Painting

The world's oldest known animal cave painting in Indonesia - a wild pig - is believed to be drawn 45,500 years ago. Painted using dark red ochre pigment, the life-sized picture of the Sulawesi warty pig seems to be part of a narrative scene. The picture was found in the Leang Tedongnge cave in a remote valley on the island of Sulawesi.

Pictures of animals such as mammoths, bison and deer started appearing on cave walls in places such as Lascaux in France in 30,000 BC.

Cave painting of aurochs, horses, and deer at Lascaux

Early Netherlandish painter Jan van Eyck's 1433 Portrait Of A Man in a Red Turban is thought to be the first Western self-portrait after antiquity. Van Eyck was a pioneering 15th-century early renaissance oil painter who lived in Bruges. There is debate over whether the subject of the portrait is the artist as there is no inscription. However, there is a faux engraving on the frame that points to a personal connection. The words ‘Als Ich Kan’ painted in Greek letters at the top of the frame translate to Van Eyck’s signature phrase ‘As I can’, but here is unusually large and prominent. This fact, along with the man's unusually direct and confrontational gaze, have been taken as an indication that the work is a self-portrait.

In 1500, German artist Albrecht Durer revealed Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight, his self-portrait that broke the boundaries of contemporary art. The most confronting element is the way in which Durer positions himself. Front facing and engaging the viewer with his gaze, he is presented in a format reserved for images of Jesus Christ.

Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight)

The first painting to be auctioned was Antonio Correggio's The Magdalen Reading, which was sold for 13,000 ducats ($6,500) to Augustus, king of Poland, and Elector of Saxony in 1746. He mounted it in a silver frame, adorned with jewels, and kept it locked in a case in his private apartment.

The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up, is an oil painting by the English artist Joseph Mallord William Turner. It was painted in 1838 and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1839. In 2005, The Fighting Temeraire was voted the UK's favorite painting in a poll organised by BBC Radio 4's Today program.

The Fighting Temeraire. 1839, by Joseph Mallord William Turner

From 1912 to 1948, painting was an Olympic event. In 1924, Jack Yeats, brother of the poet W. B. Yeats, took the silver, Ireland’s first-ever Olympic medal.

Painting by numbers may seem the antithesis of great art, but the method, developed in the 1950s, was inspired by Leonardo Da Vinci's habit of giving his assistants patterns filled with numbers corresponding to different parts.

In 2006 casino mogul Steve Wynn was set to conduct the largest art transaction in history by selling Picasso's Le Rêve for $139 million. The day before the transaction was set to take place Wynn accidentally stuck his elbow through the painting.

The most expensive painting ever is believed to be French artist Paul Gauguin's oil painting of two Tahitian girls, Nafea Faa Ipoipo, or When Will You Marry? It was sold privately by the family of Rudolf Staechelin in February 2015 to Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad Al-Thani for $300m (£197m).

The current record price of $300 million paid was matched by abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning's 1955 work Interchange, which was sold by the David Geffen Foundation to Hedge fund investor Kenneth C. Griffin in September 2015.

More Picasso paintings have been stolen than those of any other artist.

Pablo Picasso's 1955 work Les Femmes d’Alger (Women Of Algiers) became the most expensive painting to sell at an auction, when it was sold for $179.4 million (£119 million) at Christie's in New York in May 2015.

Les femmes d’Alger, Picasso Wikipedia

Covering the story of the sale of Les Femmes d’Alger, a New York TV station was ridiculed by art lovers when it blurred out the Cubist depictions of breasts so as not to offend its viewers.

The record was beaten two and half years later, by Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Christ, Salvator Mundi, which sold for  $450.3 million (£341 million) on November 15, 2017.

Fake oil paintings can be detected because of nuclear bombs detonated in 1945. Isotopes such as strontium-90 and cesium-137 that can be found in oil did not exist in nature prior to these nuclear explosions. If a picture contains these isotopes, it is certainly painted after the year 1945.

Here is a list of songs inspired by paintings.