A museum in your pocket. Enjoy learning about art from around the world. It has certainly changed the way I see art.
Virginia, USA
Joined March 2026
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Turner added a hare to Rain, Steam and Speed late, lightly brushed on top of the finished paint, running along the track ahead of the engine. The painter George Leslie, who as a boy watched Turner put the final touches to the picture the day before it went on show in 1844, said the hare, not the train, was meant to stand for speed. Then the paint turned transparent with age. The hare is now invisible; the National Gallery in London, which owns the picture, knows it from an engraving made in 1859. The thing that was meant to stand for speed cannot be seen.
She was a dancer too. At the Dada evenings in Zurich she danced in masks and under other names, because the arts school where she taught frowned on its staff performing.
The inscription caused a row. It calls him second only to Milton, and the story goes that Dean Sprat had Milton's name rubbed out as unfit for a church. A later dean let it stand.
He had a lot to remember. He first sailed into Constantinople in 1845 with a Russian naval expedition and kept going back for decades. Two sultans decorated him for his views of the city.
Mozart played the organ here in 1787. Four years later, nine days after he died in Vienna, Prague held a requiem mass for him in this church.
Sandro Botticelli, Primavera, about 1480, Uffizi, Florence. Nine figures from myth cross a flowering lawn in an orange grove, and one of them is in the middle of becoming someone else. Find the one caught mid-change. Wrong answers welcome.
The war cost him dearly. He was called up in 1916 at 43, refused to fight, and was put to work on a farm. He said it lost him friends and much of his portrait work.
A good town for Halloween week. Oudewater had the witches' scale, still in its weigh house from 1482. People accused of witchcraft came to be weighed and went home with a certificate. As far as the record goes, none of them was ever convicted.
Writing. In Ferdowsi's Shahnama, Tahmuras binds two-thirds of the divs by magic and crushes the rest with his mace, and the captives buy their lives by teaching him to write, in thirty different scripts. So the verse panel floating on the gold sky above the battle, and the columns of verse beneath it, are by the poem's own logic the demons' ransom, written on the same page as the fight that paid for it. Check the king's weapon too: his mace ends in an ox's head. Hunts like this are the whole app: amazingartadventure.com/app?…
Here is the square by day, in 1838. The arcade on the left is the Coperto dei Figini, built in the 1400s. It came down in the early 1860s to make room for the Galleria. Look for the man up a ladder, seeing to a lamp.
Look past Christ to the hills. Those walls and towers are probably Borgo Sansepolcro, Piero's own town, where this was painted for the church of San Giovanni Battista. It stayed there until the National Gallery bought it in 1861.
The winged lion of Saint Mark, the symbol of Venice, was most likely made in China. To guard a tomb.
📍 Most likely cast in Tang China, later reworked into St Mark’s lion. Today: Piazzetta San Marco, Venice, Italy.
This is today's Artwork of the Day on Amazing Art Adventure 🎨 Free app at amazingartadventure.com/app. A new masterpiece story every day.
📜 Narrated in the spirit of Marco Polo's book of marvels.
🎵 A. Gabrieli, Ricercar del sesto tuono: Metzner, organ (CC BY 3.0)
📷 Wolfgang Moroder (CC BY-SA 3.0)
📷 FrDr (CC BY-SA 4.0)
📷 Falk2 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
📷 Effems (CC BY-SA 4.0)
📷 Zairon (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Rachel Ruysch did something most women painters of her day did not: she married, had ten children, and kept painting. From 1708 to 1716 she was court painter to a German prince, the Elector Palatine, who let her stay home in Amsterdam as long as she sent him one picture a year. Then, at 59, she won 75,000 guilders in a lottery. She went on painting until she was very old anyway, and near the end of her life a book of poems about her paintings was published, an honour no Dutch artist had ever had.
Agreed, one of the best. That face opening calls back to the old Greek Corinthian helmet. It may be no accident, in a century of Italians who loved anything antique.
Duckworth helped row the boat on 4 July 1862, the afternoon Lewis Carroll first told the Liddell girls the story of Alice. Carroll put him in the book as the Duck.
All that study of water paid off in 1940. He was not at Dunkirk, but his painting of the withdrawal made his name overnight when it was shown at the National Gallery that August.
Look at the threads spilling from the cushion on the left. The red one is painted soft, almost like running paint, while her fingers and the bobbins stay sharp. The whole picture is only about 24 by 21 centimetres.