Art Central
Canvas Celebrities
A world-famous painting that went missing, a garden pond painted about 250 times, and a blue paint once valued like gold. Let's step into the stories behind great art!
Did you know?
The Mona Lisa is only 77 cm tall and 53 cm wide. In 1911, a museum worker stole it from the Louvre in Paris. It was missing for about two years, and the theft made it even more famous!
Claude Monet painted the water lilies in his garden pond at Giverny, France, about 250 times! He painted them for the last 31 years of his life, many while he had cataracts, which make eyesight cloudy.
Amrita Sher-Gil, born in 1913, is one of India's best-known painters. She was inspired by the Ajanta cave paintings and by Mughal and Pahari art. The Government of India has declared her works 'National Art Treasures'.
Try this: Grow a Picture with a Grid
Choose a small picture, such as a cartoon from a comic. Lightly draw a grid of 2 cm squares over a photocopy of it. On a big sheet, draw the same number of squares, but make them 4 cm wide. Now copy the picture one square at a time, matching the lines in each box. Your drawing comes out twice as big! Artists often use grids like this.
Go further: A Blue Worth Its Weight in Gold
Long ago, the finest blue paint, ultramarine, was made by grinding a blue stone called lapis lazuli, brought from mines in Afghanistan. Its name comes from Latin for 'beyond the sea', because it travelled so far to reach Italy. Making it was slow and costly, so at times it was valued as highly as gold! Painters often saved it for the most important parts of a picture. In the 1820s, chemists finally found a way to make a cheaper, man-made ultramarine.