his Die Brücke friends thought cheap, loud entertainment — circuses, wrestling matches, variety halls — was more honest than anything on a proper stage.

The woman here was apparently an artist herself — an etcher — and by most accounts pretty private, which makes it interesting she agreed to sit for this at all.

They say Corinth kept turning the brush on himself after a stroke nearly killed him in 1911, and this is one of the last self-portraits from near the end of his life.

Apparently she only made something like 200 paintings in her whole life, all around this size, all this hushed and toned-down. This exact table with the teapot turns up in three other versions elsewhere, so she must have kept coming back to it.

Mondrian, from what I've read, believed grids like this could help build a calmer, more honest world after the first World War — a strict visual language everyone could read the same way.