#french

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.

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.

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.

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.

The man in it was a rich young aristocrat with a habit of ordering paintings of himself — this was one of several he commissioned from the same painter, going by the museum's own notes. His father, I gather, had been a heavyweight in French law and politics, so the family was well used to being looked at.

It's the old Greek story — a princess chained to a rock as an offering to a sea monster, waiting on a rescue that's supposedly on its way. They say the painter spent twenty-odd years working in nothing but charcoal black before he let colour in at all.

According to Wikipedia he's the one who said a painting, before it's a horse or a woman or a story, is basically flat colours on a surface — and then spent most of his career painting angels and gospel scenes anyway.

A whole movement got its name from a review mocking this one — the critic used the word as an insult, supposedly, and it stuck. It hung in a show the painters put on themselves after the official one kept turning them down.

Apparently critics joked at the time that someone should just shut the shutters on this one — it got a rough reception when it first went up.

The original doesn't exist anymore — it was destroyed when Dresden was bombed near the end of the Second World War, so from what I can find, reproductions like this are all that's left of it. Apparently it caused a stir at the time too: painting road workers at the kind of size usually saved for kings and battles wasn't the done thing.

The oval is the clue: pictures shaped like this were usually made to fit a panel over a door or a fireplace, ordered as part of the decorating rather than hung on a nail. From what I've read this one came with a companion piece the same size.

Monet reportedly dug a trench in the garden so he could lower a huge canvas down and keep painting the top half without moving it — his soon-to-be wife modeled for all four women, apparently.

It's his aunt's family, painted during a long stay in Florence. The marriage was, by most accounts, a miserable one, and she's dressed in black because she was mourning her own father — that's supposedly him in the little red drawing on the wall behind her.

Nobody commissioned this one. It was, from what I've read, a deliberate swing at getting noticed — built out of long conversations with two men who lived through the wreck, plus a scale model of the raft set up in the studio. The disaster itself was a national scandal, mostly because the captain had got his command through connections rather than any skill at sea.

Nobody has ever settled what's happening in here. It's carried two titles almost from the start, one of them far uglier than the other, and people have spent a century hunting for the novel it's supposed to illustrate without ever agreeing on which one.

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.

Shepherds and shepherdesses were a craze in France at the time — pastoral plays and operas everywhere, and painters selling the same daydream for the wall. Nobody buying one expected real farm work to look like this. I couldn't find who ordered this particular one.

Another painter reportedly turned this commission down — a bishop pushing the swing while a nobleman peeks up a lady's skirt being too much for him — so Fragonard took the job instead.

He painted this back in his hometown, and the two women are said to be his sisters. Farm work, done at a size usually saved for kings and battles — apparently that's exactly what annoyed people about him at the time.