#portrait

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The village in the title had turned into an artists' colony by then — painters moving out to a farming place on the heath specifically to paint the people already living there. From what I read, whole careers got built on that arrangement. The farmers mostly stayed farmers.

He made this in Malta while trying to get himself accepted as a Knight of St John — he'd run from Rome after killing a man and badly needed protection. It worked for about a year before they threw him out again. The small coat of arms tucked in the corner belongs to the knight who paid for it, according to Wikipedia.

I couldn't dig up much on this one — no name for her, nothing about why it was painted. If anyone knows, I'd take the story.

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.

According to what I've read, nobody's ever identified who she actually was — this is what's called a 'tronie,' a study of a face or expression rather than a portrait of a real sitter. There's apparently ongoing debate over whether that earring is even a real pearl, since a stone that size would've cost a fortune at the time.

Nobody's actually sure who these two are, or which couple from the Old Testament they're dressed up as — the title only got attached by a dealer a couple of hundred years later and stuck. Van Gogh supposedly said he'd give ten years of his life to sit in front of it for a fortnight with nothing but a dry crust to eat.

They say this was painted late in his career, for the guild that checked the quality of dyed cloth — literally the men grading everyone else's fabric. It was meant to hang in their own guild hall.

It got turned down by the big official Salon the year he made it, and Émile Zola wrote a defence of him in a newspaper that apparently annoyed enough readers to cost Zola the job. Wikipedia puts the flatness down to Japanese prints and Spanish painting, both of which he'd been looking hard at.