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

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."

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.

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.

US President Dwight Eisenhower became interested in painting before moving into the Oval Office. He claimed to be influenced by the prime minister of Great Britain Winston Churchill in his decision to take up the paintbrush. While he produced over 250 known works in his lifetime, the 34th President of the United States never took it too seriously. In a conversation with reporter Richard Cohen, after being asked about the symbolism in one of his pieces, he replied: "Let’s get something straight here, Cohen. They would have burned this [expletive] a long time ago if I weren’t the president of the United States."

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.

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.

Henri Matisse gained fame quickly, but his financial situation remained precarious. And only his acquaintance with Russian patrons and collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov helped him to get out of poverty once and for all.
In 1908, an art connoisseur Sergei Shchukin commissioned him two panels, which he intended to hung on the walls of his Moscow mansion. It was then when the first Dance appeared. Shchukin invited Matisse to Russia, where the artist was completely overwhelmed by Russian icons.

Towards the end of his life, Thomas Gainsborough often quarrelled with his wife Margaret Burr. With age, she became stingier and more grumbling. Gainsborough would flare up at the slightest provocation and curse. And yet, he was always the first one who would try to make it up with his wife: he would write a note of repentance, sign it with the name of his favourite dog, ‘Fox’, and address it to his wife’s pet spaniel, ‘Tristram’. This forbidden trick always worked with Margaret. She would immediately start writing an answer to Gainsborough's dog: "My own dear Fox, you are always loving and good, and I am a naughty little female ever to worry you as I too often do, so we will kiss and say no more about it. Your own affectionate, Tris."

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.

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".

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 ... "

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.

Passion for birds has become the main dominant of John Audubon's life. He was to manage the lead mines, but once he started drawing birds, he could not live without it, devoting his days and nights to his sketches. This led him to ruin, and Audubon found himself in a debt prison.
After getting free, the artist painted river ships, drew road signs and even taught dance, but continued to create exotic birds in huge albums, where he depicted them almost in half of human growth.

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.

Alexander Benois is considered the main critic and opponent of creativity of Kazimir Malevich. Benois considered the works of Malevich a "dead-end branch". It is no surprise, as Malevich called for "stabbing the art of painting and abandoning obsolete Madonnas and Venuses." For Benoit, such a philosophy was blasphemous, so he tirelessly criticized Malevich in his articles and speeches. Here is his review on the "Black Square": this work allegedly had its beginning in an abomination of desolation and through "trampling all the tenderness and love, it will inevitably lead the world to imminent death." Well, has history judged them?

They say, manuscripts do not burn, but pictures do... In his youth, Modigliani was so poor that he paid with his pictures to the hostess of the cafe, where he boarded daily. The kind woman always agreed to "barter", but at the same time (o woe to us, the admirers of Modigliani!) she actually used them to kindle her stove. We’ll never know how many paintings by the famous artist were burned in such a villainous manner!

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.

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.