Paintings

Arkhip Kuindzhi. Sunlight has reached the hamlet while an almost black cloud still stands behind it.

Leonardo da Vinci. Lisa Gherardini was married to the Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo, whose surname gave the painting its Italian name, La Gioconda.

Vincent van Gogh. In June 1889, Van Gogh was living and receiving treatment at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole near Saint-Rémy.

Mi Youren. In 1130 Mi Youren painted this landscape to thank someone who had given him shelter.

Kano Sansetsu. The tree occupies a wall almost five metres wide. Its trunk rises at the right, turns sharply, and extends a long branch across the neighbouring panels.

Johannes Vermeer. A girl looks back over her shoulder, and light picks out her face, lips and earring. Vermeer painted her around 1665 in Delft.

Unidentified Egyptian painters. Nebamun hunts birds with his wife and daughter.

Sandro Botticelli. Pursuit, transformation and a dance share Botticelli’s garden. These classical gods were painted for a Florentine home.

Gustave Caillebotte. The pedestrians at this junction are finding their way through a recently rebuilt Paris.

Painting by Habiballah of Sava. Birds gather beside a stream before a long journey. In a poem by the Persian author Attar, they seek Simurgh, their king.

Andrei Rublev. Rublev painted the Trinity for the monastery of Sergius of Radonezh, probably in the 1420s.

Judith Leyster. Leyster presents herself at work, though the elaborate collar would have been impractical while painting.

Frederic Edwin Church. In 1859 audiences came to see this single painting as an exhibition in its own right. Church encouraged them to examine it through opera glasses.

Théodore Géricault. In 1816, the Medusa ran aground while carrying a new governor to French Senegal. Around 150 people were left on a hastily assembled raft after the wreck.

Unidentified painters of Roman Egypt. This is Eutyches, an adolescent who lived in Egypt in the second century CE.

Henri Matisse. In 1911, Matisse painted his own studio at Issy-les-Moulineaux outside Paris. His paintings, sculptures and ceramics fill the room.

Unidentified Korean painters. The young pilgrim Sudhana has come to seek teaching from Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion.

Mary Cassatt. Bathing a child involves practical actions. The woman holds the child on her lap, supports the waist and washes a foot in a basin.

Leonardo da Vinci. In the refectory of Milan’s Santa Maria delle Grazie monastery, the friars faced Christ’s final meal with his disciples during their own daily meals.

Yi Taek-gyun. A ten-panel folding screen depicts bookshelves on an almost human scale. Such paintings were called chaekgado, pictures of bookshelves.

Francisco Goya. After Madrid’s uprising on 2 May 1808, Napoleon’s troops executed prisoners and detained civilians.

Sandro Botticelli. In fifteenth-century Florence, wealth from trade and banking funded buildings, paintings and the study of ancient books.

Katsushika Ōi. Guan Yu has poison scraped from his arm bone after an arrow wound, yet continues a board game.

Unidentified Roman painters. These red walls surrounded visitors with figures painted almost at life size. The murals were made in the 80s–70s BCE in a villa near Pompeii.

Alexey Venetsianov. This painting began with someone else’s interior. At the Hermitage, Venetsianov spent long periods studying François Granet’s painting of a Roman monastery.

Unknown artist. This bison is painted on the ceiling of Altamira Cave in northern Spain. Its multicoloured animals belong to the Magdalenian period, late in the Palaeolithic.

Unknown artists of Patagonia. Cueva de las Manos means Cave of the Hands. Its paintings occupy the Río Pinturas canyon in Argentine Patagonia, where people made images over thousands of…

Unknown mosaic artists. Justinian appears in a church in a city he never visited. His mosaic portrait stands near the altar of San Vitale in Ravenna, consecrated in 547.

Attributed to Eadfrith. This book of the four Gospels was made around 700, probably at the monastery on Lindisfarne, off the Northumbrian coast.

Unknown Byzantine icon painter. A child embraces his mother as she looks towards us. An unknown Constantinopolitan painter made this image in the first third of the twelfth century.

Rembrandt van Rijn. In 1642 Amsterdam’s civic guards received an enormous group portrait from Rembrandt for their meeting hall. They are preparing to move out.

Claude Monet. The Gare Saint-Lazare linked Paris to Normandy, where Monet developed his outdoor painting. In 1877 he made a series of views of this familiar place.

Vasily Kandinsky. Kandinsky painted Improvisation No. 30 in Munich in 1913. Individual objects remain recognisable among coloured patches.

Thomas Cole. Thomas Cole visited Niagara Falls in May 1829. Painted the following year, this landscape shows autumn and an almost uninhabited setting.

Unidentified Teotihuacan painter. This piece of painted wall came from a palace interior in Teotihuacan, a vast city in ancient Mexico.

Tosa Mitsuoki. Narrow slips of poetry hang from the maple branches. They remain after a courtly gathering whose participants admired autumn foliage and recalled older verse.