Fourteen paintings I keep returning to, each with one thing about it, or its painter, that stuck with me. They range from a Caravaggio painted in Rome in 1597 to a Russian seascape from 1850 and an American Civil War landscape from the year of Lincoln's assassination. No theme beyond "things that stop me when I scroll past them."
The Musicians
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
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The man who painted these tender young musicians turned out to be the most dangerous artist in Rome. Caravaggio's court record includes throwing a plate of artichokes at a waiter and running a blade through his own foot, and in 1606 he killed a man in a street fight, then spent his last four years painting masterpieces while on the run from a papal death sentence.
Landscape with a Plowed Field and a Village
Georges Michel
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Michel reportedly held that any painter who could not spend an entire lifetime working within four leagues, about eleven miles, of a single spot was a bungler chasing a phantom. He spent his own life proving it, painting the windmills and threatened plains around Paris over and over without once leaving town for a subject.
Breton Brother and Sister
William-Adolphe Bouguereau
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The Met owes this painting to Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, reputedly the richest unmarried woman in America and the only woman among the museum's founders, who left it to them in 1887. She had inherited it from her father, who snapped it up in 1871 within weeks of its leaving the easel, back when American collectors were paying record sums faster than Bouguereau could paint.
Girl Holding Lemons
William-Adolphe Bouguereau
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Bouguereau painted this sunlit girl and her lemons in a rented hotel room in Menton in 1899, where he had taken his grown son Paul for the sea air and refused even to step out for a walk, "to avoid giving a bad example to my son, to whom such things are forbidden." Paul died the next spring, the fourth of Bouguereau's five children to die before he did.
By the Stream (Au Bord du Ruisseau)
William-Adolphe Bouguereau
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Dismissed as sugary kitsch for most of the twentieth century, these rustic scenes cost Bouguereau his reputation: Degas turned his name into a slur, Bouguereauté, for slick and artificial work, and the most celebrated painter of his generation was very nearly written out of art history before a 1980s revival pulled him back in.
The Veteran in a New Field
Winslow Homer
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Critics in 1865 scolded Homer for a beginner's blunder, since no real farmer still cut wheat with a one-bladed scythe. They had it exactly backward: the faded paint now shows he first painted the correct modern cradle, then deliberately swapped it for the single curved blade of the Grim Reaper, in a wheat field finished weeks after Lincoln was buried.
The Shipwreck
Claude-Joseph Vernet
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Legend has it that Vernet once had himself lashed to a ship's mast through a gale so he could study the sea from inside its fury. The story is almost certainly apocryphal, it first surfaced in his obituary and his grandson later turned it into a painting, but it stuck to Vernet for decades before the very same tale got attached to Turner.
Salisbury Cathedral from Lower Marsh Close
John Constable
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Constable so distrusted invented skies that across the summers of 1821 and 1822 he climbed Hampstead Heath and made roughly a hundred oil studies of clouds, noting the date, hour, and wind direction on the back of each like a meteorologist with a brush. When he called the sky "the chief organ of sentiment" in a landscape, he had the field notes to prove it.
The Rape of Proserpine
Joseph Mallord William Turner
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Turner unveiled this storm of golden light at the Royal Academy in 1839 in the same room as four other large canvases, one of them The Fighting Temeraire. Posterity made the Temeraire a national treasure and left this abduction to the 1839 critics, who greeted Turner's whole display that year with open hostility.
Venice: The Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore
Joseph Mallord William Turner
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McConnel, the Manchester cotton manufacturer who commissioned this sunlit Venice, later ordered a deliberate opposite to hang beside it: Turner's soot-black Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight, Tyneside coal-labour set against Venetian leisure. He sold the pair in a bad business year, then tried to buy one back in 1861 and was turned down.
Boats Carrying Out Anchors and Cables to the Dutch Men of War
Joseph Mallord William Turner
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In 1804 Turner was so busy building his own private gallery on Harley Street, where he could show his work without the Royal Academy, that the builders took over his studio and he ended up painting this seven-man rowboat in a borrowed room inside the very Academy he was breaking away from.
Intérieur du Port de Marseille
Claude-Joseph Vernet — from the Ports of France series.
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Look into the crowd on the quay and you find Vernet himself, his wife steering him toward Annibal Camoux, a local celebrity then reputed to be 117 years old, while their son Livio sketches the very scene we are looking at. Camoux's age was always more legend than ledger, but Marseille believed it, and so, clearly, did the painter.
The Ninth Wave
Ivan Aivazovsky (Hovhannes Aivazian).
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In 1844 the young Aivazovsky was aboard a ship caught in a Bay of Biscay storm so violent it was given up for lost, and newspapers across Europe printed his obituary. He walked ashore alive, and said the terror had only helped him store the whole scene in memory "like a marvelous living picture," which is exactly how he worked: he painted the sea almost entirely from memory, and by his own count 4,000 of his roughly 6,000 canvases were storms.
The Hamlet of Optevoz
Charles-François Daubigny
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Years after this quiet pond, Daubigny took a seat on the Salon jury and used it to shove seven young Impressionists past the gatekeepers in 1868. When the jury threw out a Monet anyway in 1870, he resigned in protest, having spent years being mocked himself for landscapes critics dismissed as mere "impressions," a decade before the word was pinned to a whole movement.