National Gallery of Art — Washington, DC, USA

Apparently this is one of the paintings people point to when they talk about cubism pushing all the way toward abstraction — there's barely anything left that reads as a literal scene. It's tied to a procession he remembered from Spain, but almost none of that original imagery survived into what's on the canvas.

This was one of a run of nudes his dealer had him churn out fast to sell — and when they went on show in Paris, police shut the exhibition down on opening day for indecency.

Apparently that's his own family and friends in their own sitting room. Painting your relatives is cheaper than hiring models — though from the faces, the sitting went on a while.

From what I've read, he was still working on this when he died, so it was never actually finished — which might explain a few things, or might not.

Supposedly he painted this same setup over and over — pale figure, near-black surroundings, no story attached to it — and it sold well enough that he kept at it for years. I couldn't find anything about this one in particular, only that there are a lot like it.

Apparently 'Fantômas' was a wildly popular pulp villain in French novels and early films back then — the kind of cheap thrill respectable painting wasn't supposed to notice. Cubists of the period put newsprint and pulp covers like this straight into their paintings anyway, which was kind of the point: you didn't need a myth or a portrait anymore, a newsstand would do.

He never left France — this jungle came from botanical gardens and picture books, not anywhere he'd actually set foot.

They say painters in this circle tightened up after the First World War — fewer overlapping shards, flatter shapes, something closer to order than the earlier, more splintered cubism. This one's from that stretch, and the checkerboard corner is one of the only clues there was ever a table under all this.

This is the Bible story where Abigail rushes to meet David's men with food, trying to stop them attacking her household after her husband snubbed them. It doesn't end there — Nabal dies soon after, and Abigail ends up marrying David instead.

This was originally the side panel of a bigger triptych — the centre piece is long gone, so nobody's totally sure what completed the scene.

Supposedly the commission was turned down flat at first, and only accepted after an actual meeting with her — then it dragged on for something like a decade, with a whole second painting of her finished years after this one. Nobody, it seems, was in any hurry.

This one's round — a tondo — and from what I can find, historians don't fully agree who painted most of it: it's catalogued under one name, but they think a second painter, plus workshop hands, did a lot of the actual work. It's been called the 'Cook Tondo' for decades, after a private collector, even though it left his collection a long time ago.

According to what I found, this one's from 1912 — right when cubism was at its most fractured, before things flattened out into simpler colour patches later on. Playing cards turn up constantly in paintings from this circle, apparently because a card's already a flat, printed thing pretending to sit on a table, which suited what these painters were after anyway.

Sketches like this came out of a few months tagging along with a French mission to North Africa, according to Wikipedia — notebooks filled up on the trip, then the big painting worked out later, back home. One journey he kept mining for years afterwards.

This one got mistaken for a Raphael self-portrait for a long time. Turns out it's actually a portrait of one of his patrons — a wealthy Florentine banker who helped fund some of his other work.

They say this started as a quick study of a French stage actress, a favourite subject who sat for several portraits like this one.

From what I can find, this was part of a set standing in for the four seasons — the lion's a nod to Leo, marking high summer.

This is the Bible story of Daniel thrown into a den of lions for refusing to stop praying to his own god — and coming out fine. Apparently Rubens painted the lions true to life-size, which is part of why the scene lands so hard.

The story goes that he spent years painting quiet, brownish landscapes, then late in life switched almost overnight to thick, crusted paint like this — and apparently it baffled the people who'd been happily buying the brown ones.

The juniper behind her is supposedly a pun — 'ginepro' is Italian for juniper, so it doubles as a nod to her name. It's also, they say, the only Leonardo painting on public display anywhere in the Americas, part of why it made headlines when a museum bought it for a record sum in the 1960s.