Your Art Gallery: Landscapes Trivia Quiz

Answer: Camille Pissarro

He was born Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro in 1830 in the town of Charlotte Amalie, then part of the Danish West Indies and now the capital and largest city in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Pissarro's early work clearly belongs to the Impressionist school, but in his later life he also made an important contribution to the Post-Impressionist movement.

Pissarro is the only artist whose work was shown in all eight of the Paris Impressionist exhibitions (held between 1874 and 1886). Today, he can be seen in major galleries all around the world. His best-known works include the five paintings known collectively as the "Boulevard Montmartre" cityscape series, which sold for almost £20m (more than $30 million) in London in 2014.

The pictured work, 'Landschaft mit überfluteten Feldern' ("Landscape with Flooded Fields") can be seen at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, one of the oldest continually-operating art museums in the U.S.

Answer: Canaletto

Born Giovanni Antonio Canal in 1697 in Venice, he is generally known simply as Canaletto. His works can be seen throughout the world, although the largest selection is to be found in two English collections, at the Wallace Collection in London and the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle.

Always much in demand, the record auction price paid for a Canaletto was in London in 2005, when his "View of the Grand Canal from Palazzo Balbi" sold for £18.6m (around $30 million).

His "Harbor of San Marco" (pictured) is on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, one of the largest museums in the U.S., with more than 450,000 works of art in the collection.

Answer: Caspar David Friedrich

Caspar David Friedrich was born in 1774 in the city of Greifswald in what was then Swedish Pomerania, but is now in northeastern Germany near the Baltic coast. Most of his paintings are allegorical landscapes with figures silhouetted against the sky or misty mountains. I was therefore delighted to find this example of a genuine landscape so that I can probably slip him in again when we get to the room containing 'landscapes with people'.

Having produced more than 500 works in his lifetime, Freidrich can be seen at galleries around the world. Amongst the most famous works are "Moonrise Over the Sea" and "The Oak Tree in the Snow" which, along with our featured work, can be seen at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin. This is part of the Berlin national Gallery, which is on Museum Island, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Answer: Johan Christian Dahl

Born in 1788 in the city of Bergen on Norway's west coast, Johan Christian Dahl is widely considered as Norway's first great Romantic painter. To illustrate Dahl's importance to Scandinavian culture, he was awarded the Order of Vasa by the King of Sweden, the Order of Saint Olav by the King of Norway and in Denmark was honored with the Order of Dannebrog.

Collections including many of Dahl's best-known works can be seen in the National Gallery in Oslo and the Bergen Kunstmuseum in his home town. The large work simply called "Norway" along with "Storm at Sea", and our featured painting can be seen at the the 'Galerie Neue Meister' ("New Masters Gallery") in Dresden.

Answer: Claude Monet

Oscar-Claude Monet was born in Paris in 1840. Monet was the master of what the French call ' plein-air' painting, i.e. actually sitting out in the open air and applying paint to canvas rather than doing sketches and them going back to a studio to do the actual painting. He is well known for painting the same scene many times, each time capturing the light specific to a different time of day or the season. He spent more than 20 years working on his most famous works, numerous variations on water lilies.

In a 2008 London auction "Le Bassin aux Nymphéas" (from the water lilies series) sold for more than £40m (more than $80 million) including auction fees, more than doubling the previous highest for a Monet.

Our featured work, 'Gartenweg' ("Garden Path"), is part of the collection at Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, a museum established in 1903 and located in Belvedere Palace in Vienna, Austria.

Answer: Francesco Guardi

Francesco Guardi was born in Venice in 1712. Many of Guardi's landscapes are painted in a style the Italians called 'pittura di tocco', notable for small dotting and spirited brush-strokes, a technique resurrected more than a century later by some of the later Impressionists.

Guardi's most famous work is a 12-painting series commemorating the 1763 election of Doge Alvise IV Mocenigo.

Our featured work, 'Vedute der Isola di San Pietro di Castello', can be seen at the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon, Portugal.

Answer: Georges Seurat

Georges-Pierre Seurat was born in Paris in 1859. His first work was a huge canvas depicting bathers relaxing by the Seine called "Bathers at Asnières", which he finished in 1883 and which is now on display at the National Gallery in London. "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte", on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, took him two years to finish. As his career developed, so he honed and perfected the technique of painting with small, distinct dots of color which became known as chromoluminarism or pointillism.

Our featured work, Port-en-Bessin" is part of the world's largest collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist work at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

Answer: Henri Rousseau

Henri Julien Félix Rousseau was born in 1844 in the town of Laval, capital of the Mayenne department in western France. A customs officer by day, Rousseau had a somewhat childish style which was often ridiculed during his lifetime, but several later generations of avant-garde artists regard him as a self-taught genius. I confess that he is another of my favorite artists, so remember the name and look out for him as you wander around future rooms in my virtual quiz gallery.

In the early part of the 21st Century, many of the world's most famous galleries have hosted exhibitions of "Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris" including the Tate Modern in London, the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

As well as his 'exotic' scenes, Rousseau painted a number of topographical images of the city and its suburbs such as the one we have featured, "Malakoff". Part of the collection belonging to the National Gallery in Prague, Czech Republic, this particular work can be seen at the gallery's largest site in Veletrzní Palác, home of the modern art part of the collection.

Answer: John Constable

John Constable was born in 1776 in the village of East Bergholt in the Stour River Valley in the southern part of Suffolk, a region today known simply as 'Constable Country'.

Constable's paintings are now amongst the most valuable and the most popular in the British art world, for example "The Hay Wain" (which is in the National Gallery in London), "Dedham Vale" and "Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds" (both in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London) and "Wivenhoe Park" (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.).

Our featured work is "View of Epsom", an oil on canvas painted around 1808, which is part of the Tate Britain collection.

Answer: Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne was born in 1839 in the city of Aix-en-Provence, just north of Marseilles in the south of France. Both Matisse and Picasso have referred to him as "the father of us all".

An incredibly versatile artist, he painted classics in numerous genres, including landscapes, still life, portraits and, in his later life, some religious images. His body of work is often divided into four distinct eras, "Dark Period", "Impressionist Period", "Mature Period" and "Final Period".
Our featured work, 'Das Haus des Père Lacroix', can be seen at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.c.