10 most difficult paint­ings riddles

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.

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.

The painting features six female figures and two males, along with a cupid, in an orange grove. In the centre (but not exactly so) and somewhat set back from the other figures stands Venus, a red-draped woman in blue. Like the flower-gatherer, she returns the viewer's gaze.

The painting is on a monumental scale of 491 × 716 cm and became an icon of French Romanticism. It depicts a moment from the aftermath of the wreck of the French naval frigate Méduse. All but 15 of around 150 people died in the 13 days before their rescue, and those who survived endured starvation and dehydration and practised cannibalism.

Commentators have suggested that nearly every great ancient Greek philosopher can be found in this painting, but determining which are depicted is difficult. However, the identities of some of the philosophers in the picture, such as Plato (pointing the heavens) and his student Aristotle (pointing the earth), are certain.

Piet Mondrian was a Dutch painter and theoretician. He is known for being one of the pioneers of 20th century abstract art, as he changed his artistic direction from figurative painting to an increasingly abstract style, until he reached a point where his artistic vocabulary was reduced to simple geometric elements.

The Turkish Bath (Le Bain turc) is an oil painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, initially completed between 1852 and 1859, but modified in 1862. The painting depicts a group of nude women at a pool in a harem.

Still life developed as a separate category in the Low Countries in the last quarter of the 16th century. The Netherlandish production of still life was enormous, and they were very widely exported, especially to northern Europe.

Almond Blossoms is from a group of several paintings made in 1888 and 1890 by Vincent van Gogh in southern France of blossoming almond trees. Flowering trees were special to van Gogh. They represented awakening and hope. He enjoyed them aesthetically and found joy in painting flowering trees.

A veduta (Italian for "view") is a highly detailed, usually large-scale painting or, more often print, of a cityscape or some other vista. The painters of vedute are referred to as vedutisti.