This showed at a Paris salon alongside a handful of painters using color this wild — critics apparently called them 'the wild beasts,' and the nickname (Fauves) stuck.

He turned a square canvas onto its corner to hang like a diamond — not a one-off trick, he kept coming back to the format for years.

This was a commission — her parents were rich Viennese patrons who put money behind a lot of the design world there. The story goes she was nine, and that she picked how she wanted to stand herself.

Apparently it stands for the twin-town friendship between Turku and Gothenburg, and there are two of them — the original in one city and a copy in the other. You'll come across this one by the market square at Puutori.

He'd never seen a jungle. From what I've read the closest he got was the glasshouses at the botanical gardens in Paris, and he built the plants up from there. He had a day job and taught himself, and the critics gave him a hard time for it.

Took him something like two years, from what I can find — a pile of small studies done out at the park, then the big one built up indoors. The speckled border round the edge is his as well; he added it later so the thing wouldn't have to sit inside somebody else's gold frame.

Ensor's family ran a souvenir shop in Ostend that sold carnival masks, and he never really stopped painting them after that. This one comes out of the war years, when food was short across occupied Belgium — which the title seems to be having a go at.

Apparently this is from a stretch in the mid-1920s when Lissitzky put the geometric shapes aside for a while and started cutting up photographs instead, trying to get a still picture to hold something moving. People point to this kind of layering as an early step toward the collage-heavy propaganda photography that came out of the Soviet Union not long after.

A Russian businessman ordered this for the staircase of his Moscow house, along with a second panel to hang near it. Supposedly he got nervous about all the bare bodies, pulled out, then changed his mind and took them anyway.

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.

According to the city's tourism site, this one was commissioned by the shopping centre it's balanced on, taking its cue from all the ice cream stands doing business on the street below. Apparently the tilted tip was meant to echo the church spires on the skyline nearby — a mall dressed up, half-jokingly, as a cathedral of consumption.

Supposedly he painted this right after leaving hospital — the print behind him nods to the Japanese woodblocks he collected.

This one's built from strips of coloured tape rather than paint, and it was never finished. A curator worked out a few years back that it's likely been hanging upside down since the 1940s — and from what I've read they're leaving it that way, because the tape has gone so fragile that turning it now could take the whole thing apart.

He's usually filed with the Fauves — the 'wild beasts' famous for screaming colour — but apparently what he actually loved was grey weather and busy water, and he spent years travelling around Europe painting one port after another.

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.

The story that went round was that he'd had himself lashed to a ship's mast for hours in a real storm to see one properly — apparently that claim has been doubted for a very long time now. The critics of the day weren't kind either; one of them dismissed it as soapsuds and whitewash.

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.

The models were apparently his sister and his dentist, and it supposedly won him $300 and instant fame overnight. People still argue about whether he was making fun of farm folk or standing up for them — he insisted it was the second.

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.

A study head, apparently — one of a pile made while wrestling with a monument to a writer who'd been dead about forty years. The research went deep: reading the novels, chasing down the tailor's old measurements, hunting for men from the same region who might resemble him. When the finished monument was finally unveiled, the society that had ordered and paid for it refused to take 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.

The name spelled out in the tiles sent me looking: Babrios was apparently an ancient Greek poet who retold Aesop's fables in verse, and this one is the sour grapes. It's set into a school wall, which figures.

He painted apples over and over for most of his working life, dozens of times. The line everyone quotes is that he meant to astonish Paris with one — though nobody seems certain he ever actually said it.

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.

It's one of a run of goldfish pictures he turned out over a few months. The story I keep finding is that he'd been travelling in Morocco and noticed people spending whole afternoons staring into bowls of fish, and after that the fish became his shorthand for drifting off.

This was one of the first of his rehearsal-room pictures, painted when he'd started getting himself in behind the scenes at the Paris opera house through friends with subscriptions. The building he was working in burned down a few years later, from what I can find, so the room itself is long gone.

The woman in the chair was a pianist who ran with a crowd of painters, writers and musicians. Apparently he painted her many times and the two stayed close friends for years, even after her marriage ended.

Mezzetino was a stock character in the old Italian travelling comedies — a servant type, always in love with someone who isn't having it. From what I can find, this sat in the collection of a friend who had prints made of everything, and a few decades later it was bought up for the Empress of Russia's palace.

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.

The woman reading is Madame Hessel — according to what I've read, she was his art dealer's wife and one of his closest friends, and he painted her over and over for something like forty years. This is her on holiday at a house by the Normandy coast.