QuizAmerican art history is full of paintings everyone has seen but few can name, which makes them perfect picture-round material. Here are ten, in the order they were painted, from a 1778 shark attack to a 1930 Iowa farmhouse. Every one of them appears in our Famous Paintings picture quiz.
- Watson and the Shark, John Singleton Copley (1778) — Boston-born Copley painted it in London, from a true story. In 1749 a 14-year-old named Brook Watson was attacked by a shark while swimming in Havana harbor and lost his right leg below the knee. Watson survived, became a wealthy merchant, commissioned the painting from Copley decades later, and went on to become Lord Mayor of London.
- George Washington (the Athenaeum Portrait), Gilbert Stuart (1796) — You have almost certainly seen this one: it is the source of Washington's face on the one-dollar bill. Stuart never finished it. He kept the original in his studio and painted dozens of copies from it for paying customers.
- The Oxbow, Thomas Cole (1836) — Its full title is View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm. Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School of landscape painters, set wild storm-dark forest against a sunny farmed valley along the Connecticut River. Look closely at the bottom of the canvas and you can spot a tiny figure of the artist at his easel.
- Washington Crossing the Delaware, Emanuel Leutze (1851) — Probably the most famous image of the American Revolution was painted in Düsseldorf, Germany, by a German-born artist raised in the United States. It is over 21 feet wide and hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is also famously inaccurate: the real crossing happened in the dark, and the Stars and Stripes flag in the boat was not adopted until 1777, months after the December 1776 crossing.
- Whistler's Mother, James McNeill Whistler (1871) — Whistler, born in Lowell, Massachusetts, called it Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 and insisted it was a study in tone, not a portrait. The French state bought it in 1891, so one of the most famous American paintings hangs in Paris, at the Musée d'Orsay.
- The Gross Clinic, Thomas Eakins (1875) — Eakins showed the surgeon Dr. Samuel Gross mid-operation in a Philadelphia lecture theater, bloody hand and all. It was considered too graphic for the art gallery at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition and ended up shown in an army hospital display instead. Eakins painted himself into the audience on the right.
- Madame X, John Singer Sargent (1884) — The sitter was Virginie Gautreau, a Louisiana-born socialite in Paris. When the painting was shown at the 1884 Paris Salon, one jeweled strap had slipped off her shoulder, and the result was a scandal. Sargent repainted the strap, but the damage to his Paris career was done, and he soon moved to London.
- The Child's Bath, Mary Cassatt (1893) — Degas invited Cassatt to exhibit with the French Impressionists in 1877, and she became the best-known American in the group. The high viewpoint, flat patterns and bold outlines show the influence of Japanese woodblock prints, which she saw at a large exhibition in Paris in 1890. The painting is in the Art Institute of Chicago.
- The Gulf Stream, Winslow Homer (1899) — A lone sailor lies on the deck of a broken boat, surrounded by sharks, with a waterspout on the horizon. Viewers kept asking Homer what happened to the man. Homer, tired of the question, wrote to his dealer that the sailor would be rescued, returned to his friends and home, and live happily ever after.
- American Gothic, Grant Wood (1930) — The models were Wood's sister, Nan Wood Graham, and his dentist, Byron McKeeby. Many people assume the couple is husband and wife, but Wood described them as a farmer and his daughter. The house behind them, with its pointed Gothic window, still stands in Eldon, Iowa.
Could you name all ten from the picture alone? Find out in the Famous Paintings picture quiz, or host it live for your next game night.