About This Quiz
Everyone creates art. However, only a few people become famous and world-renowned for their artwork. While Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Claude Monet, Salvador Dali and Roy Lichtenstein had very different styles, they do have one thing in common: Their work is found in museums around the world.
An art lover would have to visit The Smithsonian, Le Louvre, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Modern Museum of Art and many others to see a fraction of the works that great artists have made. Even if you somehow manage to visit every art museum in the world, you still won't be able to see many works. Some of those pieces have made their way into private collections. When they hit the auction block, those paintings sell for thousands, if not millions, of dollars. Other paintings have been lost to time or destroyed by their creators, who felt that a particular painting should not have been created in the first place or was not their best work.
If you're familiar with art, you're going to enjoy this quiz. Instead of focusing on one art style, this quiz runs the gamut from Pop Art to Impressionism. Will you get all of these questions correct? Or will you forget the real name of "Dogs Playing Poker?"
"Mona Lisa" is believed to be a painting of Lisa Gherardini. Today, you can find the painting in its own room at the Louvre. Approximately 6 million visitors visit the Louvre every year. Of those visitors, around 16,000 a day visit the "Mona Lisa."
"Girl with a Pearl Earring" is one of Johannes Vermeer's 36 known works. Most of his paintings feature women doing daily tasks. His other paintings include "Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window" and "The Music Lesson."
Sandro Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" depicts several gods. Venus is the goddess in the seashell. The others are Zephyr, the god of the west wind, and Horae, the goddess of the seasons. Aura, nymphs of the wind, or Chloris, nymph of spring, are two possible explanations for the fourth figure.
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Vincent van Gogh's older brother was also named Vincent van Gogh. However, the elder Van Gogh died at birth. The famous Van Gogh's other brother, Theo, was the recipient of most of the painter's 800 letters.
"Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1" is popularly known as "Whistler's Mother." The woman's real name is Anna Matilda McNeill Whistler. She lived with her son, James, in London from 1864 to 1875.
Gustav Klimt studied at the Vienna School of Decorative Arts. Once he left the school, he opened a studio that specialized in mural painting. In 1897, Klimt founded the school of painting known as the Vienna Sesession.
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Jan van Eyck's "The Arnolfini Portrait" features Giovanni di Nocolao Arnofini and his wife. Arnofini came from a merchant family. Van Eyck signed the portrait with "Jan van Eyck was here 1434" in Latin.
"The Garden of Earthly Delights" is a triptych, which is a painting with three panels. The middle panel measures 7.25 by 6.5 feet. The side panels are approximately 7.25 by 3.25 feet.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was known to have a quick temper. In 1606, Caravaggio lost his temper and killed a man. Instead of staying to face the consequences, he left Rome because he was sure that the Pope would pardon him, which he did.
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"The Night Watch" has two much longer names: "Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq" and "The Shooting Company of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch."
In 1893, Monet put a lily pond in his yard. From 1899 onward, the pond was the dominant subject of his paintings. In total, there were over 250 paintings of water lilies. However, Monet destroyed some of them.
Raphael spent 12 years of his life in Rome. During that time, he painted the Stanze di Raffaelo, which translates to "The Raphael Rooms," which are four rooms in the Palace of the Vatican. "The School of Athens" is a painting in the Stanza della Segnatura and stands alongside "Disputation of the Holy Sacrament," "The Parnassus" and "Thew Cardinal Virtues."
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Gustave Caillebotte owned "Dance at Le moulin de la Galette" from 1879 to 1894. After his death, the painting was housed in Musée du Luxembourg until it was moved to the Louvre in 1929.
Paul Cézanne was married to Hortense Fiquet Cézanne, who sat for at least 27 paintings. In each painting, she is depicted as sullen. In 2014, 24 of the paintings were displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Diego Velazquez was appointed painter to Phillip IV in 1623. He would remain in the king's court for the rest of his life. In the 1640s, Velazquez painted less so that he could focus his attention on serving the king.
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Wassily Kandinsky is a Russian-born artist who was part of the influential group Der Blaue Reiter, which was based in Munich, Germany. In 1896, Kandinsky made the move from Russia to Germany, where he became a painter.
Edvard Munch's first painting was "The Sick Child," which was inspired by his sister who died when Munch was 14. The Norwegian painter's work focuses mainly on psychological themes and was influenced by German Expressionism.
When it debut in 1965 Paris, Edouard Manet's "Olympia" was controversial because the painter had realistically depicted a nude body. Currently, the painting resides at Musée d'Orsy.
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Henri Matisse's "Green Stripe" is also known as "The Green Line," "Portrait of Madame Matisse," and by it's French name, "La Raie Verte." The painting is housed at the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Piet Mondrian painted "Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow" around 1930. The painting is oil on canvas like "Composition," which Mondrian had painted the previous year. In 1987, Alfred Roth donated the painting to Kunsthaus Zurich.
El Greco was born Domenikos Theotokopoulo. His "View of Toldeo" depicts the city in which he spent most of his life. Some of the structures in the painting are Alcázar, Alcántara Bridge and the Castle of San Servando.
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Frida Kahlo painted 143 paintings of which 55 are self-portraits. Her other self-portraits include "Self-Portrait with Monkey," "Diego and I," "Self-Portrait with Loose Hair" and "Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky."
In 1931, Salvador Dali painted "The Persistence of Memory" at the height of the Surrealist Movement. He created the painting using his paranoiac-critical method, which relies on self-induced hallucinations and paranoia to create art.
In 1907, Umberto Boccioni moved to Milan. While in the Italian city, Poet Filippo Marinetti, who started the Futurist movement, began to have a heavy influence on Boccioni's work. Boccioni published "Manifesto of the Futurist Painters" in 1910.
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John Constable never left England and is closely associated with Stour Valley, which is nicknamed "Constable country." Constable's later paintings were not open-air oil sketches. Instead, they were sketches inspired by his earlier works.
Frederic Edwin Church studied with Thomas Cole from 1844 to 1846. Both men are known for paint landscapes. Cole enjoyed Church's work so much, he once said that Church had "the finest eye for drawing in the world."
"Nighthawks" was completed in January 1942. It is currently owned by the Art Institute of Chicago. While most of Edward Hopper's paintings have one lonely subject, "Nighthawks" features many people in a neighborhood diner.
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In 1962, Renoir took lessons at the École des Beaux-Arts in drawing and anatomy. He also took lessons from Swiss painter Charles Gleyre, who had been a student of Neoclasical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominque Ingres.
Vincent van Gogh admired Jean-Francois Millet. However, Van Gogh never got to see "The Sower" because it entered a private collection in Boston years before he was born. "The Sower" is a 40- by 32.5-inch painting made from oil on canvas.
Sometime before October 31, 1979, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "The Day Dream" was commissioned by Constantine Alexander Ionides for 700 guineas. The painting was Rossetti's last finished work.
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Roy Lichtenstein was a member of the Pop Art movement and a contemporary of Andy Warhol. Many of Lichtenstein's paintings used Ben-Day dots, which was a printing process that featured dots of equal size and distribution across a given area.
Pablo Picasso's "Three Musicians" features two characters from "commedia dell'arte," or Italian comic theatre. The first character is the Pierrot, which is on the left. The other is a Harlequin, which is in the center.
"A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" debuted at the 1886 Impressionist exhibition. It was created using dot-like dabs of paint, which is a technique now known as Pointillism. The painting is housed at the Art Institute of Chicago.
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At the 1998 Christie's auction, "Self-Portrait without Beard" had seven serious bidders. The painting was originally made for Van Gogh's mother's 70th birthday to prove to her that her son was doing fine.
Diego Rivera's painting was removed from Rockefeller center in 1934, two years after it was commissioned. In 2014, the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington D.C. told the story of the mural in an exhibition called "Man at the Crossroads: Diego Rivera's Mural at Rockefeller Center."
Grant Wood submitted "American Gothic" to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1930. He ended up winning a $300 prize and the art museum acquired the piece for its permanent collection. The small town of Eldon, Iowa inspired the painting.
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Magritte painted apples on several occasions. The other paintings include "The Postcard," " Listening Room," "Ceci n'est pas une pomme," "The Habit" and "Le prêtre marié." Another recurring feature in Magritte's paintings is the bowler hat, which first appeared in "Man in the Bowler Hat."
In 1998, one of Coolidge's original paintings was sold for $74,000. In 2005, "A Bold Bluff" and "Waterloo: Two" were expected to sell for $30,000 to $50,000, but would end up selling for over $590,000.
The Sistine Chapel was renovated in the late 15th century and named after the man who supervised that renovation, Pope Sixtus IV. The chapel is located in the Vatican's Apostolic Palace.
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