‘Dignity and Impudence’ by Sir Edwin Landseer
Dear Readers, we had a very close race for the top spot this week, with Fran and Bobby Freelove and Anne both getting 15/15 for getting all the artists right. However, I’m going to hand the top spot to Anne this week, for recognising that the little unicorn horn on the rhino’s withers is an artistic embellishment not present on the real animal. Let’s see what challenge I can come up with tomorrow!
- ‘Whistlejacket’ by George Stubbs
2. The painting is ‘St Augustine in His Study’ by Vittore Carpaccio. One theory about the pensive expression is that St Augustine has just had a revelation that the friend to whom he is writing, St Jerome, has died.
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3. This is by Albrecht Dürer. The little unicorn horn between the rhino’s shoulders doesn’t exist on the real animal, but that didn’t stop artists from including it for the next hundred years.
4. This Portrait of a Stag is by Spanish painter Diego Velásquez
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5. ‘The Goldfinch’ was painted by Carel Fabritius, and Donna Tartt (who wrote The Secret History in 1992) followed up with The Goldfinch in 2014.
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6. ‘A Horse Frightened by Lightning’ is by Théodore Géricault. His most famous picture is probably ‘The Raft of The Medusa’.
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7. Katushika Hokusai is more famous for ‘The Great Wave’ and for ’36 Views of Mount Fuji’, but I love this painting, ‘Tiger in the Snow’. It was painted when the great man was eighty-nine years old.
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8. ‘Rocky Mountain Sheep’ was painted by John James Audobon. His master work was ‘Birds of America’, an attempt to paint all the birds of America in life-sized images, hence the enormous size of the pages.
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9. ‘Lying Cow’ is by Vincent Van Gogh
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10. ‘The Aqueduct of Morro Velho, Brazil, 1873’ was painted by intrepid biologist and explorer Marianne North. There is a gallery dedicated to her work in Kew Gardens, London.
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11. This was painted by Paul Gauguin – the picture is called ‘Still Life with Three Puppies’
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12. ‘The Foxes’ was painted by Franz Marc. Have a look at his extraordinary images of blue horses and other animals if you get a chance.
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13. This painting, ‘Coronation Cockatoo’ is by Stanley Spencer, more famous for his paintings of his home town of Cookham, in particular ‘The Resurrection’.
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14. This is by M.C. Escher, famous for his prints of impossible staircases among other things.
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15. ‘Rabbit on a Train’ is by Michael Sowa. I think the rabbit has just finished the school term and is happily going home to see his family.
BTW, I also really like the Michael Sowa paintings below. What do you think – enigmatic or just weird?
February by Michael Sowa
Kohler’s Pig by Michael Sowa
Specht by Michael Sowa
To be fair to the Freeloves, I am probably a lot more familiar with rhinos than they are. This was a delightful challenge with a lovely variety of beautiful pictures to ‘revisit’.
Yes an interesting quiz, well done Anne, you’re right about the rhinos, we never noticed that little unicorn horn!
Michael Sowa is new to me. Love his work and off to find out more about him right now/
I love him! I keep buying greetings cards with his pictures on them, but they are sometimes rather melancholy or sinister so I have to be very careful who I send them to 🙂
Hard to get the cards here, but I have ordered a book he has illustrated called A Bear Called Sunday that looks odd and delightful.
Thank you for this quiz, found it very interesting although I missed the deadline. I am glad to have discovered Michael Sowa. I find his pictures enigmatic, not weird. The rabbit on the train makes me think of my second trip to Berlin in 1982, by train… part of it involved crossing East Germany which was a bit weird, knowing what was going on there…