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Michael Najjar after Caspar David Friedrich

Michael Najjar after Caspar David Friedrich

The human being as an ambivalent creature of soaring powers of imagination yet limited means of realisation is shown by Michael Najjar’s anomaly (2015). Najjar takes photos of a crash site in California’s Mojave desert and, drawing on Caspar David Friedrich’s 1823/1824 painting Das Eismeer (The Sea of Ice), rearranges them as a jagged, towering heap of wreckage against a chain of hills banked in fog.

Duration : 2m
Maturity Level : all

Adad Hannah after Théodore Géricault

Adad Hannah after Théodore Géricault

In late 2008 Adad Hannah received a telephone call from an old friend in British Columbia. Gus Horn, a rancher, community activist, and art collector, wanted to stage a version of Théodore Géricault’s monumental painting The Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819) in 100 Mile House, a community of 2000 people in central BC. For three months the students met weekly at the high school in order to prepare for the final tableau vivant.

Duration : 5m
Maturity Level : all

Mounir Fatmi after Fra Angelico

Mounir Fatmi after Fra Angelico

Mounir Fatmi’s The Angel´s Black Leg, a tryptic of light boxes is based upon a painting by Fra Angelico. It depicts two surgeons performing a transplant operation in which a black leg is being transplanted onto a white patient. For Fatmi, this motif illustrates an attempt to overcome ethnic barriers. However, it is not revealed whether scientific interest prompted this motif or indeed how the experiment turns out.

Duration : 9m
Maturity Level : all

Tammam Azzam after Gustav Klimt

Tammam Azzam after Gustav Klimt

Azzam has Photoshopped Gustav Klimt’s painting The Kiss against a war-ravaged Syrian building. The image has gone viral, being rapidly shared around the world. And no wonder: it is an extremely eloquent picture. Klimt’s painting looks like a projection in a pacifist son et lumiere – in inventing this apparent piece of public art, Azzam imagines a country where peaceful gatherings are still possible.

Duration : 2m
Maturity Level : all

Girl with a Pearl Earring

Girl with a Pearl Earring

Girl with a Pearl Earring is Vermeer’s most famous painting. It is not a portrait, but a ‘tronie’ – a painting of an imaginary figure. Tronies depict a certain type or character; in this case a girl in exotic dress, wearing an oriental turban and an improbably large pearl in her ear.

Duration : 2m
Maturity Level : all

The Astronomer

The Astronomer

It was in 1983 that The Astronomer joined Vermeer’s other painting on the walls of the Louvre, the no less famous Lacemaker: these are the only two paintings by the artist in the French national collections.

Duration : 5m
Maturity Level : all

Young Woman with a Water Jug

Young Woman with a Water Jug

The first work by Vermeer to enter an American collection, this painting embodies the artist’s interest in domestic themes, giving an almost voyeuristic glimpse into the private life of a woman before she presents her public face to the world.

Duration : 2m
Maturity Level : all

Portrait of a Young Woman

Portrait of a Young Woman

Like Vermeer’s famous Girl with a Pearl Earring (ca. 1665; Mauritshuis, The Hague), this painting was most likely not a commissioned portrait, but rather a so-called tronie, a portrayal of an intriguing individual, often in fanciful costume.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

Woman with a Pearl Necklace

Woman with a Pearl Necklace

Vermeer lived and worked in Delft, where he must have painted Young Woman with a Pearl Necklace in the years between 1662 and 1665. It is assumed that the local art collector Pieter Claesz van Ruijven was the first owner of the painting. It was probably passed on in his family and at the end of the century, it belonged to the Delft local Jacob Abrahmsz Dissius who had married van Ruijven’s daughter and who owned no less than 21 paintings by Vermeer.

Duration : 2m
Maturity Level : all

A Lady Writing and Woman Holding a Balance

A Lady Writing and Woman Holding a Balance

Above all, Johannes Vermeer was a painter of light. In this exquisite painting, diffused light softly illuminates the tabletop, the woman’s face, and her rich lemon-yellow morning jacket. Woman Holding a Balance, on the other hand, is a superb example of Johannes Vermeer’s exquisite sense of stability and rhythm. The woman is so pensive that the viewer almost hesitates to intrude on her quiet moment of contemplation.

Duration : 2m
Maturity Level : all

The Milkmaid

The Milkmaid

A maidservant pours milk, entirely absorbed in her work. Except for the stream of milk, everything else is still. Vermeer took this simple everyday activity and made it the subject of an impressive painting – the woman stands like a statue in the brightly lit room. Vermeer also had an eye for how light by means of hundreds of colourful dots plays over the surface of objects.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Jakob Roepke after Various Artists

Jakob Roepke after Various Artists

Jakob Roepke has been working on his small-sized collage paintings since 1996. The plates, meticulously painted and drawn with gouache and ink are put together from various sources such as scienticic books and ornamented papers.

Duration : 6m
Maturity Level : all

Vincent van Gogh after Gustave Doré

Vincent van Gogh after Gustave Doré

Van Gogh expressed his state of extreme depression and sense of lacking personal freedom in his most tragic picture The Prison Courtyard, which was painted at the beginning of 1890 in the Saint-Rémy asylum. For this work Van Gogh made use of the composition in an engraving after a drawing by Gustave Doré. One of the prisoners tramping round in a circle inside the well of endless brick walls shows features resembling the artist himself.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

The Art of Painting

The Art of Painting

With his depiction of the painter in his studio, Vermeer turns this genre painting into an allegory of the art of painting. His model is posing as Clio, the Muse of history, who inspires the painter and proclaims the glory of painting in the old Netherlands, which she has immortalised in the book of history. The unity of the arts is reflected in the sculpture model, sketchbook and the work in progress on the easel. The map with the 17 provinces of the Netherlands before they were divided into north and south is a reference to a land that had always owed its fame to the art of painting.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

Woman Writing a Letter, with her Maid

Woman Writing a Letter, with her Maid

This painting is one of the most ingenious compositions of Vermeer’s late career. While a maidservant stares out of a window, her mistress writes a letter. In the foreground on the floor, lie a red seal, a stick of sealing wax and an object which is probably a letter-writing manual, often used for personal correspondence at the time.

Duration : 2m
Maturity Level : all

View of Houses in Delft

View of Houses in Delft

This is an unusual painting in Vermeer’s oeuvre, and remarkable for its time as a portrait of ordinary houses. The composition is as exciting as it is balanced. The old walls with their bricks, whitewash, and cracks are almost tangible. The location is Vlamingstraat 40–42 in Delft. Vermeer’s aunt Ariaentgen Claes lived in the house at the right, with her children, from around 1645 until her death in 1670.

Duration : 2m
Maturity Level : all

The Glass of Wine

The Glass of Wine

The Glass of Wine is a 1660 painting by Johannes Vermeer now in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. It portrays a seated woman and a standing man drinking in an interior setting. It contains figures situated in a brightly lit and spacious interior, while its architectural space is highly defined. The figures are set in the middle ground, rather than positioned in the foreground.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

A Young Woman standing at a Virginal

A Young Woman standing at a Virginal

The young woman at the keyboard holds our eye with a direct gaze. The empty chair suggests she is expecting someone and the large painting of a naked Cupid, the god of erotic love, on the wall behind her may be a signal that she is waiting for her lover. Scenes of music making were a popular genre in seventeenth-century Holland. They were often associated with romantic encounters, sometimes obviously bawdy ones, sometimes apparently innocent. Here, the style of the Cupid painting derives from a book illustration on the theme of faithful love.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait

Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait

This close look at van Eyck’s jewel-like masterpiece of 1434 considers the intrigue and wonder it sparked when it first went on show at the National Gallery in 1843.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

Manet’s Music in the Tuileries Gardens

Manet’s Music in the Tuileries Gardens

Music in the Tuileries Gardens is an 1862 painting by Édouard Manet. The work is an early example of Manet’s painterly style, inspired by Frans Hals and Diego Velázquez, and it is a harbinger of his lifelong interest in the subject of leisure.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

Holbein’s The Ambassadors

Holbein’s The Ambassadors

The portrait is a supreme display of Holbein’s skill in composing images and in manipulating oil paint to recreate a variety of textures. If viewed from a particular angle the elongated shape between the men’s feet becomes a skull.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

Carvaggio’s The Supper at Emmaus

Carvaggio’s The Supper at Emmaus

Typically for Caravaggio, he has shown the disciples as ordinary working men, with bearded, lined faces and ragged clothes, in contrast to the youthful beardless Christ, who seems to have come from a different world.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed

Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed

Turner frequently painted scenes of contemporary life and was particularly interested in industry and technology. As he often used new forms of transport, including steam trains, it is unlikely that the painting is a rejection of modernity. Instead, he saw both the train and the bridge as subjects worthy of being painted.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

Fantin-Latour’s A Basket of Roses

Fantin-Latour’s A Basket of Roses

It seems as if these roses have been tossed almost carelessly into the wicker basket – they tumble over the edge and onto the table – but the disarray is artful.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all