? ? ?The Night Watch · 1642
? ? ?Girl with a Pearl Earring · 1665
? ? ?The Starry Night · 1889
? ? ?The Garden of Earthly Delights · about 1500
? ? ?Laughing Cavalier · 1624
? ? ?The Feast of Saint Nicholas · about 1668
? ? ?Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede · about 1670
? ? ?The Goldfinch · 1654
? ? ?A Winter Scene with Skaters near a Castle · about 1608
? ? ?Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow · 1930
Photo credits
- Every painting is in the public domain. The images are Wikimedia Commons reproductions.
Rules & what counts
Dutch Painters Quiz: Rules & What Counts
The Netherlands produced some of the most famous paintings in the world. This quiz shows 10 Dutch masterpieces, and you name the painter of each one.
Each card shows the painting with its title and year. The question is never which painting this is. The question is always who painted it.
Most players land Rembrandt, Vermeer and Van Gogh. The run-killers are Avercamp's skaters and Fabritius's goldfinch.
How to play
- Just start typing. The quiz checks your answer at every keystroke. There is no submit button.
- The surname alone works for every card: "rembrandt", "bosch" and "hals" each solve a painting.
- Dutch spellings count: "Mondriaan" solves Mondrian, and "Jheronimus Bosch" solves Bosch. Accents and capitals are optional.
- A great painter who is not on the board clears the input: a guess at Rubens or Escher registers as wrong and resets the bar.
- The timer starts at your first keystroke and counts up. Give Up ends the run and shows every painting you missed. Progress saves automatically.
What counts in this quiz
- Ten painters of the Northern Netherlands, one painting each, from Bosch around 1500 to Mondrian in 1930.
- The set spans the Golden Age and beyond: Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, Steen, Ruisdael, Fabritius and Avercamp, then Van Gogh and Mondrian.
- Every painting is in the public domain, and the images are Wikimedia Commons reproductions.
What's not included, and why
- The Flemish masters have no card. Rubens, Bruegel, Van Eyck and Van Dyck painted in the Southern Netherlands, today's Belgium.
- Escher has no card. He made prints, not paintings.
- Pieter de Hooch and Judith Leyster have no card. Ten slots do not fit every Golden Age master, and both are recognised wrong answers.
Good to know
- The Night Watch shows a day scene. Dark varnish earned it the wrong name in the 1700s.
- Girl with a Pearl Earring is not a portrait of a known person. It is a tronie, a study of a face and a costume.
- Van Gogh painted The Starry Night from his asylum room in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in 1889.
- Fabritius died at 32 in the Delft gunpowder explosion of 1654, the year he painted The Goldfinch.
- Mondrian's grids grew out of trees. His early paintings are Dutch landscapes, windmills included.