No one managed to avoid the sarcastic jokes and condescending remarks of Edgar Degas. Everybody got it in the neck: artists and writers, critics and politicians; admiring biographers and chroniclers of Impressionism even recorded excerpts of Degas's conversations in cafes and at the exhibitions.
When Pablo Picasso settled in Montmartre, there had been legends about Edgar Degas. Residents of the commune Bateau-Lavoir, their guests and friends (poets and artists) spent evenings "playing Degas". The point of the game was to insult each other in a perfectly calm voice and as politely and secular as possible.

According to the memories of his relatives, the first word of the baby Pablo Picasso was the word "pencil". When the boy grew up, his father began to take his son with him to college, where he taught drawing. And, one day, Picasso’s father for some reason was allegedly called from the office, where he was working on a painting depicting pigeons. On return, he found that the young Pablo finished the picture. The mastery of the 13-year-old son shocked his father so much that he gave Pablo his palette and brush, and since then he no longer came to easel.

The 18th century French pastelist Jean-Étienne Liotard was remarkable by his extravagant look and long, curled beard, which he grew during his four-year stay in Constantinople. Noble and wealthy Europeans, having a weakness for oriental exotics, were very eager to have the "Turkish gentleman" make their portraits. But before marrying Marie Fargues, the artist shaved off his magnificent beard, and the story was widely told (on the initiative of the bride). Even Voltaire wrote to the Austrian Count Karl von Zinzendorf that the beard was deposited in a special box with due ceremony.

In France, in April 2015, a picture of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, a famous French artist of the 19th century, was discovered – a true miracle of the stock control conducted by Emmanuelle Busline, curator and adviser on historical monuments of the region. In the chapel attic of the former Hotel Dieu Hospital, a large canvas of 4.3 by 3.4 meters was found, rolled up and covered with dust – an image of the Madonna with a baby in her arms and a kneeling king. A well-known plot for the artist!

It is believed that Ingres presented the picture to the city in 1826, when he finished it. It hung in the local church of Saint-Désiré, and in 1936, when the restoration began in the temple, it was transferred to the former hospital and forgotten. It is believed that this is the second version of "The Vow of Louis XIII". The leader of European academicism created the first version in 1824 by the order of the King of France, Charles X.

Leon Bakst came to the conclusion about the advantages of lecturing over creating paintings in 1923, after delivering at the Plaza Hotel his most famous lecture on fashion and design L'art du Costume et les lois, ces applications selon toute individualité. Bakst was paid 2,000 US dollars for this lecture. Its text was published in Vogue magazine. Bakst really enjoyed it and wrote to his sister that he craved more lectures like that: "This is like Chaliapin’s tour – pleasant and much easier than painting."

For a long time, the famous English Pre-Raphaelite artists George Frederick Watts and Frederic Leighton were not only friends, but also neighbours. They lived on adjacent plots of a unique artists' colony built in Holland Park in the second half of the XIX century. The "brothers in art" shared the gate that connected their gardens, and every morning Leighton would call Watts to tell him about the latest news of the Royal Academy of Arts. Leighton was a member of each committee of the Royal Academy, the so-called social activist, and in 1878, at the early age of 48 he became president of the Academy. Watts wasn't that interested in the affairs of the institution, and Leighton was constantly making efforts to prevent his friend from being excluded from it.

13-year-old Auguste felt like the church boys’ choir was where he belonged: large organ pipes hid him from the eyes of the worshippers, while he could see and feel everyone. Loaders, traders, workers and many others came to morning mass. "It was on a cold morning like that I understood Rembrandt," recalled Renoir later. He had a beautiful baritone, learned musical notation and performed complex passages. At that time, the regent of the choir and the church organist was Charles Gounod, still young and unknown (the opera Faust would appear only in 10 years). The regent was sure that Renoir stood a pretty good chance of becoming a famous opera singer. He gave the boy private lessons and persuaded his parents to choose a musical education for their son

The American artist John Singer Sargent was friends with the famous London art dealer Asher Wertheimer, and had painted 14 portraits of his family members. The favourite artist’s model was the youngest daughter Ena Wertheimer, who was 13 years away from the romantic portraitist, moreover, they belonged to different social circles. On the eve of her wedding, the artist painted Ena’s portrait, as if she sailed away in the suit of a naval officer, leaving Whitman's poetry lines in his notebook: "O we can wait no longer, We too take ship O soul, Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas". After that, he officially declared that he is all over with custom-made portraits. The artist only made exceptions for his friends John Rockefeller, Henry James, Woodrow Wilson.

William Turner was very reluctant to part with his paintings: he wanted the best of them to be preserved for descendants in a single collection. And if the thing was dear to him, willing to scare away a persevering buyer, he inflated the price wickedly. So it happened to "Dido building Carthage". In the bidding process, the price rose from 500 to 2,000 pounds and the angry buyer blurted out: "What are you going to do with it?" "They'll bury me in it, what else?" Turner joked spitefully. The artist's phrase became popular, so that when Turner died, the gossip spread across London. The abbot of St. Paul's Cathedral, having learned about the death of the artist, allegedly stated indignantly that he would not read the funeral prayer, if Turner was wrapped in a picture!

The First President of the Royal Academy of Arts Joshua Reynolds had an obsessive tendency of retouching and reworking the paintings of his great colleagues. For example, during the study of Rembrandt's "Susanna and the Elders" in 2015, the restorers came to a shocking conclusion: a significant part of the canvas was repainted in the XVIII century, some areas were simply washed off with solvent and painted anew in a lighter palette, which was more fashionable at that period. Scientists believe that in this "barbarism" was engaged none other than Reynolds, as this kind of "editing" refers to the period when "Susanna and the Elders" was in his collection.

Apples are the landmark object in the Cézanne’s work. And the friendship of Paul Cézanne and Emil Zola began precisely with apples - the future writer, grateful for Paul’s intercession gave the future artist a whole basket of apples.
"He, Zola, was interested in absolutely nothing. He dreamed. He was absolutely unsociable, a kind of a melancholic destitute. You know, the kind of people guys usually hate. Without any reason, they bullied him. And this was the beginning of our friendship. The whole school, big guys and kids, gave me some kind of a swagger because I did not participate in their ostracism. I didn’t care about them, I came up and talked with him as usual. A nice friend. The next day he brought me a basket of apples. Here they are, Cézanne's apples!"

The teachers of the Dutchman Van Meegeren found his own paintings stiff and imitative. The most notorious forger of the twentieth century earned millions on forgeries of paintings by Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch. For example, he sold Christ and the Adulteress, a fake Vermeer, to Nazi Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring for 1.6 million Dutch guilders. After the war, World War II, van Meegeren confessed to fraud in order to avoid accusations of collaboration for the sale of national treasures. In 1947, he was sentenced to a year in prison but died of a heart attack the next month.

With the beginning of the Franco-Prussian war, Mary Cassatt had to leave Paris and return to America. However, the Americans did not buy Cassatt's paintings. Two of her works were burned during the Great Chicago Fire of 1871... The artist got depressed and put her brushes off. Salvation came unexpectedly ant it was the Archbishop of Pittsburgh. He commissioned Mary copies of Correggio's paintings, located in Parma, and in 1871 Cassatt went to Italy. There she found out that her painting Two Women Throwing Flowers During Carnival was bought at the exhibition of the Paris Salon of 1872. A talented paintress came to light.

Certainly, the great artist did not do it on purpose. During his voyage to Etretat, a place in Normandy with the most beautiful cliffs in France, Monet was fascinated by the views. So much so that, carried away by his work, he did not notice how the tide began. The water came so quickly that the artist himself almost died, but the almost completed landscape had no chance to survive, it drowned in the risen water. However, Monet made up with the landscapes. As recalled Guy de Maupassant who saw him then: "I often followed Claude Monet when he wandered around searching impression. In those moments, he seemed to be not an artist, but a real hunter. He always had 5 or 6 canvases with him, carried by pleasured local children... He took one or another canvas, according to the changing conditions. Sometimes the artist waited for a long time for suitable weather."

The phenomenal Erté (Roman Tyrtov), one of the icons of Art Deco, not only designed exquisite and extravagant clothes for fashionistas, but also wore them. Once, American costume designer Howard Greer met Erté wearing his pyjamas with a hem and collar, simulating ermine. In 1926, he appeared at Paris Opera ball wearing a brocade bullfighter costume of his own design. He decorated a huge cape with fresh roses, which he threw into the crowd, going down the stairs. Erté had this passion for bright clothes and extravagant accessories till the end of his life. He wore his costumes “with a unique grace with which wild cat wears its fur,” wrote one of the journalists.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, an English portrait and history painter, a representative of the English school of portraiture of the XVIII century, was never married. He proposed to the German artist Angelica Kauffman, who moved to London. Having been rejected and craving for revenge, he introduced her to the gigolo Frederick Brandt. The man got her into such a big mess that it got the whole Europe intrigued and inspired Victor Hugo to write his drama Ruy Blas.

At the age of 15, Arkhip Kuindzhi started studying art under Aivazovsky. A shy, full-bodied young man arrived in Feodosia wearing a shirt, a colourful vest, checkered pants bubbling on his knees, and a straw hat. The young Kuindzhi really amused Ivan Aivazovsky and his daughter Elena, who had a good laugh at his naive village daub and crimson face. Arkhip lived under the shed in the yard for two months, since he was not allowed into the studio. At the end of his "training" the master entrusted Kuindzhi to paint his fence (though he got some practical advice from Aivazovsky's disciple Adolf Faessler). Kuindzhi learned this lesson for life and Kuindzhi never refused anyone anything.

In 2008, Tiepolo's name was the talk of the art world: a picture of the great master was found in the attic of a French estate! Shy grandparents of the current owners prudently hid the luxurious topless lady depicted on the canvas. Thus they perfectly preserved the picture! It is believed that it was ordered by the Russian Empress Elizabeth to decorate the Winter Palace, as there are similar images of the series there. The canvas was called "Portrait of a Lady as Flora" and soon sold at Christie's auction for 4,227,780 dollars, almost three times "overlapping" the considerable estimate.

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.

Apart from domestic animals, Pablo Picasso always had many birds. The French photographer and sculptor Michel Sima found a little owl in Antibes and gave it to Picasso. It was brought from Antibes to Paris, and lived in the artist's kitchen, sharing a cage with canaries and doves. The owl had a wild temper and rejected everyone except for Picasso. And the artist, known for his Dove of Peace drawing, also painted owls.