Thousands of tiny brushstrokes went into this autumn path, painted by the Danish artist Hans Andersen Brendekilde in 1902. The image below is in high definition, so zoom in and look at the leaves one by one... The path runs through a wood at the height of autumn, the trees turning gold and orange and red, and the ground so thickly covered in fallen leaves that you can almost hear them under your feet. A woman sits alone on a bench at the side of the path, while two figures walk away into the distance, and the whole scene glows with that soft, low light you only get on a clear afternoon at this time of year. The man who painted it was born Hans Andersen in 1857, into a poor family on the island of Funen, and as a boy he did chores on a farm. When he became a painter, there was another young artist working on the same kinds of subjects, also called Andersen, and people kept confusing them. So in 1884 the two friends solved the problem together: each took the name of the village he came from. Hans Andersen became Brendekilde, and his friend became L.A. Ring, one of the greatest Danish painters of his time. For much of his career, Brendekilde painted the harsh lives of Danish farmworkers, but as he grew older he turned more and more to the beauty of the countryside. This is one of those paintings: a quiet path, a bench, and the kind of autumn day that makes you want to sit down for a while and watch the leaves fall...

This is not a photograph, and it's not an oil painting. It might be the most unbelievable watercolor ever made... It's called Sommarnöje, which means something like Summer Delight, and Anders Zorn painted it in 1886. Look at the water, the gentle ripples, the reflections, the wet sheen of it, and then look at the two people, the fine detail of the wooden rowboat, the woman's white dress, the light on her face. It has the near-photographic realism of an oil painting, and it was done in watercolor, a medium so unforgiving that a single wrong stroke ruins the entire piece. Zorn painted this in the first summer of his marriage: the woman in white waiting on the pier is his new wife, Emma, whom he had married only months before. They had just come back from their honeymoon and were staying with her family at Dalarö near Stockholm, still looking for the home where they would spend their life. The man rowing toward her is their friend Carl Gustav Dahlström. It is a real moment from the happiest season of a young couple's life, caught and held forever. In 2010 this single sheet of watercolor sold for twenty-six million Swedish kronor, over three million dollars, the highest price ever paid for a Swedish painting. In his own lifetime, Zorn was celebrated above all for two things: his handling of light, and his ability to paint water. Sommarnöje is where you see exactly why...

This is one of the most famous paintings in the world, but what the artist was actually trying to capture is very different from what most people assume... The Scream was made by Edvard Munch in 1893. At first glance, it appears to show someone screaming in terror. But a closer look at those hands tells a very different story. They’re pressed against the ears, and the face almost looks like it’s trying to block something out. And Munch’s original title gives us a clue as to what that something might be. In German, he called it Der Schrei der Natur — The Scream of Nature. The scream isn’t coming from him. It’s coming from the world around him. He’s just the only one who can hear it... He described exactly where it came from in a diary entry that is one of the most haunting things an artist ever wrote about his own work: "I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun was setting. Suddenly the sky turned blood red. I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence. There was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city. My friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety. And I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature." That is the real subject of the painting: not a monster, not a nightmare, but a moment many people know, when the ordinary world suddenly turns strange and hostile, and a wave of dread rolls through everything, and you feel utterly alone in it because the people beside you feel nothing. Munch was painting the sensation of anxiety itself. And there is one more thing, a secret hidden in the paint for over a century. In the top left corner, in tiny pencil letters, someone had written in Norwegian, "Could only have been painted by a madman." For a hundred years no one knew who. In 2021 the National Museum of Norway used infrared scanning and compared the handwriting to Munch's diaries and letters, and confirmed it was Munch himself. He wrote it on his own masterpiece, most likely a bitter, wounded answer to those who had dismissed him as insane. Munch spent his whole life turning that inner darkness into art, and he said plainly what he was really painting all along: he called it "the study of the soul."

This looks like a photograph. It's not. It's an oil painting made in 1883 by Peder Mørk Mønsted. It's called The Woodland Glade. Sunlight pours down through a high forest canopy and scatters across the ground in a thousand shifting patches of gold and shadow, each one placed with a precision that hardly seems possible for a human hand. In his own day Mønsted was celebrated for exactly this. He was admired enough to travel the world and, in 1893, to be received as a personal guest of King George I of Greece, a king who had himself been born a Danish prince, painting the royal family and the countryside there. But Mønsted had two misfortunes: he painted landscapes rather than important people, and he did it just as the art world was falling out of love with this kind of realism, deciding that all that loving exactitude had had its day. So his name slipped almost entirely out of art history. And yet his paintings never stopped being loved: they circulate endlessly online, reposted by people who fall for a sunlit forest and, most of the time, have no idea who made it. The man has been forgotten, but the light he captured never has. Leonardo da Vinci once said it best: "A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not."