Art

1,236 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 21 of 21.

Peter Pan's royalties still fund a London children's hospitalJ. M. Barrie gave Great Ormond Street Hospital the copyright in 1929. Even after the works entered the public domain, a special UK law lets the hospital keep collecting royalties …
Early Robin Hood was a yeoman, not a displaced nobleModern films cast him as a Crusade veteran robbed by Prince John. The oldest ballads make him a commoner archer devoted to the Virgin Mary, hostile to the Sheriff of Nottingham, w…
Santa's red suit is a nineteenth-century American lookThe jolly, white-bearded gift-bringer in fur-trimmed scarlet traces less to medieval icons than to U.S. popular art after Dutch Sinterklaas arrived in New Amsterdam. An 1823 poem …
Sherlock Holmes was modeled on a real Edinburgh surgeonArthur Conan Doyle met Joseph Bell at the Royal Infirmary in 1877 and clerked for him. Bell dazzled students by reading lives from tiny clues—the same performance Doyle later gave…
A British chemist's will founded America's SmithsonianJames Smithson never visited the United States, yet when his heir died childless his fortune crossed the Atlantic in 105 sacks of gold sovereigns. After years of congressional bic…
Spider-Man was almost called Spider-BoyTeenage heroes usually got "boy" in the name. Stan Lee wanted Peter Parker to age on the page, so he fought for Spider-Man—and for a tryout only because Amazing Fantasy was about …
The Monkey King somersaults fifty-four thousand kilometersSun Wukong's cloud-distance feat—108,000 li in one flip—is only the start. Stone-born, heaven-rebelling, and mountain-imprisoned by the Buddha, he later escorts the monk Tripitaka…
Superman almost died when Shuster burned the first comicAfter endless rejections, Jerry Siegel sought a famous artist to replace Joe Shuster. Hearing the plan, Shuster set their Superman book on fire, saving only the cover. They later …
Seven arts once, then comics became the ninthPainting, building, carving, books, sound, stage, and film once defined the official list. Francophone critics later wedged television and comics into eighth and ninth slots. The …
Florence's Uffizi began as Medici offices, not a museumVasari's 1560 complex for Cosimo I packed republican committees into one building—uffizi means offices. The top floor became a private gallery of Roman sculpture for family guests…
One dug-up marble launched the Vatican MuseumsOn 14 January 1506 a vineyard near Santa Maria Maggiore yielded the Laocoön group. Julius II sent Sangallo and Michelangelo to look, bought the Trojan priest and his sons within a…
Pooh's Latin translation made the New York Times bestseller listAlexander Lenard's Winnie ille Pu (1958) became, in 1960, the only Latin book ever to land on The New York Times Best Seller list. The honey-loving bear of Ashdown Forest had alre…
Rembrandt was given no subject, and painted a philosopher envying a poet.A Sicilian nobleman ordered a painting from Rembrandt without saying what it should show. Rembrandt delivered Aristotle, wearing a gold chain, with his hand resting on a bust of b…
The Arnolfini Portrait may show a husband standing beside his dead wife.Jan van Eyck's 1434 double portrait is famous for its tiny convex mirror and the graffiti-like signature 'Jan van Eyck was here'. For decades scholars read it as a wedding certifi…
The Bayeux Tapestry isn't a tapestry, and Harold's arrow may be a repair.The famous 70-metre record of 1066 is embroidered, not woven, so technically it isn't a tapestry at all. It was probably stitched in England, not France. And the arrow in the eye …
The most influential artwork of the 20th century is a urinal nobody can find.In 1917 a shop-bought urinal signed 'R. Mutt' was submitted to a New York art show and quietly hidden behind a partition. The original was soon lost, probably thrown out. In 2004,…
Frankenstein began as a ghost-story contest on a rainy holiday.In the cold, wet summer of 1816, Lord Byron challenged his guests at a villa on Lake Geneva to each write a ghost story. An 18-year-old Mary Shelley, after days of having no idea,…
The Ghent Altarpiece may be the most stolen artwork in history. One panel is still missing.Van Eyck's great altarpiece of 1432 has been carried off to revolutionary Paris, pawned, sold to Prussia, taken in two world wars and hidden in a salt mine. One art historian coun…
Girl with a Pearl Earring was never meant to be a portrait.Vermeer's most famous face isn't a picture of anyone in particular. It is a 'tronie', a Dutch study of a character in exotic costume. It sold in 1881 for about two guilders. And t…
The Great Wave is a print, and there are thousands of them.Hokusai's Great Wave isn't a single painting in one museum. It is a woodblock print from around 1831, made to be sold cheaply, and thousands were printed. Its vivid blue came from…
Did the Old Masters secretly trace projected images? David Hockney thought so.In 1999 the painter David Hockney noticed that some Old Master drawings looked almost photographic. With a physicist, he argued that from about 1420 artists used mirrors and lense…
Impressionism was named after a sneer at one small painting.In 1874 Monet showed a hazy harbour at dawn and, stuck for a title, told the organisers to 'put Impression'. A critic mocked it, saying unfinished wallpaper looked more complete. …
In Japan, a broken bowl can be mended with gold and become more precious.Kintsugi, 'golden joinery', repairs cracked pottery with lacquer dusted with powdered gold, so the break shines instead of hiding. Collectors loved it so much that some were accus…
In Las Meninas, the most important people are standing where you are.Velázquez's 1656 masterpiece shows a five-year-old princess, her attendants, a dog and the painter himself at a huge canvas. But the king and queen appear only as a blurry reflect…
One slipped shoulder strap nearly ended John Singer Sargent's career in Paris.At the 1884 Paris Salon, Sargent showed a socialite in a black gown with one jewelled strap fallen from her shoulder. Crowds jeered and critics called it vulgar. Sargent repainted…
Painters once used a brown made from ground-up Egyptian mummies.Mummy brown was exactly what it sounds like: mummified flesh mixed with pitch and myrrh. It was popular with European painters for about two centuries. When Edward Burne-Jones lea…
Rembrandt's Night Watch isn't set at night.Rembrandt's most famous painting shows a militia company stepping out in daylight. For centuries it hid under a dark varnish so thick that people assumed it was a night scene, and…
The Victorians' favourite green was made with arsenic.Scheele's green, invented in 1775, coloured 19th-century wallpaper, dresses, candles, toys and even sweets. It was a copper arsenite. Journals reported children wasting away in gr…
There isn't one Scream. Munch made at least four.Edvard Munch made two painted versions of The Scream, two in pastel and a lithograph for prints. Both paintings have been stolen and recovered. And a tiny pencilled line on the fi…
Michelangelo didn't paint the Sistine Chapel lying on his back.The image of Michelangelo flat on a scaffold is a myth. His early biographers say he painted standing, head craned backwards, for four years. He was a sculptor who didn't want the…
Van Gogh thought The Starry Night was a failure.He painted it in June 1889 from an asylum where he had admitted himself, working from the view out of his barred bedroom window. The brightest 'star' is really Venus. The village …
Is a thousand-year-old Japanese tale the world's first novel? It's complicated.Around the year 1000, a lady-in-waiting at the Japanese court known as Murasaki Shikibu wrote a vast story of the 'Shining Prince' Genji, with some four hundred characters who age…
Purple became the colour of emperors because it came from rotting sea snails.Tyrian purple was squeezed from the glands of predatory sea snails. One estimate puts it at about 12,000 snails for just 1.4 grams of dye, enough to trim a single garment. The dye…
For centuries, the bluest blue was worth more than gold.True ultramarine was ground from lapis lazuli mined in the mountains of Afghanistan and shipped across the world. Renaissance painters sometimes used it only for the Virgin Mary's…
The forger who sold a fake Vermeer to Göring had to prove it in court by painting another.Han van Meegeren's fake Vermeers fooled the leading experts of his day, and one ended up in Hermann Göring's collection. Arrested after the war for selling a national treasure to …
America's most famous patriotic painting was made in Germany, with the Rhine as the river.Emanuel Leutze painted Washington Crossing the Delaware in Düsseldorf, using American tourists as models and the Rhine as his river. The flag in it didn't exist yet, and the real …