World Famous Paintings
1. You will find me in gallery 908. I am an oil painting on canvas, and I was painted by the same
artist who painted Clue # 9 in Category 4. I was painted in 1953, and I depict a man sitting in
an office, staring out at the city. The man is viewed from one large window as he stares out
another on an adjacent wall. He is blondish, wearing a brown vest and seated nearly with his
back to the viewer. His right hand rests on the desk. Across the street from the building the
man is in is a tannish building with arched windows. What painting am I?
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2. You will find me in gallery 625. I am a tempera painting on wood, with gold ground, and I am
painted by Simone Martini circa 1326. I am a precursor to the work of Cimabue and Giotto,
and very similar in appearance. I feature the Virgin Mary and infant Jesus, and while I feature
the distinctive elongated, flattened shapes of the Gothic period, I also incorporate shading in
an extremely early attempt at the naturalistic style that would flourish during the Renaissance.
Set against a gold background, Mary (in a dark veil and reddish gown), hold Jesus in my left
arm. He wears a red gown with gold sleeves, and His hair is reddish ringlets. He tugs on my
robe with His left hand. What painting am I?
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3. You will find me in gallery 616. I am an oil painting on canvas, and I am painted by Antoine
Watteau circa 1718-20. I depict a stock character from the plays of the commedia dell’arte,
Mezzetino (or Mezzetin, in French). Mezzetino is a scheming trouble-maker, willing to create
acts of violence of necessary, and sometimes depicted with the ability to sing and dance very
well. Usually, Mezzetino is seen heavily flirting with women and scheming against his master.
In this painting, Mezzetin sits cross-legged, holding a lute in his right arm and strumming it
with his left hand. He sits on a bench, looking longingly to a window from the building beside
him (though most of the building is obscured. He wears a silvery-blue outfit with pinkish
stripes that match both his floppy hat and the cape draped over his left shoulder. He has both
a white ruffled collar and white ruffled cuffs on his sleeves. His tan shoes have pink rose
details at the tongue. A woman, or a statue of a woman, is in the garden behind Mezzetino.
What painting am I?
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5. You will find me in gallery 617. I am an oil painting on canvas, and I was painted by Nicolas
Poussin circa 1633-34. I depict a famous scene of legend, in which the Romans invited the
neighboring Sabines with the intention of forcibly retaining their young women as wives.
Romulus raised his cloak as the prearranged signal for the Romans to seize the women. The
scene is a chaotic one, wherein people are fighting and struggling with one another. A man
on the far left stands above the crowd, wearing a red cloak and holding a long staff in his right
hand. His bearded face looks out over the people, and he stands before two columns. Below
him, a calm man in tan watches as a woman in a blue gown is lifted by another man. Two
small children struggle nearby - the one closest to the left, in white, stares up at the woman in
blue and her abductor, and seems to be crawling towards them; the other, nearby, lays on his
back as though just having been dropped, and makes eye contact with another woman in
blue to the right, who is being separated from a bald man in a pinkish toga by a muscular
man in gold armor, who looks to strike the bald man with his left arm. Many others struggle in
the background. What painting am I?
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5. You will find me in gallery 771. I am an oil painting on canvas, and I was painted by the same
artist who painted Clue # 15 in Category 4, in 1897. I depict a couple, the Phelps Stokes
family. The man stands to the right of the woman, on the left side of the painting. He has a
dark hair, beard and bow tie, but the rest of his suit is white. The left side of his face is in
shadow. His wife smiles at the viewer. Her dark hair is pulled back. She wears a large,
padded black jacket, that matches her bow tie, belt and the band on the hat she holds in her
right hand. Her left hand, sporting a large gold ring, rests on her left hip. Her shirt is gray, with
a white collar that matches her long white skirt. What painting am I?
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6. You will find me in gallery 763. I am an oil painting on canvas by the same artist who painted
Clue #14 in Category 4, around 1872. I depict a scene familiar to the American dream young boys at recess playing Snap the Whip. The painting is meant to symbolize the hope for
America in it’s children, and was a popular subject at the time. There are nine boys in the
picture, all holding hands and wearing a cap. Seven hold hands as they play, but two have
fallen off the end of the “whip”. They are barefoot, symbolizing the freedom of children, but
their suspenders symbolize the responsibility of a man. Two teachers supervise from the
distance. In the background is a little red schoolhouse. The boy in the center, fourth from the
right, wears a blueish jacket, a white shirt and brown pants. What painting am I?
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7. You will find me in gallery 910. I am an oil painting on canvas from 1931 by the same Clue #
19 and 20 in Category 4. I depict the skull of a cow, facing the viewer straight on. While the
skull is very naturalistic, the background is more abstract. Two thick bands of solid red on the
far sides of the painting give way to what appears to be a sheet of fabric fading from white to
blue, and recede towards a dark band in the center. This painting was probably completed in
Lake George, though thematically it recalls the Southwest. The topic was very common for
this artist. What painting am I?
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8. You will find me in gallery 921. I am enamel on canvas from 1950, painted by the same artist
who Clue # 5 in Category 4. I am a prime example of this artist’s distinctive style of dripping
and pouring paint in rhythmic strokes and curves over canvas. This painting is on an
unprimed, tannish canvas. The paint consists of the colors black, white, brown and turquoise,
and may call to mind the season of “Autumn”. What painting am I?
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9. You will find me in gallery 816. I am a combination of oil colors mixed with turpentine,
watercolor and pastel over pen-and-ink on cream colored wove paper, laid down on bristol
board and mounted on canvas, completed probably in 1874 by the same artist who sculpted
Clue # 26 in Category 4. I am part of this very famous artist’s very famous series of
ballerinas. This image depicts the rehearsal of a ballet on stage. A male choreographer
directs a girl wearing a red bow around her neck and a red sash around the waist of her white
tutu, as she gestures in pose towards the upper right side of the painting. A total of ten
ballerinas appear in the image, and two men slouch in chairs or the right side of the picture as
they watch the rehearsal. What painting am I?
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10. You will find me in gallery 819. I am an oil painting on canvas from 1899 by the same artist
who painted Clue # 27 in Category 4. I am from a very famous series that this artist painted
at his home in Giverny, France. This series is the artist’s impression of his gardens, and
tend to feature the same motif of water lilies. This painting, unusual for the series, is a
vertical composition of the pond of water lilies, the willow trees making up the background,
but incorporating the bridge over it. What painting am I?
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11. You will find me in gallery 822. I am an oil painting on canvas circa 1902-06 by Paul
Cezanne. I depict a wide view overlooking Mont Sainte-Victoire. The sky is nearly the same
blue as the mountain, which appears in the far back. A town and countryside are mostly
made up of greens and blue-greens, over yellowish green rolling hills. The landscape, done
in the artist’s late-impressionistic style, uses heavy brush strokes that appear almost like
stained glass from farther away. What painting am I?
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12. You will find me in gallery 823. I am an oil painting on canvas from 1889 by the same artist
who painted Clue # 14 in Category 6. I depict an image of a wheat field, yellowish in color,
and some cypress trees. A cloudy sky is made up of blues, greens and white. The artist’s
swirly, Post-Impressionistic style is very clear here, and it looks like a daytime, mirror image
of his famous work, “Starry Night”. The artist wrote to his brother Theo that, “I have a canvas
of cypresses with a few ears of wheat, poppies a blue sky, which is like a multicolored
Scotch plaid.” What painting am I?
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13. You will find me in gallery 826. I am an oil painting on canvas from 1884 by the same artist
who painted Clue # 30 in Category 4. I appear to be a Pointillist painting that’s extremely
familiar, but I am in fact a study for that painting. I depict many Parisians at leisure on the
island of Le Grande Jatte. In the foreground, a woman with a large bustle skirt, holding an
umbrella, largely blocks her male companion, who wears a top hat. A monkey walks in front
of this couple.In fact, almost every figure in the painting faces the left side of the painting
(towards the water, which the hill slopes down to). Noticeably, a woman with a red umbrella
holding the right hand of a small girl in white walks away from the viewer, and is not facing
the left side. What painting am I?
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14. You will find me in gallery 826. I am an oil painting on canvas from 1887 by the same artist
who painted Clue #12 in Category 6. I am a self-portrait of the artist, done in his distinctive
Post-Impressionistic style. In this picture, the artist is set against a brownish, earth-toned
background, and wearing a blue jacket. He is bearded, and, most notably, wearing a yellow
straw hat. He faces the left side of the painting. What painting am I?
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15. You will find me in gallery 827. I am an oil painting on canvas by William Bouguereau from
1873. I depict a scene from mythology, in which four nude nymphs drag a satyr into the
water. A nymph on the left side of the painting pushes on the satyr’s head with her left hand.
The nymph farthest from the viewer gestures towards three other nymphs posing in the
background (on the right side of the painting) with her left arm and pulls the hair of the satyr
with her right. A blonde nymph in front of her pulls the left arm of the satyr, a white cloth
wrapped around her. A nymph we see mostly from behind pulls his right arm with both of
hers. What painting am I?
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16. You will find me in gallery 813. I am an oil painting on canvas from 1909 by Alphonse
Mucha. I depict American actress Maude Adams in the role of Joan of Arc in the play “The
Maid of Orleans”. Adams was the most famous actress of her time, and achieved a great
amount of celebrity. This particular painting served as a poster for the play, and hung (at her
request) in the lobby of the Empire Theater in New York. It is a prime example of the art
nouveau style. In the picture, Adams is surrounded by what appear to be pink Japanese
cherry blossom trees. Her light brownish red hair flows at her sides, and her arms are raised
at the elbow. She wears a white off-the shoulder blouse with a purple lace-up corset over it,
and a tan skirt with belted satchel on her left side. A long wrap flows off of her shoulders.
The top two corners of the blue flowered border depict the fleur de lis. The bottom part of the
border lists the name of the painting on a scroll. What painting am I?
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17. You will find me in gallery 830. I am an oil painting on canvas from 1903 by the same artist
who painted Clue # 17 and # 24 in Category 4. The artist described me this way: “I am
painting a blind man at the table. He holds some bread in his left hand and gropes with his
rand hand for a jug of wine”. Indeed, the picture depicts just that. The man wears a beret
and a neck scarf. As this painting was completed during the artist’s famous “blue period”,
the entire painting has a blue overtone. In fact, only the jug of wine, the bread and the man’s
skin contain colors outside of the blue hue (the wine being red, the bread and skin
containing yellow). What painting am I?
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18. You will find me in gallery 807. I am an oil painting on canvas circa 1825-1830 by Caspar
David Friedrich. Many symbols popular in Friedrich’s work (a large, barren oak tree
symbolizing death, for example) appear in this painting, and the work also makes use of
Friedrich’s penchant for Ruckenfigur (viewing characters from the back and being denied
their expressions). This painting depicts two men standing on a hilltop, to the left of a bare
oak tree being uprooted and falling to it’s right. The younger man, identified as the artist’s
colleague, wears a blueish jacket and rests his right hand on the older man’s shoulder. The
older man, wearing a cap and a greenish cloak, is the artist himself. Before the men sits the
moon, which they are discussing. What painting am I?
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