Behind every famous painting is a story the frame leaves out. Meet a masterpiece that was never set at night, a painting bought for two guilders, and a Leonardo that flew first class under a false name. You will find painters who worked in disguise or asked the world to wait, museums that began as a fortress, a train station and a natural history cabinet, and heists involving fake police officers, a stolen picture frame and a hidden nook in a museum wall.
Every tile in a Great Paintings game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Masterpieces
nine stories
1The Night Watch was never a night scene
On the tile: Night Watch1642Myth busted
Rembrandt's colossal group portrait is called The Night Watch, but it was never meant to show nighttime. Its formal title is Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq, and a girl in the crowd carries a chicken whose claws were a symbol of the company. The nickname, first recorded in 1797, came from thick, dark varnish. The canvas is also smaller than Rembrandt left it. In 1715 it moved to Amsterdam's Town Hall and was cut down, mostly on the left, to fit between two doors. A 17th-century copy shows what was lost.
Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring is not a portrait. The Mauritshuis calls it a tronie, a study of an imaginary figure, here a girl in an exotic turban. Even the pearl is too large to be real, and Vermeer painted it with just two strokes of white, without so much as a hook. Badly neglected, it came up at an 1881 auction in The Hague, where the collector A. A. des Tombe bought it for two guilders and thirty cents. When he died in 1902, a secret will left it to the Mauritshuis.
Washington Crossing the Delaware, an iconic image of the American Revolution, was painted in Germany. Emanuel Leutze, a German American artist working in Düsseldorf, used American art students at the city's famous academy as his models. His first version was damaged by fire in 1850 and destroyed in a 1942 bombing raid on Bremen. The second, finished in 1851, came to the United States, and John Stewart Kennedy gave it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1897. It is more than 12 feet tall and 21 feet wide.
Impressionism takes its name from a hazy view of a harbor. Around November 1872, Claude Monet painted the port of Le Havre at dawn from his hotel window, in just a few hours. Asked for a title for the catalog of an 1874 exhibition, he decided the picture could hardly pass for a view of Le Havre and called it Impression. The conservative critic Louis Leroy seized on the word for a biting review titled The Exhibition of the Impressionists. A few days later a friendlier critic used the term as praise, and it stuck.
In the top left corner of Edvard Munch's 1893 painting The Scream is a faint pencil inscription that translates as "Can only have been painted by a madman." For years nobody knew whether an outraged visitor had scrawled it. In 2021, after infrared scans for the new National Museum of Norway, its curator declared the handwriting without a doubt Munch's own. The likely trigger came in 1895, when the painting was first shown in Kristiania, now Oslo, and a medical student publicly questioned Munch's mental health. Munch probably added the words soon afterward.
The stern pair in American Gothic never stood side by side. In August 1930, Grant Wood spotted an old Carpenter Gothic house in Eldon, Iowa, and imagined the kind of people who would live there. He asked his sister Nan and his dentist, Dr. B. H. McKeeby, to pose, and they sat separately. Are they father and daughter, or husband and wife? Wood stayed cagey, which was good publicity. At the Art Institute of Chicago's annual show, it won a $300 prize billed as third place, though by cash value it ranked more like fifth.
Picasso painted Guernica in Paris for the Spanish Republic's pavilion at the 1937 International Exposition, after the April 1937 bombing of the Basque town. In 1939 it went to New York, and after World War II, Picasso asked the Museum of Modern Art to keep it until public liberties were restored in Spain. He died in 1973, and Franco two years later. Guernica arrived in Madrid on September 10, 1981, under heavy guard, and was first shown at the Prado behind bulletproof glass. Since 1992 it has hung at the Reina Sofía museum.
Look closely at Edward Hopper's Nighthawks: there is no way into the diner. Hopper left out any entrance, and the Art Institute of Chicago notes that viewers are shut out of the scene by a seamless wedge of glass. It was inspired by a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue in New York, but is not a real place. The red-haired woman was modeled by Hopper's wife, Jo. The museum acquired the painting in 1942, the year it was painted, and Hopper wrote that it was one of the very best things he had painted.
James McNeill Whistler titled his 1871 portrait of his mother Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, but the world calls it Whistler's Mother. In 1925 it became the first American picture to join the collections of the Louvre. In the fall of 1932 it crossed the Atlantic for a tour meant to promote Franco-American friendship, drawing some 80,000 visitors in Los Angeles and 145,000 in San Francisco. In May 1934 it appeared on a three-cent Mother's Day stamp, cropped and with a vase of flowers added, and 200 million were printed.
Sofonisba Anguissola, a renowned painter from Cremona, came to Madrid in 1559 as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth of Valois. She held no official post as a painter, yet she made many portraits of the royal family, including a 1573 portrait of King Philip II now in the Prado. An inventory of Madrid's royal palace in 1686 credited it to Juan Pantoja de la Cruz. Scholars later saw her hand in it, and a technical study for a 1990 Prado exhibition strengthened the case. The Prado now credits her.
Artemisia Gentileschi painted herself as Saint Catherine of Alexandria around 1615 to 1617, during her years in Florence, where she learned to read and write and joined the city's Academy of the Arts of Drawing in 1616. Soon after London's National Gallery acquired the picture, it sent it on an unusual tour in 2019: Glasgow Women's Library, a doctors' practice in Yorkshire, a Newcastle high school and HMP Send, a women's prison. It was the first time a painting from a UK national collection had been shown in a prison.
For a year and a half, Rosa Bonheur sketched twice a week at the Paris horse market on the Boulevard de l'Hôpital, dressing as a man to discourage attention. The result, The Horse Fair, won wide praise at the Paris Salon of 1853, and she called it her own Parthenon frieze. Cornelius Vanderbilt bought it for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1887. Bonheur kept a menagerie of dogs, stags and wild animals at home, and in 1889 she painted Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show, though she never got to the American West.
Mary Cassatt was the only American officially associated with the Impressionists. Edgar Degas invited her to join them in 1877, and she showed in four of their eight exhibitions. In her 1878 painting Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, now at the National Gallery of Art, the girl was the daughter of friends of Degas, and the dog asleep in the other chair was Baptiste, Cassatt's own Brussels griffon, which Degas helped her find. Cassatt wrote that Degas helped with the painting too, probably adding the corner of the room behind.
A popular story says Vincent van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime. The Van Gogh Museum says nobody knows the exact number, but it was more than a couple. His first paid commission came in 1882 from his uncle Cor, an art dealer, who ordered twelve drawings of city views in The Hague. Vincent sold his first painting to the Paris paint dealer Julien Tanguy, his brother Theo sold another to a gallery in London, and The Red Vineyard was bought by Anna Boch, sister of his friend Eugène Boch. He also traded work for food and art supplies.
Henri Rousseau painted around 20 jungle pictures, starting in 1891 with a tiger crouching in thick foliage under a flash of lightning. Yet he never left France. He claimed he had served with a French force in Mexico, but London's National Gallery says the claim had no basis. His plants mixed house plants with tropical species from the Jardin des Plantes, the botanical garden in Paris. A self-taught Sunday painter, he was nicknamed the Douanier, or customs inspector, after his job at the Paris customs office, a rank he never reached.
Swedish painter Hilma af Klint was making bold abstract paintings in 1906, several years before Wassily Kandinsky, who is often considered the forerunner of abstract art. She believed spirits contacted at séances with her group of women, the Five, had commissioned the work. By the end of her life she had more than 1,200 abstract pieces, and her will said they should not be shown publicly for 20 years after her death in 1944. Her 2018 to 2019 Guggenheim show drew more than 600,000 visitors, the most in that museum's history.
Anna Mary Robertson Moses switched from embroidery to painting when arthritis made it hard to hold a needle. At a country fair, she noted, she won a prize for her fruit and jam but none for her pictures. Her paintings sat in a drugstore window in Hoosick Falls, New York, until Easter week of 1938, when Louis Caldor, a New York City water department engineer, bought the whole lot. Dealers balked at her age, since she turned 78 that year. She got a solo show in New York City in 1940 and lived to 101.
Jacob Lawrence, born in 1917, was in his early twenties when he painted The Migration Series in 1940 and 1941, 60 panels telling how African Americans left the rural South for the industrial North during and after World War I. Fortune magazine published 26 panels in November 1941, and all 60 were shown that year at Edith Halpert's Downtown Gallery. In 1942 two museums split the series. The odd-numbered panels went to Duncan Phillips's collection in Washington, D.C., and the even-numbered ones to the Museum of Modern Art. The halves reunite for special exhibitions.
The Louvre began as a fortress with thick defensive walls, built in 1190 under King Philippe Auguste. It became a royal residence in 1364, and French rulers kept remaking it for centuries. During the Revolution it was decreed a museum, and on August 10, 1793, the Musée Central des Arts opened in the Grande Galerie. Even so, the museum did not have the whole palace. A wing was occupied by France's finance ministry, and only in 1993, on the museum's 200th anniversary, did that rebuilt wing open, giving the entire Louvre over to museum use.
Madrid's Prado was designed for a natural history collection, not paintings. Architect Juan de Villanueva drew up the building in 1785, on the orders of King Charles III, to house the Natural History Cabinet. The king's grandson, Ferdinand VII, encouraged by Queen Maria Isabel de Braganza, made it a royal museum of paintings and sculpture instead, and it opened to the public in November 1819. Its first catalog listed 311 paintings, though the museum already held just over 1,510 pictures from the royal residences. Among later gifts were Goya's Black Paintings, donated in 1881.
Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum has a bike path running straight through the building. The museum went up in the 1880s on land from the city, which made a public passage to the new neighborhoods to the south a condition, and the Rijksmuseum calls the path a required element of the original commission. Cars were banned in 1931 because their vibrations could damage the building. During a renovation in the 2000s, cyclists fought plans that might have pushed them out, and on May 13, 2013, the passage reopened with cyclists in the middle and pedestrians on the sides.
The Musée d'Orsay in Paris began as a railroad station and hotel, built in two years and opened for the World's Fair on July 14, 1900. From 1939 it served only suburban trains, because its platforms had become too short as lines were electrified and trains grew longer. During World War II it was a center for sending parcels to prisoners, and Orson Welles later filmed The Trial there. Threatened with demolition to make way for a modern hotel, it was saved instead, and the museum opened to the public on December 9, 1986.
When Theo van Gogh died in 1891, his widow Jo was 28, with a baby son and hundreds of paintings by Theo's brother Vincent. She moved to Bussum in the Netherlands, opened a guesthouse and learned the art world from writer and artist neighbors. In 1905 she staged the largest Vincent retrospective ever, more than 480 works at Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum, and prices climbed. In 1914 she published his letters to Theo. After her death, her son put the family's remaining works in a foundation and helped found the Van Gogh Museum, opened in 1973.
Henry Tate bought a business by the age of 20, became a wholesale grocer and then a sugar refiner, experimenting with the sugar cube at his London refinery. In 1889 he offered his collection of 19th-century British art to the nation and gave 80,000 pounds toward a gallery. The site chosen was Millbank, where from 1816 to 1842 a reformatory prison had operated, larger than the gallery is today. The National Gallery of British Art, as Tate Britain was then called, opened to the public on August 16, 1897.
Before Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral Guggenheim Museum opened in New York, 21 artists, among them Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell, protested its design. Their letter reached the museum in December 1956 and made headlines, with one paper calling them the Rampant 21. At issue was the Grand Ramp, whose floor slopes at three degrees. Chairman Harry F. Guggenheim replied that the grade matched New York's sidewalk curb regulations, and Wright answered in Newsweek. The museum opened three years later, slope and all, and several of the protesters later showed work there.
The only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas reached Washington in a suitcase. When the National Gallery of Art bought Ginevra de' Benci from the princes of Liechtenstein in 1967, conservator Mario Modestini worried the wooden panel could warp in a new climate. He fitted a gray American Tourister suitcase with Styrofoam and a temperature and humidity gauge, then booked it a first-class seat from Zurich to New York as Mrs. Modestini. FBI agents met the plane. The reported $5 million price was then the most ever paid for a work of art.
In the late 1920s, three patrons of the arts, Lillie P. Bliss, Mary Quinn Sullivan and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, set out to challenge the conservative policies of traditional museums with an institution devoted only to modern art. With other trustees, they created the Museum of Modern Art in 1929. Its collection began with a gift of eight prints and one drawing. The public response was enthusiastic, and over ten years the museum moved three times before opening its own midtown Manhattan building in 1939. Today the collection holds about 200,000 works.
In August 1911 the Mona Lisa vanished from the Louvre. Vincenzo Peruggia, a former museum handyman who had even helped build its protective frame, hid in a storage closet and walked off with it. When the Louvre reopened a week later, thousands came to stare at the empty wall. Police questioned the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and his friend Pablo Picasso, who were cleared. The painting sat in a trunk with a false bottom in Peruggia's apartment for more than two years, until December 1913, when he took it to Florence to show an art dealer and was arrested.
In the early hours of March 18, 1990, two men in police uniforms rang the intercom at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, saying they were answering a disturbance call. The guard on duty broke protocol and let them in, and he and a second guard were tied up in the basement. In 81 minutes the thieves took 13 works, including two Rembrandts cut from their frames and Vermeer's The Concert. The case remains unsolved, with a $10 million reward. The museum repaired the five empty frames and hung them back on the walls as placeholders.
In 1937 the eminent Vermeer scholar Abraham Bredius, then in his eighties, hailed a newly surfaced Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus as a Vermeer, and Rotterdam's Museum Boijmans acquired it. The painter was Han van Meegeren. After World War II, an Allied commission found another supposed Vermeer in Hermann Göring's collection and traced it to him. Arrested in 1945 and charged with collaborating with the Nazis, he confessed he had forged it, and to prove it he painted another Vermeer under observation. Sentenced in November 1947 to a year in prison, he died that December.
On April 11, 1934, the sexton of St. Bavo's Cathedral in Ghent found two panels of the Ghent Altarpiece missing, the Just Judges and John the Baptist. A ransom letter demanded one million Belgian francs. To show goodwill, the thief sent a luggage receipt for Brussels-North station, and the package held John the Baptist. Later that year Arsène Goedertier, a small-town banker and former sexton, confessed on his deathbed that only he knew where the Just Judges was hidden. His office held copies of the ransom letters, but no panel. It has never been found.
On October 18, 1969, thieves entered the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo, Sicily, cut Caravaggio's Nativity with Saints Lawrence and Francis from its frame with a razor, rolled it up and fled. It has never been recovered. The FBI lists the theft among its top ten art crimes and puts the painting's value at $20 million. The case has come up in the testimony of many Mafia informants, and theories about its fate range from a barn where mice and pigs ate it to rubble from a 1980 earthquake.
In February 1997, Gustav Klimt's Portrait of a Lady vanished from the Ricci Oddi Modern Art Gallery in Piacenza, Italy, shortly before it was to star in a special exhibition. X-rays had just revealed that it was painted over an earlier portrait, making it the only known double Klimt. Its frame turned up on the roof. In December 2019, a gardener clearing ivy from the gallery's walls pulled open a metal panel and found a black bag stuffed in a nook. Inside was the painting, which experts authenticated in January 2020.
In August 1961, 19 days after London's National Gallery put Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington on display, it vanished. It had just been bought for 140,000 pounds to keep it in Britain. Anonymous ransom notes demanded that the money pay for television licenses for pensioners. The painting made a cameo in the villain's lair in the 1962 Bond film Dr. No. In 1965 it turned up in a left-luggage office at Birmingham New Street station. Kempton Bunton, 61, turned himself in and was acquitted of stealing the painting but convicted of stealing its frame. In 1969 his son John confessed to the theft.
Picasso's The Blue Room, painted in 1901 and now at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., shows a woman bathing in his Paris studio. Underneath is someone else. Using infrared imaging and other analysis, researchers found a portrait of a bearded man in a bow tie, his head propped on his hand, which Picasso painted over when he reused the canvas. Curators think the young artist could not afford a new canvas for every picture. When the find was announced in 2014, a Phillips conservator said they were still working out who the man was.
The story goes that a dog named Robot chased a rabbit down a hole and led four French teenagers to the painted cave of Lascaux. History Today calls the dog uncertain, and the French culture ministry's account has no dog at all. Marcel Ravidat, a young apprentice mechanic, found an opening in a foxes' den near Montignac, then came back with three friends on September 12, 1940, slid down a shaft and saw walls covered with animals by lamplight. Visitors' breath later damaged the paintings, and the cave closed to the public in 1963.