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.

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."

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!"

According to one of the legends, Raphael's beloved Fornarina was a commoner and led a very unjust way of life. The artist, sincerely fond of her, bought he from her father for 3 thousand gold coin. But Fornarina had affairs on other men and his students. After Raphael's death, she received a considerabe fortune under the will, but continued to be libertine, becoming one of the most famous Roman courtesans.
And according to another legend, Raphael and Fornarina sincerely loved each other, and after the death of the artist, Fornarina went to the monastery, where she soon died. Choose the version!

Botticelli was unhappy in love and never married, because he was in love with Simonetta Vespucci, the first beauty of the Renaissance era, dubbed La Sans Pareille. She became a model of the famous painting "The Birth of Venus", her image was also on other canvases by the master. Unfortunately, Simonetta never belonged to him: she was the wife of Marco Vespucci (the cousin of the famous Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci!) and the beloved of the younger brother of the Florentine ruler Giuliano Medici. However, it didn’t make Simonetta’s fate happy. The beauty, which made crazy all the noble men of the city, died of tuberculosis at the age of 23. Botticelli was buried next to Simonetta in the church of Ognisanti 34 years after her death, according to the will of the creator.

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.

Venus Verticordia, created in 1868, is the only nude painting by the Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Because of it, he broke with John Ruskin, the leading English art critic of the Victorian era. Ruskin's hypocrisy and double attitude to the female body are well documented. He found sensuality in Rossetti's art disturbing. Unable to resist the true cause of his discomfort towards Venus herself, he unleashed harsh criticism on the roses, which the artist painted with great difficulty. But, most likely, Ruskin's reaction wasn't caused by the flowers. He was frightened by the woman looking from the canvas so seductively and powerfully that the critic found it menacing.

Arkhip Kuindzhi adored birds. He considered himself a “birds' chosen one”, said that the birds understood his speech and let him pet them. Usually laconic Arkhip Kuindzhi became extremely talkative when it came to birds. He spent hours sitting on the roof of his house, "talking" with pigeons and crows. Every month he bought 60 French buns, up to 10 kg of meat and 6 sacks of oats to feed his feathered friends. Once the illustrator Pavel Scherbov published a caricature depicting Kuindzhi giving an enema to a bird. They say that Arkhip Kuindzhi, deprived of sense of humour, got terribly offended.

Piero della Francesca is the creator of "the greatest painting in the world": that's how English writer Aldous Huxley described the painter's Resurrection in his essay Along the Road. The fresco was created somewhere between 1450 and 1465 in the artist's hometown Sansepolcro on the wall of the town hall (which is now a museum). The masterpiece survived until the modern times: it had been hidden beneath a layer of plaster for nearly two hundred years. And during the Second World War, an officer of the Royal Horse Artillery, Anthony Clarke saved the fresco and the town by holding back from using his troop's guns to shell Sansepolcro. He’d read Aldous Huxley's essay about "the greatest picture in the world." And in return, the locals named in his honour a Sansepolcro suburban street. By the way, in translation from the Italian, the name of the tower means "the Church of the Holy Sepulchre" and the fresco depicts the risen Christ on the brim of the sepulchre. Read more about the artist on Arthive.

When Cézanne was passing the Saint-Lazare station on his way home, he met a stranger who asked him to show a sketch he was carrying. Having seen the landscape painting, the pale, skinny young man was amazed with its' unprecedented green colour, freshness, and artistic style. "If you like my trees that much, you can take them!" – said Cézanne. "I have nothing to pay with," answered the artist's new fan. Cézanne gave him the painting for free and both of them left the station completely happy.
Right from the station, happy Paul went to the studio, which he rented together with Renoir and Monet. "I've got a fan!" he solemnly declared from the doorway. That stranger appeared to be the poor composer and musician Ernest Cabaner, who was banned from all the cafés where he tried to play his own music.

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.

This happened when Kandinsky was about 30 years old. After visiting Wagner's Opera Lohengrin in Moscow, he suddenly realized that he could "see" music. Later he wrote: "The violins, the deep tones of the basses, and especially the wind instruments at that time embodied for me all the power of that pre-nocturnal hour. I saw all my colours in my mind; they stood before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me." Shortly afterwards, Wassily Kandinsky decided to leave the legal profession and became an artist.

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.

Old masters often portrayed brawlers and drunkards, and wine served as one of the debauchery symbols. In the painting by Jan Steen "Rascal Family", the mistress of the house tramples the Bible, the maid fills her glass with wine, holding the hand of the owner of the house. Fate hangs over these people’s heads in the form of a basket with a sword (justice and punishment), a crutch and a mug (impending poverty) and a beater (it was used by those who suffered of plague and leprosy). A brave artist! Steen himself (the father of the family), his wife Margriet van Goyen (mother) and their sons Thaddeus (behind the grandmother) and Cornelis were the models for the picture!

"Women of Algiers (Version O)" by Pablo Picasso set a new world record as the most expensive painting sold at auction. On May 12, 2015 at Christie's auction in New York they paid more than $179 million for it. Previously, the most expensive work sold at auction was Francis Bacon's triptych " Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud". In November 2013, it was auctioned at Christie's for $142.4 million, taking the priority from Edward Munch’s "Scream".

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.

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.

During his forced resignation in 1915, the famous British Prime Minister Winston Churchill fell into such a depression that his wife feared that he would commit suicide. This continued until his relative interested him in painting. Gradually, the Prime Minister not only forgot about depression, but also carried this passion throughout his life.

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".

Having become famous and rich, Renoir still wore the same suit for 10 years, didn't tip waiters, but dispensed money to those deceived by notaries and other unfortunate ones who daily asked him for money for a sick child, a dying aunt or an innocently convicted husband. The artist's relatives protected him from those arrogant canters, therefore most often the “unfortunate” ones were waiting for him on his way from home to the studio. But for these cases, Madame Renoir came up with a protection scheme: seeing the beggar, the model would run to the studio, take her clothes off and quickly take a beautiful pose. Only the fear that his model would catch a cold could make Renoir quickly see the visitor off and light the fireplace, which he never lit for himself alone.