#blue

The blue in her jacket is ultramarine — ground lapis lazuli that reportedly cost more than gold at the time. Not the obvious choice for a plain house dress, if that's what this even is.

This started off a run of tree paintings he kept at for years — each one taking a bit more out, according to Wikipedia, until the trees eventually turned into straight lines and blocks and stopped being trees at all.

It's pastel — chalk, basically — rather than paint, which I only found out looking it up, and it explains why the colour sits so grainy. He drew dancers for decades, apparently, mostly the standing-about parts rather than anything you'd buy a ticket for.

Gris was close with Picasso in Paris and got called his disciple early on — not exactly a compliment, from what I can tell, but he'd carved out his own geometric style by the time he painted this one.

One out of a huge cycle he kept adding to for decades — love, jealousy, death — built to hang together as a set rather than be met one at a time. He came back to two people kissing over and over, in paint and in prints, and from what I can find the two of them get harder to tell apart with every version.

This came out of a run of flower paintings made in his last year, while he was living in an asylum in the south of France and painting whatever was brought to his room. The background was pink once, according to the museum's own notes — the red pigment faded out of it — so the pale white we get isn't the colour he actually mixed.

Apparently he meant this one as a summing-up and expected to be done after it — he was ill and broke, and by his own account he tried to end his life not long after finishing. The story goes you're meant to read it right to left, from the baby at one end to the old woman at the other, though sources disagree on how literally he meant that.

Painted as a present for his brother's newborn son, who'd been given his name. They say the family hung it over their bed. The flat, bright look of it supposedly owes a lot to the Japanese prints he collected.