Fun Facts about Paintings:
– Mona Lisa is indeed Lisa Gherardini, a member of a prominent Florentine family and wife of a wealthy silk merchant and a mother of two sons.
– Generally, the Creation of Adam would be basically linked to the future coming of Christ, who comes to reconcile man after the sin of Adam.
– Van Gogh painted Starry Night while he was admitted for mental illness at Saint Remy de Provence.
– Edvard Munch’s most famous work, The Scream has technically five versions painted through the years.
– Dawn Ades, a well-known critic interpreted The Persistence of Memory as an allusion to the Theory of Relativity and Time by Albert Einstein.
– For Dali, The Persistence of Memory was a surrealist vision of Camembert cheese melting in the heat of the sun.
– The Vermeer’s work of art The Girl With The Pearl Earring is also known as the “Dutch Mona Lisa” or “Mona Lisa of the North”.
– The Night Watch painting was a very famous masterpiece of Rembrandt in 1642 which can be found in Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
– The most famous painting work by Rembrandt known as The Night Watch which portrays a group portrait of a militia company.
– Pablo Picasso was a Spanish cubic painter who painted the renowned “Guernica” – city that was bombed by Nazi planes during the Spanish Civil War.
– Grand Wood’s American Gothic is a depiction of the ideals of rural America.
– Dalí featured images of the previous Salvador in several of his paintings, including ‘Portrait of My Dead Brother.
– Despite being the epitome of a “Renaissance man,” Leonardo had a penchant for leaving his works unfinished.
– Van Gogh officially sold one painting, “The Red Vineyard at Arles,” before committing suicide in 1890.
– Pierre-Auguste Renoir, one of the founders of the Impressionist movement, suffered from rheumatoid arthritis starting in 1892, but continued painitng for the 20 years.
– In 1763 and 1766, Goya submitted entries to enroll at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid. He was rejected both times.
– The thief threw Picasso’s Pigeon with Peas into a bin which was emptied before authorities knew that the painting was in it.
– Harlequin – Picasso painting was one of seven taken from the Rotterdam Kunsthal gallery during a daytime heist, which was the biggest art theft in the Netherlands.
– Portrait of a Young Man was stolen by the Nazis from Poland and is considered the most important painting still missing from World War II.
– Reformed Church was stolen from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 2002 and remained missing for 13 years. It was recovered in 2016.
– Madonna with the Yarnwinder worth between $45 and 50 million, was stolen from the Duke of Buccleuch’s home in Scotland.
– Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I by Gustav Klimt was one of the many pieces of art stolen by the Nazis during World War II.
– Mona Lisa was originally painted with eyelashes and with better visible eyebrows, but that these had gradually disappeared over time, perhaps as a result of overcleaning.
– A painting bought by a priest for £400 was revealed on Antiques Roadshow UK to be the work of the 17th Century master Sir Anthony Van Dyck and to be worth £400,000.
– The painting “The Scream” depicts a Krakatoa sunset over Oslo, Norway. (After the eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia in 1883)
– Mr. Tatsuo Horiuchi, a 73-year-old man living in Gunma, Japan creates paintings only using Microsoft Excel since 2000.
– John Lennon almost got beaten up during a mid-1970s visit to Hugh Hefner’s Playboy mansion – when he put out a cigarette on a priceless painting by French artist Matisse.
– The 10 Most-Wanted Missing Paintings In The World – Poppy Flowers by Vincent Van Gogh.
– Teri Horton paid $5 for this original Jackson Pollock painting at a thrift store in San Bernardino, California.