Paintings Explained

[Paintings Explained @PaintingsPOV]

The Artist's Death: The Last Friend (1901) by Zygmunt Andrychiewicz

📍National Museum in Warsaw

He gave his whole life to art, and at the end the only one who showed up was a man with a violin.

[Paintings Explained @PaintingsPOV]

Moses Saved from the Waters (1633) by Orazio Gentileschi

📍Museo del Prado, Madrid

Artemisia Gentileschi's father painted this exact scene twice, and Britain paid £22 million to keep the other one.

Orazio was in his late sixties, working as court painter to Charles I in London

[Paintings Explained @PaintingsPOV]

The Women of Amphissa (1887) by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

📍Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

In the middle of a war, a town woke up to find its enemy's wildest women passed out in the market square, and decided to protect them.

[Paintings Explained @PaintingsPOV]

Self-Portrait with a Harp (1791) by Rose-Adélaïde Ducreux

📍The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Her father became a meme. She painted a masterpiece, and almost nobody knows her name.

[Paintings Explained @PaintingsPOV]

Death and the Miser (c. 1635) by Frans Francken the Younger

📍Wellcome Collection, London (likely; this image matches the Wellcome version, but many near-identical copies exist and the 1635 date is unconfirmed).

[Paintings Explained @PaintingsPOV]

Theseus and the Minotaur (date unverified) by Paul Reid

📍Unknown (probably a private collection; I couldn't confirm)

Everyone knows who wins this fight, so why does the monster get the spotlight?

[Paintings Explained @PaintingsPOV]

The Awakening (c. 1905, attribution unverified) by Serafino Macchiati

📍Unknown. Location and authorship unconfirmed

The internet credits this nightmare to a 1905 Italian painter, but the paper trail stops dead.

Serafino Macchiati was real, and nightmares were his specialty.

[Paintings Explained @PaintingsPOV]

The Feast of the Bean King (c. 1640-1645) by Jacob Jordaens

📍Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Right above this drunken riot, Jordaens painted a sign that reads, roughly, "nothing is more like a madman than a drunk."

[Paintings Explained @PaintingsPOV]

Compulsory Education (1887) by Briton Rivière

📍Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

A little girl, a bloodhound nearly her own height, and a title lifted straight from an Act of Parliament.

[Paintings Explained @PaintingsPOV]

The Kiss (1859) by Francesco Hayez

📍Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

It looks like a love scene, but it may be a political poster in disguise.

Hayez showed it in Milan in 1859, just months after French and Piedmontese troops drove the Austrians out of the city.

[Paintings Explained @PaintingsPOV]

Hercules Killing the Centaur Nessus (c. 1700) by Sebastiano Ricci

📍Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston)

The man who painted this heroic rescue was once accused of trying to poison a pregnant young woman so he wouldn’t have to marry her.

[Paintings Explained @PaintingsPOV]

Home at Last (1951) by George Hughes

📍Original painting's current location unverified; published as a Saturday Evening Post cover

Two kids get carried inside tonight. The third gets woken up.

[Paintings Explained @PaintingsPOV]

The Remorse of Judas (1880) by José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior

📍Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro

The most famous traitor in history, painted by a former church bell-ringer who wanted you to feel sorry for him.

[Paintings Explained @PaintingsPOV]

Clytemnestra Hesitating Before Killing the Sleeping Agamemnon (1817) by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin

📍Musée du Louvre, Paris

Three years after a French king was restored to the throne, Paris flocked to see a painting of a queen about to stab a king in his bed.

[Paintings Explained @PaintingsPOV]

Hijack (Jacques Guetta, b. 1992), Los Angeles

📍Private collections; represented by Contessa Gallery

His dad is Mr. Brainwash. He grew up with Banksy in the living room. And somehow, Hijack became the most technically skilled painter in the family.

[Paintings Explained @PaintingsPOV]

The Peasant Wedding (1567) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

📍Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

The most famous wedding in art history, and nobody can agree on which person is the bride.

[Paintings Explained @PaintingsPOV]

The Deluge (1840) by Francis Danby

📍 Tate Britain, London

A disgraced painter, back from a decade in exile, staked his entire comeback on the end of the world.

[Paintings Explained @PaintingsPOV]

Anders Zorn (1860 - 1920)

📍Nationalmuseum Stockholm | Musée d'Orsay | Metropolitan Museum of Art | Zorn Museum, Mora

When a fellow traveller asked him "Are you Swedish?", he replied: "No. I am Zorn."

[Paintings Explained @PaintingsPOV]

Llywelyn and his Brave Hound, Gelert (1880) by Gourlay Steell

📍 Royal Collection Trust

Queen Victoria's official animal painter chose the one dog story guaranteed to make a nation weep.

[Paintings Explained @PaintingsPOV]

The Promised Land (2015) by Bo Bartlett

📍Private Collection
A painter who rows into the open Atlantic when he hits a creative wall made a 10-foot canvas about three people doing exactly that, and it might be the most honest painting about the American dream in the last decade.