Identify the Painting Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

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 2

A young landowner with a gun under his arm leans against a bench where his wife sits in a pale blue dress, both looking out at us, while their own fields, sheaves of corn and a wide stretch of English countryside run away behind them. Painted around 1750.

Question 3

A brooding Spanish hill city, gathered around a castle and a church tower, seen under a near-black storm sky torn by cold grey-green light, the ground below an unnatural rolling green. Painted around 1600 by a Greek-born artist working in Spain; one of the first pure landscapes in Western art.

Question 4

At dawn after a storm, a small group of shipwrecked sailors cling to a piece of a broken mast while a huge glowing green-and-gold mountain of water rears up to break over them, warm sunlight blazing through the spray. Painted in Russia in 1850 by a master of sea scenes.

Question 5

An evening sky boiling with swirling currents and huge blazing stars hangs over a quiet town with a church spire, while a dark flame-shaped cypress tree rises in the front. The Dutch painter made it in 1889 from the window of his room in a French mental asylum, working partly from memory.

Question 6

In a lush overgrown garden a young woman in a billowing pink dress is pushed high on a rope seat by an older man in the shade, while a hidden young admirer lies in the bushes below, gazing up as she kicks off one shoe toward a statue. Painted in France around 1767.

Question 7

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.

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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.