# Nine Paintings > Nine of the most reproduced images ever made, in the order they were painted, from Botticelli in about 1485 to Frida Kahlo in 1939. Each one gets a chapter: the work itself, the artist, the museum's own catalogue record where it is reachable, and the specific thing that makes that painting worth stopping at. - **Canonical URL:** https://skemr.com/experience/nine-paintings - **Category:** History - **Curated by:** SKEMR AI - **Contents:** 5 journeys, 9 chapters, 39 sources - **Last updated:** 2026-10-03 ## What this is A curated transmedia experience: existing web sources selected and ordered by an editor. SKEMR does not host the underlying content — each item links to its original publisher. Journeys are alternative routes through the same material. ## Journeys ### The Nine, In Order Botticelli to Kahlo, 1485 to 1939, each painting with its museum record where one is reachable. The straight run through. - Steps: 17 - Machine-readable: https://skemr.com/api/ai-context/nine-paintings/journeys/j-nine - Briefing for a chat: https://skemr.com/api/ai-context/nine-paintings/journeys/j-nine/briefing.md ### Nine Painters The same nine chapters read through the people who made them. A man with fewer than 25 surviving works, a bankrupt, a printmaker who changed his name thirty times, and a woman who started painting while recovering from a bus crash. - Steps: 19 - Machine-readable: https://skemr.com/api/ai-context/nine-paintings/journeys/j-artists - Briefing for a chat: https://skemr.com/api/ai-context/nine-paintings/journeys/j-artists/briefing.md ### How They Were Actually Made Materials and process rather than meaning. Tempera on canvas instead of panel, sfumato, a militia group portrait, a genre that never named its sitter, four craftsmen and a Berlin pigment, house paint chosen to look like newsprint. - Steps: 18 - Machine-readable: https://skemr.com/api/ai-context/nine-paintings/journeys/j-made - Briefing for a chat: https://skemr.com/api/ai-context/nine-paintings/journeys/j-made/briefing.md ### Theft, Bombs and Vandalism The eventful route. Two thefts, three attacks, a bombing, a forty-year exile and a divorce. Most of these paintings have survived something. - Steps: 16 - Machine-readable: https://skemr.com/api/ai-context/nine-paintings/journeys/j-trouble - Briefing for a chat: https://skemr.com/api/ai-context/nine-paintings/journeys/j-trouble/briefing.md ### What Instruments Found Infrared, X-ray and image analysis on nine paintings. A confession written in pencil, a curtain that faded away, an earring that may not be there, and a fluid-dynamics paper about a sky. - Steps: 17 - Machine-readable: https://skemr.com/api/ai-context/nine-paintings/journeys/j-science - Briefing for a chat: https://skemr.com/api/ai-context/nine-paintings/journeys/j-science/briefing.md ## Chapters - **The Birth of Venus** — Botticelli, about 1485. Tempera on canvas rather than panel, which was still unusual and probably means it was made for a country villa. It did not get its present title until the nineteenth century, and Botticelli's reputation stayed low until the Pre-Raphaelites went looking for him. - **Mona Lisa** — Leonardo, 1503 to 1519, oil on a poplar panel 79.4 by 53.4 centimetres. For four hundred years it was one admired painting among many. Then in 1911 a Louvre contractor took it off its pegs and walked out, and the two-year manhunt made it the most famous object in the world. - **The Night Watch** — Rembrandt, 1642. Not called that by him, not a night scene, and not the size he painted it — the dark look came from centuries of varnish removed only in the 1940s, and the canvas was trimmed on all four sides in 1715 to fit between two columns. Two figures were cut off entirely. - **Girl with a Pearl Earring** — Vermeer, about 1665, and not a portrait at all — a tronie, a study of a type rather than a named person. Bought at auction in 1881 for the equivalent of about 24 euros because it was in poor condition. Whether the earring is even a pearl is genuinely disputed. - **The Great Wave off Kanagawa** — Hokusai, about 1831 — and not a painting. A woodblock print, made by four trades working together, in an edition of thousands. It exists in the form it does because a synthetic blue invented in Berlin in 1706 reached Japan and did not fade the way indigo did. - **The Starry Night** — Van Gogh, June 1889, painted from memory in a ground-floor studio at an asylum he had checked himself into. The view is east from his window before sunrise, with a village he invented. Venus is really there; the crescent moon is not, it was waning gibbous that month. And the swirls have been argued over by physicists, not just art historians. - **The Scream** — Munch, 1893, tempera and grease crayon on cardboard. Four versions exist. Written in pencil in the top left of this one is 'Can only be painted by a madman!' — infrared analysis confirmed Munch wrote it himself. The figure is not screaming; it is hearing one. - **Guernica** — Picasso, 1 May to 4 June 1937 — thirty-five days, in response to a newspaper report. Three and a half metres by nearly eight, in matte house paint, grey and black and white like newsprint. It sat in New York for over forty years because Picasso refused to let it go to Spain until democracy did. - **The Two Fridas** — Kahlo, 1939, her first large-scale work, painted the year she divorced Diego Rivera. Two versions of herself, joined by an artery, one holding a portrait of him and one holding the forceps that cut the vessel and stained her dress. She remarried him the following year. ## Sources - [The Birth of Venus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_Venus): Venus arriving on the shore of Cyprus, blown there by Zephyrus, a cloak held out to receive her. Painted in tempera on canvas rather than the usual panel, which points to a country villa rather than a city palace. Long said to be a Medici commission on the strength of a 1908 monograph, though it is... - [Mona Lisa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa): Lisa del Giocondo, wife of a Florentine silk merchant — confirmed by a margin note Agostino Vespucci wrote in 1503 recording that Leonardo was working on her portrait. The famous ambiguity is a technique, not a mood: sfumato, blending without outlines, concentrated at the corners of the mouth and ey... - [The Night Watch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Watch): Properly, Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq. Rembrandt's innovation was refusing to line the militia up: they are caught mid-movement, unevenly lit, some half-obscured. Three separate attacks — a knife in 1911, thirty-centimetre slashes in 1975, acid in... - [Girl with a Pearl Earring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl_with_a_Pearl_Earring): About 1665. The 2018 Girl in the Spotlight project found eyelashes, a green curtain behind her that has since faded to nothing, and evidence she was a real person in a real space rather than an abstraction. The astrophysicist Vincent Icke argued in 2014 that the earring is polished tin, not pearl —... - [The Great Wave off Kanagawa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Wave_off_Kanagawa): The first print in Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, late 1831. Fuji is the small triangle in the distance, dwarfed by the wave — the scale reversal is the whole idea. Around 1,000 impressions in the first run and perhaps 8,000 eventually; as of 2022 roughly 113 first-edition prints are known to survi... - [The Starry Night](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Starry_Night): June 1889, from the east-facing window of his room at the Saint-Paul asylum, just before sunrise — sketched in the bedroom, painted downstairs in his studio. The village is invented; it is not in the view. Venus was genuinely visible at dawn in Provence that spring, so that is real. The crescent moo... - [The Scream](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scream): Four versions: two painted, two in pastel, plus a lithograph stone that yielded about 45 prints before being reused. The 1895 pastel sold for 119.9 million dollars in 2012, an auction record at the time. Stolen twice — during the 1994 Winter Olympics opening, recovered in a police sting; and by arme... - [Guernica](): Picasso was working on a studio scene for the Paris Exposition when he read George Steer's report of the bombing on 1 May 1937. He abandoned it and started again, finishing on 4 June. Matte house paint, deliberately, for a newsprint flatness. A gored horse, a bull, a dead child, a dismembered soldie... - [The Two Fridas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Fridas): 1939, oil on canvas, 173.5 by 173 centimetres — her first work at this scale, and in the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City since 1966. Two selves side by side, one in Tehuana dress holding a small portrait of Rivera, one in European white holding surgical forceps that have severed the artery runn... - [Uffizi — The Birth of Venus](https://www.uffizi.it/en/artworks/birth-of-venus): The gallery's own catalogue entry. Circa 1485, tempera on canvas, 172.5 by 278.5 centimetres. The Uffizi identifies the figure receiving Venus as possibly a Grace or a personification of spring, credits the poet Agnolo Poliziano as a likely source, and does still describe it as probably a Medici com... - [Louvre — Portrait of Lisa Gherardini](https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl010062370): The catalogue record, under its full title: Portrait de Lisa Gherardini, epouse de Francesco del Giocondo, dit La Joconde ou Monna Lisa. Oil on poplar, 79.4 by 53.4 centimetres, inventory INV 779 and MR 316, dated 1503 to 1519, hanging in Salle 711 — the Salle des Etats — in the Denon wing. Useful f... - [Rijksmuseum — The Night Watch](https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/SK-C-5): 1642, oil on canvas, 379.5 by 453.5 centimetres and 337 kilograms. The provenance is unusually complete: first recorded in the Kloveniersdoelen in 1653, moved to the Town Hall in 1715, to the Trippenhuis in 1808, and it is still formally on loan from the City of Amsterdam. Includes Operation Night W... - [Nasjonalmuseet — The Scream](https://www.nasjonalmuseet.no/en/collection/object/NG.M.00939): Norway's National Museum on its 1893 version. Tempera and grease crayon on cardboard, 73.5 by 91 centimetres, room 060, given by Olaf Schou in 1910. The catalogue identifies the setting precisely — the Kristiania fjord seen from Ekeberg hill — and quotes Munch's own prose poem: he felt a breath of m... - [Museo Reina Sofia — Guernica](https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/collection/artwork/guernica-0): The museum's record, and precise where most accounts are vague: dated 1 May to 4 June 1937, Paris. Oil on canvas, 349.3 by 776.6 centimetres. Registration DE00050, room 205.10. It notes the painting was held at MoMA from the war until 1981, when it returned to Spain after democracy was restored, and... - [Sandro Botticelli](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandro_Botticelli): About 1445 to 1510, and he lived his whole life in the same Florentine neighbourhood. Lorenzo de' Medici actually commissioned little from him, preferring Pollaiuolo; the steady patronage came from Lorenzo's younger relatives and the Vespucci. Savonarola's influence in the 1490s pushed his religious... - [Leonardo da Vinci](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci): 1452 to 1519, and fewer than 25 major works are attributed to him — a startlingly small body of painting for the reputation. The notebooks are the other half: anatomy, astronomy, botany, cartography, palaeontology. He carried the Mona Lisa with him and was still working on it late in life. He died a... - [Rembrandt van Rijn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rembrandt): 1606 to 1669. Around 300 paintings, nearly 300 etchings and several hundred drawings — modern scholarship cut the painting count down from earlier estimates above 600. About 100 self-portraits, over 40 of them paintings, which together form something close to an autobiography. He declared insolvency... - [Johannes Vermeer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Vermeer): 1632 to 1675, fewer than 50 paintings of which 34 survive — roughly three a year. Then he vanished: barely mentioned by Houbraken in 1718 and left out of surveys of Dutch art for nearly two centuries. Rediscovered from the 1860s, largely through Theophile Thore-Burger's 1866 catalogue, which overcor... - [Hokusai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokusai): 1760 to 1849. Over 30,000 works across seventy years, and at least 30 different names, changed as his style changed. He made the Thirty-six Views around 1829 to 1832, in his seventies. In the colophon to One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji he wrote that nothing he made before seventy was worth much and... - [Vincent van Gogh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_van_Gogh): 1853 to 1890, and he painted seriously for only about nine years — roughly 2,100 works, some 860 of them oils, most from the final two years. He sold almost nothing and lived on money from his brother Theo, an art dealer; over 600 letters from Vincent survive. Note that SKEMR has a separate, fuller... - [Edvard Munch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edvard_Munch): 1863 to 1944. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was five and his sister Sophie of the same disease at fifteen; another sister was diagnosed with mental illness early. The Frieze of Life gathered the work on love, anxiety, jealousy and death. After a collapse in 1908 he spent eight months in a... - [Pablo Picasso](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso): 1881 to 1973, and a career of more than 76 years. The Blue Period, then the Rose Period, then Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907 and the co-founding of Cubism with Braque. He also invented constructed sculpture and co-invented collage. Guernica is the hinge in his politics: he had largely avoided pol... - [Frida Kahlo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frida_Kahlo): 1907 to 1954. On 17 September 1925 a streetcar hit the bus she was on: fractured pelvis, spine broken in three places, and a lifetime of pain — a friend said she lived dying. She began painting during that recovery. She joined the Mexican Communist Party in 1927. Almost unknown until the late 1970s;... - [The Man Who Made It Famous](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincenzo_Peruggia): Vincenzo Peruggia, 1881 to 1925, a decorator and glazier who had worked at the Louvre building protective cases. On Monday 21 August 1911 he walked in wearing a white employee smock, lifted the painting off its pegs, took the frame off in a service stairway and left through a door a plumber had unlo... - [Frans Banninck Cocq](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_Banninck_Cocq): 1605 to 1655, the man in black with the red sash at the centre. A merchant and patrician who became an alderman, then captain of the civil guard between about 1635 and 1646, then colonel, then burgomaster of Amsterdam in 1650 and again in 1651, 1653 and 1654. He commissioned the painting in 1638. Kn... - [What a Tronie Is](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tronie): The single most useful thing to know before looking at this painting. A tronie is not a portrait: it is a study of an expression, a type or a costume, sold on the open market without naming a sitter. So the question everybody asks — who was she — may not have an answer, because the genre did not req... - [Prussian Blue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_blue): Made by accident in Berlin around 1706 by Johann Jacob Diesbach, who was trying to produce a red and had contaminated potash. The first modern synthetic pigment, cheap and stable where ultramarine was ground lapis lazuli and ruinously expensive. It reached Japan through European trade, and Hokusai u... - [Ukiyo-e — Pictures of the Floating World](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukiyo-e): The reason it is wrong to call this a painting. Ukiyo-e prints were made by four trades: the artist drew the design, a carver cut the blocks, a printer inked and pressed them, a publisher financed and sold the result. Ten or more blocks for a colour print. It was a commercial mass medium, and from t... - [Saint-Remy-de-Provence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-R%C3%A9my-de-Provence): About 20 kilometres south of Avignon, in the northern Alpilles. Van Gogh admitted himself to the Saint-Paul asylum, in the old monastery of Saint-Paul de Mausole, and stayed exactly a year, May 1889 to May 1890. The Starry Night came out of it, and so did Irises and the olive-tree paintings. This is... - [Krakatoa, 1883](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_eruption_of_Krakatoa): One explanation for that sky. The eruption peaked on 27 August 1883 — the third blast is the loudest sound ever measured, heard 4,800 kilometres away at Rodrigues Island nearly four hours later, with an official death toll of 36,417. For months afterwards the sunsets worldwide were violently red; fi... - [The Bombing of Guernica](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Guernica): 26 April 1937. The German Condor Legion and the Italian Aviazione Legionaria, at Franco's request, codenamed Operation Rugen. Early reports said over 1,600 dead; modern estimates are 170 to 300, with one study identifying 126 and later revising to 153. George Steer's report in The Times is what reac... - [Diego Rivera](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Rivera): 1886 to 1957, the muralist, and the man in the small portrait one Frida is holding. They married in August 1929 when he was 42 and she was 22, divorced in 1939 — the year of this painting — and remarried in December 1940. In 1933 he refused to remove Lenin from Man at the Crossroads at Rockefeller C... - [Is the Sky Real Turbulence?](https://www.astronomy.com/science/the-starry-night-captures-the-physics-of-turbulence-and-twinkling-stars-study-finds/): Astronomy magazine on a paper published in Physics of Fluids in September 2024. Yongxiang Huang of Xiamen University analysed the 14 major swirls and reported that their sizes, spacing and intensity follow Kolmogorov's turbulence scaling — a power-law exponent of about -1.67 or -1.68 against a predi... - [Mona Lisa — High Resolution](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Mona_Lisa): 49 freely-licensed files and 12 subcategories on Wikimedia Commons, including digitally restored versions, details, and early copies — one of which, at the Prado, was painted alongside the original and preserves colours the Louvre panel has lost under varnish. Worth zooming in on the hands rather th... - [The Night Watch — 60 Files and Seven Subcategories](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:The_Night_Watch_by_Rembrandt): The best image resource in this experience. 60 files plus subcategories for details, historic views, the people in it, restorations and scientific analyses — including the Hirox tile set at extraordinary magnification. Look at Historic views first: it contains Gerrit Lundens's seventeenth-century co... - [Girl with a Pearl Earring — Details](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Girl_with_a_Pearl_Earring_by_Johannes_Vermeer): 26 files and three subcategories, one of which is a 132-file Hirox tile set at microscopic resolution. Go to the details subcategory and look at the earring: at that magnification the argument about whether it is a pearl, polished tin, or a highlight with no object behind it at all becomes something... - [The Scream — The Versions](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:The_Scream_by_Edvard_Munch): Six subcategories separating the four versions, including 37 files on the Nasjonalmuseet painting. Seeing them together is the point: the 1893 painting, the 1895 pastel that broke the auction record, and the lithograph are recognisably the same image made four different ways, which is unusual for a... - [Guernica — Photographs](): 29 files, plus a 60-file subcategory of derivative works. Since the painting itself is still in copyright the images here are mostly photographs of it in situ and historical documentation, which is its own kind of useful: it lets you see the thing at scale, in rooms, with people in front of it. Thre... - [Frida Kahlo — Photographs](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Frida_Kahlo): 16 files at the top level and seven subcategories, including 44 photographs of her and 80 from the Museo Frida Kahlo. Note the copyright banner: new uploads of her work are restricted until 2055, because she died within the last hundred years. That is why this category is mostly photographs of Kahlo... ## Attribution Curated by SKEMR. 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