Pictures to build
Jigsaw puzzles by painter.
Some painters left enough behind in The Met's open collection to fill an evening on their own. Here they are, each with a note on what their pictures are actually like to put back together, because a painter's hand changes the puzzle more than the subject does.
or browse by art style → or browse by subject →
Winslow Homer
Sea, woods and open air 6 pictures →A new painter every Monday.
Thick paint, seen close
Vincent van Gogh
Paintings from the last five years of his life, all of them from the Met. Roses and irises, olive trees and cypresses, a pair of worn shoes, the people of Arles. Almost every one is built from short, loaded brushstrokes you can follow with your eye.
17 pictures →
Posters and late nights
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Mostly prints and drawings rather than oils. Cabaret bills, the Moulin Rouge, singers and dancers caught mid-gesture, and a handful of quieter portraits. Flat colour, a quick line, a lot of bare paper.
19 pictures →
Rehearsal rooms
Edgar Degas
The dance class runs through most of these. Girls at the barre, a ballet seen from the pit, tulle in pink and green. Around them sit the quieter ones: a woman ironing, a collector of prints, a portrait or two.
13 pictures →
A face out of the dark
Rembrandt
Nearly all of these are people. Aristotle with his hand on Homer, Flora in her spring clothes, Hendrickje, Bellona in her armour, the painter Gerard de Lairesse, a man in a turban. The light finds a face and lets the rest go.
7 pictures →
Bright American afternoons
William Merritt Chase
Loose and quick and mostly sunlit. Children at the seaside, a girl in a park, a vase of azaleas, a table of fish. He painted fast and left the brush showing.
7 pictures →
Portraits and travels
John Singer Sargent
From the famous black dress of Madame X to bright scenes carried home from Egypt and Spain. A society painter with a restless streak.
7 pictures →
River afternoons
Édouard Manet
Paintings from his lighter years. A boat on the Seine, the Monet family under their garden trees, fishing, and one small brioche on a cloth.
6 pictures →
Solid and unsentimental
Gustave Courbet
Paintings with weight to them. A woman in the waves, a fishing boat, village girls out walking, a parrot on a wrist. Thick paint, worked with the knife as much as the brush.
6 pictures →
Soft edges, silver light
Camille Corot
Pictures where the light does most of the work. Hagar in the wilderness, travellers in a landscape, a woman reading, a letter half written. Feathery trees and a grey green hush over everything.
6 pictures →
Fuji, waves and snow
Katsushika Hokusai
Woodblock prints from the years Hokusai was past seventy and at his best. The great wave off Kanagawa with Fuji small beneath it, the lake at Hakone, the torii standing in Noboto Bay, snow on the Sumida River, a rooster and hen among the spiderwort, and a mystical bird with a human face. Prussian blue, firm outlines and a great deal of nerve.
6 pictures →
Rain, moon and the road
Utagawa Hiroshige
Woodblock prints of a Japan seen on the move. Wild geese crossing a full moon, night rain slanting over the great pine at Karasaki, the post town of Ōtsu on the Tōkaidō road, a temple grove beside a village, and a small view of Edo. Hiroshige let one colour fade into the next, so his skies go from deep blue to nothing.
6 pictures →
Warm light on people he liked
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Renoir at his warmest. Madame Charpentier on a sofa with her two children and the family dog, a young girl with a bunch of daisies, Nini sitting in a garden of dappled light, a girl bathing, and flowers heaped beside prickly pears on a table. Soft skin, feathery brushwork, and colour where you would expect shadow.
6 pictures →
Built stroke by stroke
Paul Cézanne
Cézanne in the years he was rebuilding painting from the ground up. Mont Sainte-Victoire above the viaduct of the Arc valley, card players bent over their game, Madame Cézanne in a red dress, apples beside a pot of primroses, a seated peasant, the Domaine Saint-Joseph among its trees. Everything is made of small, square strokes laid side by side like tiles.
6 pictures →
Tahiti, in flat colour
Paul Gauguin
Gauguin's Tahiti. Ia Orana Maria, a Tahitian Mary with her child on her shoulder and an angel half hidden among the flowers, women bathing at the water's edge, the siesta on a shaded porch, two women side by side, a Tahitian landscape, and a teapot set among fruit. Flat colour laid in broad, firm shapes.
6 pictures →
A court painter with a sharp eye
Francisco de Goya
Goya the portrait painter, from the court of Charles III to the years after the war. Manuel Osorio in red with his magpie on a string and three cats watching it, the Countess of Altamira with her baby daughter, a small boy called Pepito, an architect in his shirtsleeves, a lady in a mantilla, and a bullfight in a divided ring. Grey grounds, quick brushwork and no flattery at all.
6 pictures → Sea, woods and open air
Winslow Homer
Winslow Homer out of doors. Schoolboys playing snap the whip in a field, a veteran back from the war cutting wheat, a sailor adrift among sharks in the Gulf Stream, a fisherwoman leaning into the wind on the shore, a camp fire throwing sparks into the dark woods, and a canoe shooting the rapids on the Saguenay. Weather, painted by someone who went out in it.
6 pictures →
Everything in motion
Peter Paul Rubens
Rubens from his earliest dated painting, a man holding a pair of dividers, to the pictures of his last years. A wolf and fox hunt at full stretch, the river god Achelous feasting his guests, Venus holding Adonis back from the hunt, Henry IV riding in triumph, and Rubens himself in the garden with his young wife and their son. Warm flesh, red cloth and nothing standing still.
6 pictures →
Colour with a pulse
Eugène Delacroix
Delacroix across forty years, from a student's study of a model to one of his last pictures. Christ asleep in the boat while the storm breaks, Rebecca carried off on horseback from a burning castle, Ovid in exile among the Scythians, his aunt Madame Riesener, and a basket of flowers tipped over in a park. Colour that moves even when nothing else does.
6 pictures →
Panels, paper and the woodblock
Albrecht Dürer
Albrecht Dürer in Nuremberg, about 1505 to 1523, in paint and in print. Saint Anne with a hand on Mary’s shoulder while the Child sleeps, Christ in blue and red, blessing, the world in his hand, the Virgin and Child against the dark, and a young woman’s profile on green paper. Then the prints: his coat of arms, an open door under spread wings, a knot pattern for embroidery, and two woodcut sheets from the Arch of Honor for the emperor Maximilian.
8 pictures →
Saints, goddesses and red hats
Lucas Cranach the Elder
Lucas Cranach, court painter at Wittenberg in the years of the Reformation. Judith in a red hat with white plumes, her sword upright over the head of Holofernes, Venus on a round panel with Cupid beside her, Paris in armour as three goddesses wait and a white horse looks on, Saint Barbara kneeling in red among soldiers, Saint Maurice in silver armour, and the Duke of Saxony in black against red. A workshop Luther hangs with them.
6 pictures →
Merchants, a scholar and Death
Hans Holbein the Younger
Hans Holbein’s portraits, from a young man of Lucerne in 1517 to the German merchants he painted in London. Benedikt von Hertenstein in a red cap under a painted frieze, Hermann von Wedigh and Derick Berck in black against blue and green, Erasmus, hands folded, in a fur collar. Then two small woodcuts from the Dance of Death, where a skeleton drags off the abbot and leads an old man to the doctor. A copy and a workshop roundel hang with them.
6 pictures →
Ruffs, laughter and black coats
Frans Hals
Frans Hals in Haarlem, painting fast and leaving the strokes in view. Merrymakers crowding a carnival table of bread and eggs, a young man in a great grey hat raising his glass in an inn while a girl laughs at his shoulder, a boy with a lute, and the scholar Petrus Scriverius and his wife Anna van der Aar, each in a painted oval. Paulus Verschuur stands in black, hand on hip. A copy of a portrait of Hals himself hangs alongside.
7 pictures →
Silk, lapdogs and a quick brush
Jean-Honoré Fragonard
Jean-Honoré Fragonard in Paris around 1770, with one dim room from his years in Rome, full of women, babies and a dog. A woman at her desk turning from her letter and a posy of flowers, a small white dog on the chair, two sisters holding each other in yellow and pink, a lady in an old-fashioned ruff holding up her dog, and a girl reading in profile against blue sky. Painted quickly, in silk colours and warm light.
6 pictures →
Venice, masks and gondolas
Francesco Guardi
Francesco Guardi’s Venice in the 1760s and 1770s, painted with a quick, flickering brush. Piazza San Marco with its bell tower against a wide blue sky, the Rialto bridge from further up the Grand Canal, sails and masts crowding the basin of San Marco, figures in black robes in the anteroom of the Great Council hall, and masks mingling at the Ridotto. And one place that never existed: ruins, trees and boats under a curved top.
6 pictures →
Silk, red coats and woodland
Thomas Gainsborough
Thomas Gainsborough’s sitters, and the country he liked to paint between them. Grace Dalrymple Elliott at full length in gold silk, Queen Charlotte under a cloud of powdered curls, a musician in a red coat holding his music, an officer in scarlet with gold at the shoulder, cottage children out gathering sticks in a dark wood, and a cart track winding into wooded hills. England in the 1770s and 1780s, with a light, quick brush.
7 pictures →
Big hats, red coats and a lamb
Joshua Reynolds
Joshua Reynolds and the families who sat for him, from the 1740s to the end of the 1780s. Two children and their tutor with a lamb, three gentlemen at a table under the trees with a dog at their feet, Anne Dashwood holding a shepherd’s crook, Lady Smith gathering her three children close, Captain Coussmaker leaning on a tree beside his horse, and a little girl in a pink cap, sitting very still with her hands folded.
8 pictures →
Faces in a strong light
Henry Raeburn
Henry Raeburn’s portraits, painted in Edinburgh around 1800. Young William Fraser in a dark coat against a darker ground, Mrs Oswald in white with an orange sash and trees going dark behind her, the Drummond children with their pony under the trees, George Harley Drummond beside a tall bay horse, Janet Law in white, and two older men at ease in their chairs. The light falls hard on faces and linen, and the rest sinks into brown.
7 pictures →
Oaks, heath and still water
Théodore Rousseau
Théodore Rousseau in the French countryside, much of it in and around the forest of Fontainebleau, from the 1840s to the 1860s. Bare trees going dark against a winter sunset, a pond under a heavy sky, a small boat on a slow river, a red evening over the rocks near Arbonne, a great oak at the edge of the woods at Monts-Girard, and a young birch catching the sun on an early summer morning. Every tree has its own shape, like a face in a crowd.
7 pictures →
Roses, pansies and a pear
Henri Fantin-Latour
Henri Fantin-Latour at his table of flowers, from the 1860s to the 1880s. White roses in a glass beside one ripe pear and a few grapes, pansies in clay pots with green apples beside them, a crowded summer bouquet in pink, white and red, and a basket of fruit with a knife on a small wooden table. Between the flowers, two people: the painter himself as a young man, half in shadow, and a woman in black with her hands folded.
7 pictures →
Village hills and city mornings
Camille Pissarro
Camille Pissarro, from the hills of Pontoise to the windows of Paris and Rouen, between 1867 and 1899. A lane climbing out of the village at Jalais Hill, women bent over the harvest on a slope under tall trees, a barge with a red stripe on the river, pink haystacks at Eragny, the Boulevard Montmartre on a winter morning seen from high up, and the Tuileries gardens in spring. Ordinary days, looked at for a long time.
8 pictures →
Roads, riverbanks and moving sky
Alfred Sisley
Alfred Sisley in the small towns along the Seine and the Loing, from the 1870s to the 1890s. The suspension bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne, chestnut trees along the river with a carriage in their shade, the road from Versailles to Louveciennes under a grey sky, a snowy street at Moret, a red-roofed house on the road to Saint-Mammès, and a meadow at Sahurs gone gold in the morning sun. Sky over almost all of it, and the light changing in it.
8 pictures →
Black, grey and a touch of pink
James McNeill Whistler
James McNeill Whistler, an American who settled in London, in the 1870s and 1880s. The critic Théodore Duret in evening dress with a pink cloak over his arm, the actor Henry Irving as Philip II of Spain, a lady in grey against the dark, a woman leaning back by the fire in a yellow room, evening crowds at Cremorne Gardens, and the market square at Dieppe. He called his pictures arrangements and notes, and meant it.
7 pictures →
Lakes, sea and quiet light
John Frederick Kensett
John Frederick Kensett, an American painter of lakes and shores, from the 1850s to 1872. Mountains in mist over Lake George, the same lake again in a quick turquoise study, the Hudson between green hills, people resting under tall trees by Conesus Lake, the sun going down on a flat sea, a rocky point under a foggy sky, and cedars at Darien with the last red light behind their trunks. Very little happens, very slowly.
8 pictures →
Blossom, oaks and golden haze
George Inness
George Inness, from the Delaware valley to the hills outside Rome and back to New Jersey, between 1861 and the 1890s. A rainbow over the Delaware Water Gap with cattle by the river, red and gold oaks under a storm sky, a red barn and dark trees against an orange evening at Medfield, olive trees above the plain at Tivoli, and an orchard at Montclair in white blossom and green mist. The air is the real subject.
8 pictures →
Lanterns, plum blossom and rain
Suzuki Harunobu
Woodblock prints from Edo in the 1760s, the years when Harunobu made some of the first full-colour prints. Slender young women in quiet scenes: one holding a lantern up to plum blossom against a black night, two sharing a yellow umbrella in a storm, women playing the shamisen while men peer in through a lattice window, tea things on a red stand on a rainy night, and a woman alone at a shrine at the hour of the ox.
7 pictures →
Women of Edo, close up
Kitagawa Utamaro
Woodblock prints from Edo, most of them from the 1790s, with Utamaro’s women drawn close, often head and shoulders. Two women with their heads together, one in black with white dots, a woman wiping her face after the bath, two ladies each holding part of a lacquered mirror, a mother with her baby at midnight, children at play around a standing screen, and a household scrambling under a green mosquito net as a thunderstorm comes in.
8 pictures →
Ghosts, wrestlers and rain
Utagawa Kuniyoshi
Woodblock prints from Edo around the middle of the nineteenth century, many of them three sheets wide. Two sumo wrestlers locked together while a judge and the referee look on, the ghosts of the Taira rising from the sea around a ship at Daimotsu Bay, a crowd of fighters on the steep roof of the Hōryūkaku from the tale of eight dogs, women on a pleasure boat under the autumn moon, and grey rain over the river at Ochanomizu.
7 pictures →