1. In David’s 1801 painting ‘Napoleon at the Great St. Bernard Pass’ (or ‘Napoleon Crossing the Alps’), the names of which two historical figures are etched into the rocks at the foreground of the painting along with that of Napoleon?
2. Popular with the Mannerists and Baroque artists, and particularly associated with Jacob van Ruisdael, Paolo Veronese and Peter Paul Rubens, what name is given to an object, such as a tree, along either side of the foreground of a painting, that directs the viewer's eye into the composition by bracketing the edge?
3. According to the inscription found at the top right-hand corner of Frans Hals’ ‘Laughing Cavalier’, how old was the sitter at the time of the portrait?
4. Which work, painted between 1472 and 1475 and housed at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, depicts a scene containing the Archangel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary and is thought to be Leonardo da Vinci’s earliest completed painting?
5. The dentist Dr. Byron McKeeby of Cedar Rapids, Iowa was immortalised in which 1930 painting?
6. What is the title of Henri Mattise’s painting that was left hanging upside down for 46 days at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1961 before anyone noticed?
7. The value of which of Van Gogh’s paintings is said to have rocketed after the 1956 film ‘Lust For Life’ (erroneously) portrayed it as the painting Van Gogh was working on at the time of his suicide?
8. With what is Christ grappling in Leonardo da Vinci’s famous oil painting ‘The Virgin and Child with St Anne’?
9. The full title of Henry Raeburn’s painting that is better known by the truncated title ‘The Skating Minister’ includes the name of the loch upon which The Reverend Robert Walker is shown to be skating. Which loch?
10. In painting, a remarque is the addition of a small personalized drawing or symbol near the signature of the artist and was first used by Whistler. What was Whistler’s remarque?
11. The crushing foot used by Terry Gilliam in the animated opening of ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’ was taken from a detail of the 1545 painting ‘Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time’ by which Florentine artist?
12. Théodore Géricault’s ‘Raft of the Medusa’ depicts the survivors of the French frigate Medusa, after it had been wrecked on the Bank of Arguin off the coast of which African country in 1816?
13. Which animal muses over the sleeping body of a woman below a moonlit night sky in Henri Rousseau’s ‘The Sleeping Gypsy’?
14. In which painting of 1866 can you view a close-up of the genitalia of Joanna Hiffernan, the lover of James McNeill Whistler?
15. Born in 1641, Titus was the only child who survived into adulthood of which painter, who used his son as a model in several of his paintings?
16. Which artistic term, deriving from the Italian for ‘scratched’, refers, in painting, to the practice of laying one colour over another and scratching the paint so that the colour underneath shows through?
17. If the first is ‘The Heir’ and the second is ‘The Levée’, then what is the third?
18. In which very famous painting of 1882 can a pair of green feet, belonging to a trapeze artist, be seen in the extreme top left hand corner of the canvas?
19. In which famous painting of 1656 can the Italian dwarf Nicolas Pertusato be seen waking a sleeping mastiff with his foot whilst the achondroplastic German, Maribarbola, looks on?
20. The snow-topped Mount Chimborazo is the highest peak in Ecuador. Its summit is also often said to be the spot on the surface farthest from the center of the Earth. Its appears, most famously, in art in a popular 1859 painting by which American artist?
The answers:
1. HANNIBAL & KAROLUS MAGNUS (CHARLEMAGNE)
2. REPOUSSOIR
3. 26
4. ANNUNCIATION
5. AMERICAN GOTHIC (by GRANT WOOD)
6. LE BATEAU
7. WHEAT FIELD WITH CROWS
8. A LAMB
9. DUDDINGSTON LOCH
10. A BUTTERFLY
11. AGNOLO BRONZINO
12. SENEGAL
13. A LION
14. L’ORIGINE DU MONDE (or THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD) by GUSTAVE COURBET
15. REMBRANDT
16. SGRAFFITO
17. THE ORGY (from A RAKE’S PROGRESS by WILLIAM HOGARTH)
18. A BAR AT THE FOLIES-BERGÈRE (by ÉDOUARD MANET)
19. LAS MENINAS (by DIEGO VELÁZQUEZ)
20. FREDERIC EDWIN CHURCH (THE HEART OF THE ANDES)
