Titian was a handsome man and a famous artist. Venetian ladies – from duchesses to courtesans – posed for him, and sometimes stayed in his studio a little bit (or even much) longer than they had to. But it was before Cecilia. She was different: shy, bright, smiling, and yet steady and reliable. Titian painted mistresses and wives of dukes and kings, but when his own wife saw herself on the canvas naked, she burst into tears and asked him not to disgrace her. They say that the artist changed the features of Cecilia's face in his painting Venus Anadyomene.

The third place on the list of the most expensive living female artists is taken by Yayoi Kusama with her polka dots obsession. There are polka dots on her canvases, objects and even people... Actually, "obsession" here is far from being a metaphor: the Japanese artist admitted herself into a psychiatric hospital and confessed: "I am deeply terrified by the obsessions crawling over my body, whether they come from within me or from outside. I fluctuate between feelings of reality and unreality. My artwork is an expression of my life, particularly of my mental disease. If it wasn't for art, I would have killed myself long ago." Indeed, the saving art is polka-dotted.

The Russian artist had a legendary exclusive visual memory. One day, into the hometown of Vrubel, Saratov, they brought a large-scale copy of the "Last Judgment" fresco by the great Italian Renaissance painter Michelangelo. The future brilliant Russian artist was just Misha then, he was 9 years old. The boy took pencils and brushes at the age of five, so he hastened to look at the work, housed in the church, together with his father, and for a long time he studied every detail of it, even though his father called him to return home. Afterwards, having retired to his nursery, he reproduced the seemingly impossible for the child composition with masterful precision.

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.

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.

In 1938, Dole company approached Georgia O'Keeffe, offering her an all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii to produce two print-ad images for the Hawaiian Pineapple Company. Though the artist only spent nine weeks visiting the island paradise, she completed no fewer than 20 paintings. Ironically, the one thing that O’Keeffe neglected to paint was a pineapple. After the trip, she turned two pieces into Dole: Heliconia, Crab’s Claw Ginger and Papaya Tree, ‘Íao Valley, Maui. The second one was rejected because the papaya was the rival fruit to the pineapple. Upon the artist’s return to New York, Dole sent her a pineapple so she could finish the assignment. In the summer of 2018, almost all of the works from the series were on view at the exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe: Visions of Hawaii at the New York Botanical Garden.

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.

With the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War, Renoir, who had never ridden a horse before, was sent to serve in cavalry regiment ... to tame horses. When the young artist came to the captain and told him about his profession, the man made a joke: "At least they didn’t send you into artillery!"
But it turned out that Renoir had the natural abilities of a rider. He learned to handle horses in a couple of months and got the most capricious and stubborn animals for taming. During his service, the artist had only one horse, with which he couldn't cope. "The recalcitrant found a way to get rid of me: the horse leaned against the wall of the arena with all its weight, trying to crush my leg. I tried the whip, tenderness and sugar – nothing helped," Renoir later said.

This is about a magnificent canvas of a mystical genre uncharacteristic for Aivazovsky. Being inspired by the biblical line "and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters", he embodied it on canvas. Pope Gregory XVI wanted to acquire the painting. Aivazovsky's studio was visited by endless processions consisting of prelates, cardinals and other high-ranking officials, but all these commissions could not find any flaws in the work that would make it unworthy of the Vatican gallery. The Pope bought the painting and awarded Aivazovsky with a golden medal. In this regard, Gogol, with whom Aivazovsky became friends in Rome, came up with a great pun: "Well done, Vania! You, a little man from the banks of the distant Neva, came to Rome and your Chaos immediately caused a chaos in the Vatican! And it's frustrating that if it had been me, a scribbler, who caused chaos in the Vatican, I would have been thumped, and Vania Aivazovsky was given a golden medal ... "

Suzanne taught young Édouard and his brothers music at their parents’ house. She gave birth to a son, Leon: was he Manet's godson, brother or son? At first, Suzanne became his secret lover, hidden from prying eyes for 10 years, and only then – his wife. Manet’s mistresses laughed at her kindness and plumpness, she never came to the studio, but it was to her that Manet daily sent pigeons with letters from the besieged Paris: "I woke up last night thinking I heard you calling me..." The poetry and prose of life went hand in hand in this story. One day Manet was following some pretty girl on the streets of Paris and stumbled upon Susanne. "I thought it was you," the artist said cheerfully to his wife.

Sometimes not only counterfeits get exposes, but also ... originals! "The Procuress" was considered a forgery by the great falsifier of paintings Hans van Meegeren (famous for his marvelous counterfeit "Vermeers") for a long time. However, after a detailed study, it was authenticated as the genuine picture created by the Dutchman Dirk van Bauburen in 1622. It was probably the first case of an unfairly "slandered" picture faker, who took up the illegal forgery of canvases in order to avenge the world for not recognizing his pictorial talent.

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.

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.

"When I accept a picture by myself, it's more serious than if it were judged by all juries in the world!" this was the artistic creed of the perfectionist Paul Cézanne. Because of the fact that creating one picture took a very long time, Cézanne could not paint live flowers. He complained that they fade too fast, and the ripening fruit change colours. Therefore, he preferred to depict artificial flowers. But you can’t call the flowers by Cézanne artificial, can you?

Rembrandt began to accept students, barely out of adolescence. The first apprentice of the 21-year-old painter was Gerrit Dou, who at that time was not yet 15 years old. It seems that Rembrandt never took beginners. A pupil’s parents had to pay the artist an annual tuition fee of 100 guilders. Rembrandt’s students learned by copying their master’s works and, later, by painting and drawing their own variations based on them. They had to work in an attic in separate cubicles partitioned by sailcloth or paper.

When Jan Vermeer died, he left behind enormous debts. His widow, Catharina Bolnes, had to transfer ownership of her late husband's masterpiece Painter in his Studio (The Allegory of Painting) to her mother, Maria Thins, to keep it out of creditors' hands. However, a year later it was sold at auction and disappeared for more than 130 years. In 1813, the piece became part of Count Czernin's collection. He bought the painting for an extremely low price, having no idea that it was created by the great master from Delft. The aristocrat thought it was a painting by Pieter de Hooch, whose works cost much more at that time. It was only in the autumn of 1860 that the director of the Berlin museum, Gustav Waagen, recognized The Allegory of Painting as an authentic Vermeer.

Ilya Repin was almost painfully stingy. Having learnt that tram tickets in St. Petersburg cost five kopecks in the morning, and ten kopecks in the afternoon, the artist tried to come to the city early in the morning. And when his daughter Vera needed massage sessions, Repin said a truly "brilliant" sentence: "You call the masseuse once, remember the massage techniques, and massage yourself then!".

On one of the Paris boulevards an artist was working on his painting, having put an easel right on the street. Passers-by, used to such phenomena, now and then stopped nearby, looked over his shoulder, commented the painting in a low voice, and sometimes asked questions. A couple of Russian tourists watched for a long time how the bold, shining brushstrokes of the artist came to life on his canvas. One of them couldn't resist saying: "These French artists are so good at colour rendering!" "And the Russian ones are not worse! " – answered the first Russian Impressionist Konstantin Korovin.

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.

Hurrying from Germany in 1914, Wassily Kandinsky left most of his paintings to Gabriele Münter, with whom he was betrothed. A few years later, he returned to Germany with his wife Nina, and asked Münter to return his works. But Gabriele refused, for he promised to marry her! Now she left his canvases for herself. Kandinsky led the trial for 5 years, but eventually he officially recognized hi ex-bride Münter as the legal owner of the paintings. She did not sell the pictures, and at the age of 80, in 1957, she transferred the whole collection (54 works!) to the Lenbachhaus Gallery.