Top 10 painters facts

In Vinci. Leonardo da Vinci was born on 15 April 1452, in a farmhouse about 3 kilometers from the town of Vinci, near Florence. His full name was "Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci", which means "Leonardo, son of Piero, of Vinci".

In a lunatic asylum. In the aftermath of the 23 December 1888 breakdown that resulted in the self-mutilation of his left ear, van Gogh voluntarily admitted himself to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole lunatic asylum, where he spent a year. During this period, he produced some of the best-known works of his career, including Cypresses, the blue self-portrait and The Starry Night.

He shot himself. After years of painful anxiety and frequent bouts of mental illness, Vincent van Gogh died at the age of 37 from a gunshot wound, generally accepted to be self-inflicted (although no gun was ever found).

Crete. El Greco (Dominikos Theotokopoulos) born in either the village of Fodele or Candia (present day Heraklion) on Crete in 1541. He went to Venice around 1567. In 1577, El Greco migrated to Madrid, then to Toledo, where he produced his mature works.

Salvador Dali. The brand was founded by the Spaniard Enric Bernat in 1958, who started his business in Catalonia. It is currently owned by the Italian multinational corporation Perfetti Van Melle.

Pablo Picasso. In 1944 Picasso joined the French Communist Party (he lived in France), attended an international peace conference in Poland, and in 1950 received the Stalin Peace Prize from the Soviet government. But party criticism of a portrait of Stalin as insufficiently realistic cooled Picasso’s interest in Soviet politics, though he remained a loyal member of the Communist Party until his death.

Paul Cézanne. The Card Players is a series of five oil paintings by Paul Cézanne. One version of The Card Players was sold in 2011 to the Royal Family of Qatar for a price variously estimated at between $250 million and $300 million, making it (then) the most expensive work of art ever sold.

By mistake. Rembrandt painted the large painting The Militia Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq between 1640 and 1642. In the 18th century the picture was called The Night Watch, because it was so dimmed and defaced that it looked quite like a night scene. After it was cleaned, it was discovered to represent the broad day.

Rembrandt painted about 100 self-portraits, and among these 20 were drawings. He started in 1627 as a juvenile, and ended in 1669.

Jackson Pollock. No. 5, 1948 is a painting by Jackson Pollock, which was sold for $140M in 2006, making it (then) the most expensive piece of art ever sold. In 1949, right after the painting was sold by Pollock to Alfonso Ossorio, the painting became damaged during the moving process. Pollock patched the painting before it went to Ossorio saying “He’ll never know, never know”.