The "Retrospective Bust Of A Woman", created by Salvador Dalí in 1933 for the Surrealist exhibition in Pierre Colle Gallery (Paris) is quite original. On the porcelain bust of a woman, there is a loaf of bread (a surreal cap!) and a bronze ink-pot – the image of L'Angélus by Jean-Francois Millet. Plus, ants on the face, a paper "scarf", corn on the shoulders – well, just a parody of fashion! The original of which was spoiled... by the dog of Picasso. The artist visited the exhibition with his pet, and the dog devoured the loaf! The whole idea was actually wasted... Now its reconstruction with a fake loaf is in the Salvador Dalí Theater Museum in Figueres.

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.

Gerrit van Uylenburgh, Saskia's (Rembrandt's first wife) relative, was a successful art dealer. Not the fairest one, though. He took whole collections of paintings from his French colleagues for sale in Holland. He hired local artists to make replicas of those paintings. The forgeries then were sold, while the originals were sent back to Paris: Sorry, but your French masterpieces do not sell well here.

The funniest thing is that in such a way, Gerrit van Uylenburgh messed around with the Parisian art dealer Everhard Jabach. And Jabach was also known for selling forgeries. That is, there is a high possibility that Uylenburgh sold replicas of replicas.

The swindler had to flee the country because of the rumours and notoriety. Uylenburgh ended up in England and eventually managed to become a conservator of the royal collection of Charles II.

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.”

During the restoration of the Caravaggio’s "Bacchus", on the decanter, they found a vague reflection of a man – probably a self-portrait by Caravaggio. It is interesting that the glass decanter is to the right of the young god (posed by a famous model), and he holds his glass in his left hand. Apparently, the artist used a pinhole camera when creating a picture – an optical device for transferring an image of a real object to the surface, for example, a canvas. At the same time, the artist "transferred" himself.

Van Gogh's Sunflowers are fading. This was confirmed by experts who have studied the version of the painting from the artist’s museum in Amsterdam. The thing is that the artist used two differing yellow pigments in the work, one of which is extremely sensitive to light and is fading to a brownish colour over time as a result. It seems that the artist himself was all too aware that the colours in his work were transient. "Paintings fade like flowers," he wrote in a letter to his brother Theo. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has already lowered its galleries’ lighting in an attempt to slow the aging process of 200 paintings and 400 drawings by the artist.

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.

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."

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.

The first believed professional art dealer, the famous art patron Paul Durand-Ruel saw his mission in supporting and developing real art, and, importantly, educating the audience. Between 1871 and 1922, Paul Durand-Ruel acquired about 12,000 Impressionist works, including more than 1000 works by Monet, 1500 works by Renoir, 800 works by Pissarro, 400 works by Degas, Cassatt and Sisley, and about 200 arworks by Manet.

The famous American photo artist Richard Prince sold Instagram online pictures of Selena Mooney for 90 thousand dollars at the exhibition in the Gagosian gallery. Now she sells the same photos for 90 dollars. This is her Roland for an Oliver dor his plagiarism. Prince took her photo for his project without permission, and yet he steals other people's works in a broad manner since the 1970's – such a "pop art trick"! Sometimes it comes to trial, but without much shock for the "projector": one of the verdicts was simply canceled a couple of years ago.

Paul Cézanne had his own creative method of work. He was always dissatisfied with himself and therefore worked for a very long time, and his models had to stay in one position for long hours. And the artist could leave a work before it was finished because it wasn’t perfect! So, Ambroise Vollard posed for Cézanne for 115 (!) times, but he saw his portrait. Cézanne postponed the painting to get back to it later when he "would achieve something". Well, except for he liked, "how the shirt chest is painted". Cézanne could only let his model to take a break under the force of the argument that the model would get tired and therefore become a bad poser. At the same time, the artist demanded complete silence at work: even the dog's barking could prevent him.

Critics liked to call the characters by the artist "cardboard dolls" or "lifeless caricatures". However, Seurat portrayed people in this way quite consciously, deliberately simplifying forms and styling figures following the spirit of flat Greek frescoes or Egyptian hieroglyphs. The artist chose such an image manner according to his philosophy: "I want to reduce the figures of modern people to their essence, make them move just like on frescoes by Phidias, and arrange them on the canvas in chromatic harmony."

Lucian Freud said: "I paint people, not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be." Quite a psychological statement, while the works that cost millions may be a subject for "Freudian" analysis. Lucian Freud led a bohemian lifestyle. By the time he died in 2011, he had been married twice, acknowledged 14 children by different women and had at least 50 lovers. At the end of 80, he created a nude portrait of Kate Moss and inked a tattoo on her lower back.

In 2015, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts issued an apology and cancelled a program, displaying Claude Monet's painting of his wife and giving the visitors the opportunity to put on a kimono similar to the one depicted in the painting, and encouraging them to pose for photographs. Before that, the painting La Japonaise. Camille Monet in Japanese Costume was shown all over Japan where the viewers posing in a kimono was an organic part of the special program. What could go wrong in America? And yet, an innocent event caused protest actions and accusations of cultural insensibility: some of the visitors noticed there "Orientalist flirtations with the exotic".

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 the White House, they always treated painting with piety. So, during the war of 1812, Dolly Madison saved the portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stewart. Jacqueline Kennedy borrowed eight paintings by Cézanne from the permanent collection of one of the museums. Hillary Clinton withstood the abstract painting “Mountain at Bear Lake—Taos” by Georgia O'Keefe, while critics assured that the work will break the restrained elegance of the Green Room, created by the paintings of the XIX century. Laura Bush convinced the committee that oversees the art collection of the White House to accept the painting by her contemporary Andrew Wyeth as a gift, although it contradicted the rules: before getting to the White House, the painting must be aged for at least 25 years. Therefore, the collection of the residence contains the minimum number of works of living artists.

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.

Leonardo da Vinci enjoyed watching cats and sketching their varying moods and postures. Judging by eight preparatory sketches, he planned to create Madonna with an Infant and a Cat. It is clear from his sketch from the British Museum why the painting itself never materialized: this combination of models was a troublesome one. Leonardo has brilliantly caught the struggle between infant and cat, but the sketches he made were obviously dashed off at high speed. It must have dawned on him that any attempt to keep the cat there for the many hours needed for a detailed portrait painting would be doomed to failure. As a result, we have been robbed of a finished painting of a cat by the grand master.

In his last years, Salvador Dalí suffered from parkinsonism, which precluded him from painting. And then his wife, incomparable and extraordinary Gala, found a Spanish artist Manuel Pujol of Baladas. In 1979–1981, he created about 400 works: oil paintings (about 200!), drawings, watercolors, lithographs, and he signed each of them with the famous signature of Salvador Dalí. These "unpleasant" details became known to the public, but the surrealist did not lose his head. He said that fakes are excellent, and they could well be his works!