Identify the Painting Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

A cluster of well-dressed men in stiff white collars lean in around a pale corpse laid on a table, while a physician in a broad hat lifts the muscles of the dead man's forearm with forceps to show how they pull. Painted in Amsterdam in 1632 for a guild of surgeons.

Question 2

Around a table in a plain room, a group of countrymen in hats sit quietly absorbed in the hands they hold, a standing man watching over them and a child looking on, every shape simplified into blocks of muted colour. Painted in the south of France in the early 1890s.

Question 3

In the front of a lush green landscape a soldier stands on the left while a nearly naked woman nurses a baby on the right; between and behind them a small town waits under a gathering storm split by a bolt of lightning. Painted in Venice around 1508; nobody agrees what it means.

Question 4

A woodblock print in which a barrel-maker squats inside a huge half-finished round wooden tub he is hooping, and framed neatly inside the ring of the tub, far in the distance, sits a small snow-capped cone-shaped mountain. Made in Japan in the early 1830s.

Question 5

A very long, narrow horizontal handscroll, meant to be unrolled one section at a time, showing hundreds of tiny figures, boats, market stalls, camels and a great arched wooden bridge in a bustling old Chinese capital in springtime. Painted roughly 900 years ago.

Question 6

Seen from a hilltop, three tired men and a straggling pack of dogs trudge home across a frozen white landscape toward a village where tiny figures skate on ponds, jagged mountains far off. Painted in 1565 as one of a set of pictures showing the seasons of the year.

Question 7

A tall painting in two halves: below, a row of black-clad Spanish gentlemen watch two saints in gold robes lower an armoured body into a tomb; above, the clouds break open and the soul, a small ghostly shape, is carried up toward heaven. Painted for a Toledo church in 1586.

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About Identify the Painting

Can you name the painting? Each question shows one famous picture and gives three short, easy sentences about it: what is happening in the image, what it looks like, and when and where it was made, without ever saying its title. You then choose it from four options, and the answer fills in the story.

These are the pictures that turn up on posters, mugs and book covers everywhere: a smiling woman in front of a misty valley, a swirling blue night sky, a howling figure on a bridge, a girl glancing back with a bright earring, a goddess on a seashell, a long table of startled diners, two fingertips almost touching on a chapel ceiling.

Part of the fun is learning to read a painting from a few features. Is it a single portrait or a busy crowd? Is it calm or full of movement? Are the edges soft and smoky, broken into little dots, or thick with gold? Is it oil on canvas, paint on a wall, or a printed design? A handful of clues like these usually points to one artist and one picture.

Many of these works carry a bigger story. One was stolen from the Louvre by a workman and vanished for two years. One has been slashed by vandals more than once and cut down to fit a wall. One may show a sky stained red by a volcano on the far side of the world. One was painted on a dining-hall wall and started peeling almost at once. Several were made not as grand statements but to decorate a friend's spare room or a palace study.

Every artist here died more than seventy years ago, so both the artwork and the photograph of it are in the public domain and there is no copyright question. The images all come from Wikimedia Commons, and every fact in the clues and answers has been checked. The wording is kept simple, so the quiz plays the same whether or not you have ever set foot in an art gallery.