10 most difficult painting riddles

"Ad" Reinhardt (1913 -1967) was an abstract painter active in New York. Reinhardt is best known for his so-called "black" paintings of the 1960s, which appear at first glance to be simply canvases painted black but are actually composed of black and nearly black shades. Among many other suggestions, these paintings ask if there can be such a thing as an absolute, even in black, which some viewers may not consider a color at all.

Leonardo spent his last years in France at the home awarded him by Francis I. He brought three masterpieces: Mona Lisa, The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist.

Tomyris was a Massagetean ruler who reigned over the Massagetae, an Iranian people from Scythian pastoral-nomadic confederation of Central Asia east of the Caspian Sea. Tomyris led her armies to defend against an attack by Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid Empire, and, according to Herodotus, defeated and killed him in 530 BC. The names of Tomyris, and her son Spargapises, who was the head of her army, are of Iranian origins.

Pieter Jansz. Saenredam was a painter of the Dutch Golden Age. His paintings frequently show medieval churches, usually Gothic, but sometimes late Romanesque, which had been stripped bare of their original decorations after the iconoclasm of the Protestant Reformation. He wanted to record this time of change by documenting the country’s buildings.

Marie-Guillemine Benoist was a French neoclassical, historical and genre painter. In 1800, she exhibited Portrait d'une négresse in the Salon. Six years previously, slavery had been abolished, and this image became a symbol for women's emancipation and black people's rights. The picture was acquired by Louis XVIII for France in 1818.

Viktor Oliva (24 April 1861 – 5 April 1928) was a Czech painter and illustrator. His most famous painting, Absinthe Drinker (Czech: Piják absintu), hangs on the wall of the historical Café Slavia in Prague, Czech Republic.

Dogs Playing Poker, by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, refers collectively to an 1894 painting, a 1903 series of sixteen oil paintings commissioned by Brown & Bigelow to advertise cigars, and a 1910 painting. All eighteen paintings in the overall series feature anthropomorphized dogs, but the eleven in which dogs are seated around a card table have become well known in the United States as examples of kitsch art in home decoration.

Vanitas means "futility" or "worthlessness", the traditional Christian view being that earthly goods and pursuits are transient and worthless. Vanitas themes were common in medieval funerary art, with most surviving examples in sculpture. Common symbols include skulls, rotten fruit, bubbles, smoke, watches, and hourglasses.

It has been said that Giotto was the first real painter, like Adam was the first man. Living in the late Middle Ages (died 1337), he broke with the prevalent Byzantine style and introduced the technique of drawing accurately from life.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was an artistic association of painters established in London in 1848. The group's intention was to reform art by rejecting what it considered the mechanistic approach first adopted by Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo. Its members believed the Classical poses and elegant compositions of Raphael in particular had been a corrupting influence on the academic teaching of art, hence the name "Pre-Raphaelite".