ARTISTS

There are lots of stories told about famous artists, some amusing, some sad — we tell you three of those stories here.

Picasso’s paintings do not seem realistic at all, but when Picasso was a poor student in Paris, he painted life-size pictures of furniture on the bare walls of his room. These paintings looked so real that his landlord had to touch the walls to convince himself that it was not actually furniture that he was seeing!

The students of Rembrandt fooled him by painting a silver coin on his studio floor. Seeing the coin, Rembrandt bent down to pick it up.It was only when he heard his students laughing that he realized a joke had been played on him.

Whistler had great fun painting flies on window painting panes and mirrors and then watching people trying to swat them. But one of his jokes had a sad ending.A patron of his lent him a house to spend a holiday. The walls were covered with very expensive morocco leather, but undeterred by this, Whistler proceeded to paint life-size peacocks on them.When the owner saw the state of his walls, he was so aghast that he had a heart attack and died.