Art Trivia: Famous Paintings and Artists Explained

Art rounds reward a little curiosity about the people and paintings behind the masterpieces. You do not need an art history degree — you need to recognise the big names, know where the famous works hang, and remember a story or two. Here are 20 facts to help you recognise the classics instantly.

Famous Paintings

1. The Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci hangs in the Louvre in Paris. It is surprisingly small — about 77 by 53 centimetres — and it became world-famous partly because it was stolen in 1911 and missing for two years.
2. The Starry Night was painted by Vincent van Gogh in 1889, while he was staying at an asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in the south of France. It is now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
3. The Scream by Edvard Munch exists in several versions, including paintings, pastels and prints. Munch was Norwegian.
4. The Last Supper by Leonardo is a huge mural on a wall of a convent dining hall in Milan. Leonardo experimented with paint on dry plaster, which is one reason it began to deteriorate during his lifetime.
5. Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer is sometimes called the "Mona Lisa of the North". It hangs in the Mauritshuis in The Hague.
6. Guernica by Pablo Picasso is a huge black, white and grey painting protesting the 1937 bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.
7. The Persistence of Memory, with its melting clocks, is by Salvador Dalí — and it is much smaller than most people expect.

Legendary Artists

8. Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism with Georges Braque and produced many thousands of works across his long career.
9. Vincent van Gogh sold very few paintings during his lifetime, yet painted around 900 in about a decade. He is now one of the most celebrated artists in history.
10. Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel between 1508 and 1512 and sculpted the statue of David. He considered himself a sculptor first.
11. Frida Kahlo, the Mexican painter, is famous for her self-portraits. Around a third of her paintings are self-portraits.
12. Rembrandt painted dozens of self-portraits too, creating a visual diary of his life from young man to old age. His most famous large work is The Night Watch.
13. Claude Monet painted his water lilies garden at Giverny again and again — around 250 paintings of them.
14. Andy Warhol was the leading figure of Pop Art, turning everyday objects such as soup cans and celebrity photographs into art.

Movements and Styles

15. The Renaissance ("rebirth") was a golden age of European art, beginning in Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries. Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael are its most famous names.
16. Impressionism got its name from an insult. A critic mocked Monet's painting Impression, Sunrise (1872), and the artists adopted the word.
17. Cubism showed objects from several viewpoints at once, breaking them into geometric shapes.
18. Surrealism, associated with Dalí and René Magritte, filled canvases with dreamlike, impossible scenes inspired by the unconscious mind.
19. Pointillism, developed by Georges Seurat, builds a picture from thousands of tiny dots of colour that blend in the viewer's eye.
20. Abstract Expressionism brought New York to the centre of the art world after the Second World War. Jackson Pollock's "drip paintings" are the most famous example.

How Quiz Writers Ask About Art

• "Who painted...?" — the most common question type.
• "Where does it hang?" — the Louvre (Mona Lisa), MoMA (The Starry Night), the Prado in Madrid (Velázquez's Las Meninas), the Uffizi in Florence (Botticelli's The Birth of Venus).
• Movements — matching an artist to Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism or Pop Art.
• Nationality — Munch was Norwegian, Vermeer Dutch, Kahlo Mexican, Dalí Spanish.

Train Your Eye

The best way to learn art is to look. Search for a painting, study it for thirty seconds, and say the artist's name out loud. Within a few weeks you will recognise the styles: Van Gogh's swirling brushstrokes, Monet's soft light, Dalí's melting shapes, Picasso's broken faces.

Learn a handful of these and the art round becomes your strength. Ready to test your eye? Jump into the free Art & Artists quiz and see how many you can name.