A lot of artists tied themselves in knots trying to emulate Kuindzhi's palette. Speaking of the painting Ukrainian Night, Kramskoy wrote in a letter to Repin: "I'm a complete fool in front of this painting. The lighting on the white hut is so realistic that it tiresome for my eyes to look at it, as if it is real..." But the secret of Kuindzhi's palette was easier than it seemed. One day Kuindzhi (who was teaching at the Academy of Arts at the time) invited his friend Dmitry Mendeleev to his class. The latter brought a device estimating the spectral sensitivity of the human eye. Kuindzhi was far ahead of his young students in this indicator. He saw in a different way. Not in terms of creativity, but in the most literal physiological sense.

Once fascinated by painting, Churchill could no longer live without this hobby, drawing wherever he could. In March 1921, on arriving to Egypt at the Cairo Conference, Churchill decided to paint the pyramids. He decided to ride a camel to the desert. However, sitting up on the "two-humped horse", Winston lost his balance and fell to the ground, which caused him a ragged wound. However, the journey continued, and yet he made sketches of the Sahara and the pyramids.

Frida Kahlo created her biggest and most difficult piece, The Wounded Table, in 1940, experiencing a divorce from Diego Rivera. Being a dedicated Communist, she sent the work to the USSR as "a gift of friendship", but Soviet officials considered it to be an example of "decadent bourgeois formalist art" and unsuitable for public display. In 1955, the painting was shown in Poland in an exhibition, but on the way back to Moscow The Wounded Table disappeared as if into thin air. Years of searching in Europe and America have been unsuccessful. The painting remains the "Holy Grail" for art historians, studying Frida Kahlo's work.

An unstudious student, Claude painted the covers of notebooks and drew cartoons of teachers. The latter were so good that by the age of 15 he was famous in his native Le Havre as a skillful caricaturist. They asked him to draw caricature portraits, and he did, this time for money: 20 francs! Soon the amusing drawings by Claude Monet were displayed in the window of the only art supplies store in the city. The young Monet glowed with pride seeing them.

Velasquez was a court painter: successful, but not as famous as he would have liked. First, only those admitted to the palace could appreciate his paintings: authors who painted pictures and frescoes for public temples were much more popular. Secondly, the Spaniard Velasquez was almost unknown in Italy, which he considered the birthplace of the beauty itself. One day, having arrived to Rome, Velasquez painted a portrait of his servant, handed him this portrait, and sent to go to the homes of local aristocrats and artists, saying, look, here I am the original, Pareja the Moor, and here is my portrait by Velasquez! It had effect! This portrait was eventually exhibited in the Pantheon, and Velasquez received orders from the Italian noblemen.

Did you know that Auguste Renoir has the most organized and active opponents? In the past several years, Renoir Sucks At Painting movement has been demanding removal of the artist’s works from museums and staging demonstrations (not particularly crowded, but very reckless). They usually hold homemade signs reading "God Hates Renoir" and "Stop Aesthetic Terrorism". The community has an eponymously-named page on Instagram, where users post their own photos with Renoir's most awful (in their opinion) paintings in the background.
Admittedly, the activists have nothing against his Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette or La Grenouillère. All protests are focused mainly on the late works of the aging Renoir, when all his characters began to look the same, pursuing the artist's conceptual ideal.

By the age of 20, Matisse had studied to be a lawyer and got the right to start his own practice, which caused his return to his native wilderness in the north of France. But suddenly he was overtaken by an attack of appendicitis, and Matisse had to undergo several surgical interventions (it was 1889, and the patient had complications). To entertain his son and cheer him up, his mother brought paints to the hospital, he enthusiastically began to copy the old postcards. The mood improved so much that after the hospital Matisse headed straight for Paris, having decided to become an artist. His father, the shopkeeper was very upset: he hoped that the son would become a decent person.

After Ruben's death in 1640, van Dyck received a letter from the King of Spain. The artist had almost no doubts he would be offered a place at court. But Philip IV asked him to complete unfinished Rubens' commission first. "He managed to humiliate me even from his grave!" – said van Dyck discontentedly. He only had 12 months to live: a year after Rubens ' death, on December 9, 1641, the 42-year-old van Dyck died of a mysterious illness and was buried the same day as his daughter Justinia's baptism.

4 miles of red yarn, 200 pairs of shoes and handwritten notes were used by Chiharu Shiota for her performance "Perspective", which dramatically and emotionally conveys the personal memories of the Japanese artist. The new art object is intended for the Venice Biennale-2015. Chiharu Shiota is known throughout the world for her research into the phenomenon of memory, losses and totems, in which people can turn ordinary household items such as shoes and keys.

During World War II, the Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window by Jan Vermeer was brought from Dresden to Saxony and kept there in a tunnel, which rescued it from destruction. The soldiers of the Red Army sent the painting to the Soviet Union, but after the death of Joseph Stalin, the Soviets decided to return it to Germany, "for the purpose of strengthening and furthering the progress of friendship between the Soviet and German peoples." Aggrieved at the thought of losing hundreds of paintings, art historians and museum curators in the Soviet Union suggested that "in acknowledgment for saving and returning the world-famous treasures of the Dresden Gallery" the Germans should perhaps donate to them Vermeer's masterpiece and Sleeping Venus by Giorgione. The Germans did not take to the idea, and the painting was returned to Germany in 1955.

...According to the memoirs of their contemporaries, Raphael and Agostino Chigi (his richest customer) were friends. And yet, duty before friendship. Once Raphael painted several frescoes for Chigi. Having finished his work, the artist unexpectedly demanded to double the payment. At first, Agostino Chigi's cashier Julio Borghese refused to do that, but Raphael would not budge. "Call on the experts and you will see how moderate I am in my demands," he argued.
Knowing the strained relations between Raphael and Michelangelo, Borghese chose the latter to be an expert. Buonarroti came, slowly and silently examined the frescoes of his rival, and pointing to the head of one of the sibyls said, "That head alone is worth 100 ducats, the others are worth not less." He disliked Raphael, but would never allow himself to be biased.

When Claude Monet turned 20, he had to participate in the drawing of lots. At that time, there was no conscription in France, but under the law in force, all young men of the city who reached the age of twenty were gathered and had their names written on pieces of paper which were put into the ballot box – in this way a lottery system determined who was called up for military service. They had to serve 7 years. It was also officially allowed to pay for someone to take your place. But Claude had already started dreaming about white sands, starry nights, and an incredibly beautiful military uniform.
Monet asked to serve in Algeria. He spent a year in the personal protection of marshal Pélissier but didn't participate in a single military campaign. Monet escaped out of boredom and despair – and was found unconscious and feverish by his colleagues. He had typhoid. Unlike his colleagues (Impressionists), Monet remained indifferent to oriental exotics.

Once Auguste Renoir and Édouard Manet painted next to each other. They stayed in Claude Monet's house in Argenteuil and set up their easels in the garden, while the owner was doing his chores. After this joint plein-air, Édouard Manet, rather embarrassingly, asked Claude to somehow suggest Renoir to quit painting. The poor fellow had no talent at all!

Auguste Renoir liked painting pictures but didn't like talking about them. The connoisseurs of art, who grilled the artist about the sublime even on a train, would often hear his: "Sorry, I know nothing about high art, my works are pornographic". Yet, there's a grain of joke in every joke. The same Renoir was quite serious when saying: "I loved women even before I learned to walk... I never think I have finished a nude until I think I could pinch it.”

It was a time of the Paris Commune. Once the artist was mistaken for a spy drawing a plan of the Seine embankments and was nearly drowned there. Quickly gathered onlookers got excited and demanded immediate reprisal for spying. But a miracle happened: the guards decided to shoot Renoir instead of drowning him. The execution was decided to take place in the city hall, but on the way there Auguste suddenly saw a familiar face – it was Raoul Rigault, a fugitive Republican journalist, whom Renoir saved from starvation and capture a few years before. Now Rigault was a police commissioner and a big man; the guards who caught the artist cheerfully sang Marseillaise and let him free.

On a bright August day of 1806, a plump, handsome elderly man entered one of the Parisian confectioneries and ordered an ice cream. The sun was warm and the visitor dozed off. The café employees knew that it was their regular visitor, Monsieur Fragonard, and therefore did not wake him up, letting him rest. After a couple of hours, it became clear that the visitor was not asleep – he was dead. Death under the gentle rays of the sun in anticipation of ice cream – it is difficult to come up with a more suitable departure of the last artist of the Rococo era.

The "Fresco" is considered a landmark work by Pollock, for he never painted huge artworks before. However, Peggy Guggenheim ordered a mural for the wall of her house, and the surrealist Marcel Duchamp advised to make it not on plaster, but on canvas. Jackson Pollock nearly put the order on the back burner, as he spent several months contemplating a blank canvas, and "gradually fell into a real depression," according to his wife Lee Krasner. However, he got out in just one night: the creator was visited by inspiration, and in less than a day he created a work later recognized as a masterpiece. Well, he got over his fear of big canvases, and they eventually became his mega-"business card".

We are lucky enough to know this artist under such a short name "Picasso". After all, you would say his full name at least for five minutes, and it would be even more challenging to remember it! The full name of Picasso consists of twenty-three words: Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso. After the Spanish tradition, Picasso received two family names for the first names of his parents: his father Ruíz and his mother Picasso. Well, it is rather difficult to say why he received such a long font name. Probably, the parents decided to list many deceased and living relatives of the family in it in order to honour their memory.

Alphonse Mucha made his way to his luck for a long time, and he became famous literally in one night. His success was brought by the unsurpassed Sarah Bernhardt, who approved his poster sketch, in which she acted in main role in the play "Gismonda". After the posters were spread, Mucha instantly became famous. It is rumored that the Parisians liked his posters so much that they bought additional copies from the distributors, and if they did not manage to agree with them, they stole posters, cutting them off in the dark from the walls with razor blades. Well, turning ordinary objects into works of art was a special gift of the famous artist.