A metal tube changed what painting could look like
Until the 1840s, paint would not keep. An artist or an apprentice ground pigment with oil each morning and stored what was left in a pig's bladder tied with string, which leaked, dried out and could not be carried anywhere. Serious painting happened indoors, from sketches.
Then an American portraitist patented the collapsible metal tube, and paint became something you could put in a bag and take to a riverbank. Within thirty years MONET, RENOIR, DEGAS and MANET were working outdoors in front of the thing they were painting, chasing the light before it moved. Renoir said flatly that without tubes of paint there would have been no Impressionism.
Impressionism started as an insult
In 1874 a group of painters rejected by the official Paris Salon put on their own show. A critic named Louis Leroy went along, saw Monet's *Impression, Sunrise*, and wrote a savage review built around the joke that wallpaper in its earliest state was more finished than that seascape.
The name stuck because the painters took it. This is a recurring move in art history — the artists adopt the sneer and it becomes the label in every textbook afterwards. What the critics were reacting to was real, though: the pictures really were unfinished by the standards of the time, because they had been painted fast, outdoors, in one sitting, using the new tubes.
Somebody has to build the reputation
The story that Van Gogh sold only one painting and died unknown is close to true but not the useful part. He was starting to attract serious notice in the months before his death in 1890, and what happened next was mostly the work of one person: Jo van Gogh-Bonger, his brother Theo's widow, who inherited hundreds of canvases and a suitcase of letters when Theo died six months later.
She was advised to get rid of them; one dealer suggested she would never shift them. Instead she spent the rest of her life placing paintings in exhibitions, building relationships with dealers and critics, and translating and publishing the letters — which is what turned a painter into a story people wanted to hear. Reputations do not simply happen to the deserving. Somebody usually spends decades on them.
The painting that destroyed itself and doubled in value
In October 2018 a framed BANKSY print sold at Sotheby's for just over a million pounds. The instant the hammer fell, a shredder hidden in the frame started up and the canvas slid halfway through it in front of the room. The artist had built it in years earlier and waited.
The protest did not work. The half-shredded object was renamed *Love is in the Bin*, the buyer kept it, and in 2021 it sold again for £18.6 million — eighteen times the price of the intact print. The rest of the grid spans six centuries of people making objects that other people later decided to put a price on: DAVINCI, RAPHAEL, VERMEER, REMBRANDT, RUBENS and GOYA; TURNER, CEZANNE, KLIMT and MUNCH; HOKUSAI, CASSATT, MATISSE, PICASSO, KAHLO, DALI, POLLOCK, WARHOL and VANGOGH.