Identify the Painting Quiz — 10 Free Questions

Question 1

A man lies slumped and lifeless in his bath, one arm hanging to the floor still holding a quill, a stab wound in his chest and a bloodstained note in his hand, against a plain, empty, shadowy background. Painted in 1793 as a tribute to a murdered leader of the French Revolution.

Question 2

On a makeshift wooden float adrift at sea, a pyramid of desperate, half-dead survivors climbs over sprawled corpses, one man at the top waving a rag toward a speck of a ship on the horizon. A giant French canvas of 1819, based on a real shipwreck and the scandal that followed it.

Question 3

Under a vast vaulted hall, dozens of ancient Greek thinkers argue and study in small groups, while two stride forward at the very centre, one pointing up to the sky and the other holding a hand flat to the ground. Painted for a Vatican library room between 1509 and 1511.

Question 4

A wide, calm coastal scene: a ploughman follows his horse across a field, a shepherd stares up at the sky, a merchant ship sails on. Almost unnoticed in one corner, two bare legs kick from the water where a boy who flew too near the sun has just splashed down. Painted in the mid-1500s.

Question 5

A near-abstract dark picture: a smoky blue-black evening over a park and water, with a shower of golden sparks from a firework drifting down and a few faint specks marking a distant crowd. Painted in London around 1875; a critic's insult about it led to a famous libel trial.

Question 6

Inside a gaslit Paris dance hall, friends sit around a table while a woman's face looms at the front, lit harsh green from below, and the artist himself, very short, crosses the background beside a much taller companion. Painted around 1892 with sharp, slashing diagonal lines.

Question 7

A close view looking straight down onto the still surface of a garden pond, with floating pads and pale blooms drifting in loose clusters and the reflection of sky and clouds filling the space between them. There is no shore and no skyline. The French painter made about 250 of these late in life.

Question 8

A calm, saffron-robed young woman with four arms stands barefoot on a small patch of green, a soft halo behind her head, holding a book, sheaves of rice, a white cloth and a string of prayer beads. Painted in Bengal in 1905 as a gentle national symbol during a protest against colonial rule.

Question 9

A crowded village square packed with more than a hundred people doing strange things: one bangs his head on a brick wall, one tosses coins into a stream, one ties a blue cloak on her husband. Each little scene acts out an old folk saying. Painted in 1559.

Question 10

A dark locomotive charges straight toward the viewer across a bridge, out of a blur of golden mist and driving weather, a tiny hare running ahead of it along the track. Almost everything else dissolves into smears of light. Painted in Britain in 1844.

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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.