Why “The Night Watch” Is Considered Rembrandt’s Greatest Masterpiece
In 1715, someone in Amsterdam’s city hall needed Rembrandt van Rijn’s enormous militia portrait to fit between two doors. The solution was simple and brutal: workers sliced off…
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Why Salvador Dalí Painted Clocks That Melt
Something in Dalí’s tiny 1931 canvas refuses to sit still in memory. A barren coastline, a strange fleshy shape sleeping in the sand, and three pocket watches drooping…
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The Night Boston Lost Half a Billion Dollars in Art
It was 1:24 a.m. on March 18, 1990, and Boston was still recovering from a night of St. Patrick’s Day parties when two men in police uniforms rang…
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What Our Love of Sad Art Reveals About the Mind
A woman recently divorced sits alone and puts on a song about heartbreak. She could choose almost anything else — something upbeat, something distracting — but she chooses…
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Why Goya Painted the Darkest Side of Human Nature
A Court Painter Who Once Flattered Power For the first half of his career, Francisco Goya painted the world the Spanish elite wanted to see. He designed cheerful…
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Why The Kiss Became the World’s Definitive Painting of Love
A Couple Made of Gold Two figures kneel at the edge of a flowered meadow, wrapped so tightly in gold that their bodies seem to dissolve into a…
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Why So Many Great Painters Found Fame Only After They Died
In March 1890, a Belgian painter named Anna Boch bought a landscape at an exhibition in Brussels for 400 francs, roughly $16 at the time. The artist who…
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Why the World’s Most Expensive Paintings Sell for Hundreds of Millions
On a November evening in 2017, inside a packed Christie’s saleroom in New York, an auctioneer opened bidding on a small, cracked panel painting of Christ holding a…
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Why American Gothic Isn’t the Satire Most People Think It Is
For nearly a century, one painting has stood as the visual shorthand for small-town American life: a stern farmer, pitchfork in hand, standing beside a woman in a…
