Paul Delaroche, The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1834)
When you first look at The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, you might not even notice the executioner. That’s what’s so striking about it.
This isn’t a painting about violence—it’s a painting about the moment just before violence. It’s about innocence, fragility, and the unbearable stillness that comes right before something terrible happens.
Lady Jane, known to history as the “Nine Days’ Queen,” was only 17 years old when she was executed in 1554. She had been caught in the crosshairs of Tudor power struggles—a Protestant pawn briefly placed on the throne after the death of Edward VI, only to be swept aside when Mary I claimed it. She didn’t seek power. She didn’t even want the crown. But she paid for it with her life.
Delaroche paints that history not as grandeur or political theater, but as something devastatingly human.
Jane is dressed in white—a visual metaphor for her innocence—but the dress also makes her seem ghostly, almost pre-emptively gone. She is blindfolded, reaching blindly for the execution block, her arms searching for something solid in a moment where nothing in her life is stable. Behind her, two maids weep into rich, red fabric. The color contrast is striking: Jane is light, ethereal, almost glowing. Everything else—curtains, stone, shadow—is heavy, dark, and inevitable.
Delaroche wasn’t trying to create a strict historical document. In fact, the execution didn’t look like this at all. But that’s not really the point. Like a filmmaker working with historical fiction, Delaroche stages this moment to evoke feeling. The painting is emotionally accurate, even if it’s not factually precise.
And what a feeling it is. There’s no gore, no movement, no clear climax—just dread, tenderness, and tragedy suspended in oil and canvas.
There’s also something radical about how Delaroche centers Jane—not as a footnote, not as a victim, but as the emotional and moral core of this story. In a time when most historical painting still focused on great men and dramatic battles, The Execution of Lady Jane Grey asked viewers to linger on vulnerability. To empathize with a girl lost to history.
It’s a painting that doesn’t raise its voice. It just breaks your heart.
Salvador Dalí’s The Ascension of Christ (1958)
What does it mean to witness something sacred from below?
In The Ascension of Christ (1958), Salvador Dalí invites us to see the divine from a disorienting vantage point: Christ’s feet are the focal point, suspended mid-air, toes pointed downward as he rises not into the clouds—but into a swirl of light and cosmic energy. No angels. No trumpets. Just motion, space, and the dizzying mystery of the unknown.
Dalí painted this during his self-declared period of “nuclear mysticism,” a time in the 1950s when he became obsessed with the possibility of uniting science and spirituality. After years of Surrealist rebellion and personal chaos, Dalí returned to the Catholicism of his youth—but he didn’t return quietly. He returned through the lens of atomic theory, believing that the structures of the universe and the soul might somehow mirror each other.
You can see that influence all over this painting: the spiral that Christ ascends into is modeled after the structure of a hydrogen atom. Dalí believed the spiral was a divine shape—a symbol of both scientific precision and spiritual infinity. In a way, this painting is a theological hypothesis: that divinity might be embedded in the very fabric of the cosmos, that matter and spirit aren’t opposites but companions.
Also fascinating: the eyes at the top of the painting belong to Gala, Dalí’s wife and muse. He saw her as his guide to the divine—his connection to both eros and eternity. Her presence here isn’t accidental. She’s not a saint or angel in this context—she’s a watcher. An anchor. A witness to transcendence.
And Dalí’s own fingerprints—metaphorically, if not literally—are all over the composition. The entire painting is viewed from below because, according to Dalí, he wanted to paint it from “the perspective of God.” In typical Dalí fashion, it’s both profoundly reverent and incredibly audacious. He wasn’t just showing the viewer Christ’s ascension—he was trying to stage the viewer in God’s position, watching it unfold.
What’s so striking to me about this piece is that it doesn’t resolve. There’s no clear narrative. We don’t see where Christ came from, or where he’s going. We only see the moment of departure. And it makes you wonder—what does it feel like to leave? To ascend? To let go of what’s behind without knowing exactly what’s ahead?
For Dalí, that tension—between the known and the unknowable, the physical and the metaphysical—was where the real art lived. And The Ascension of Christ doesn’t give us an answer. It gives us a moment. A question. A spiral.
And maybe that’s more honest than any explanation could ever be.
Sandro Botticelli, Primavera (c. 1482)
Let’s begin with this: Primavera is a painting that doesn’t explain itself. It doesn’t offer an obvious story, and Botticelli doesn’t spoon-feed us a clear narrative. What we get instead is an invitation—into a forest glade that feels both impossibly distant and uncannily familiar, like a dream you’re sure you’ve had before.
Painted during the height of the Italian Renaissance, Primavera is often read as a kind of visual love letter to classical mythology. We see Mercury brushing away clouds on the far left. The Three Graces dance in a delicate circle, light as air. Venus stands calmly at the center, an anchor of order and grace. On the right, Zephyrus—the god of wind—abducts the nymph Chloris, who transforms into Flora, the goddess of spring, scattering flowers with every step.
But here’s what I find most captivating: this isn’t a mythological scene in the narrative sense. It’s a mood. A climate. A state of being. Botticelli isn’t illustrating a single moment—he’s evoking the sensation of renewal, beauty, and seasonal transformation. It’s called Primavera—“spring”—for a reason. This isn’t a painting you decode. It’s one you feel.
And when you stand in front of it (it’s huge, nearly 7 feet wide), what you feel is this overwhelming gentleness. There’s so much movement, and yet everything feels still—like time has been suspended at the exact moment life begins to bloom again. Botticelli’s lines are impossibly graceful. The color palette is soft but vivid. The way Flora’s gown flows across the canvas… it feels alive.
The painting was likely commissioned by a member of the Medici family, and it’s full of Neoplatonic symbolism—an attempt to unite physical beauty and divine love, the earthly and the eternal. Renaissance thinkers saw no contradiction between mythology, philosophy, and spirituality—they saw them as different paths to the same truth. Botticelli paints that idea, not with grand gestures, but with almost unbearable delicacy.
What’s fascinating, too, is that Botticelli faded into obscurity after his death. His work was considered old-fashioned, overly linear, too emotionally subtle for the dramatic turns of later art. Primavera was almost forgotten. And then, centuries later, it was rediscovered—not just as a technical masterpiece, but as something emotionally complex. Quiet. Evocative. Not easy to pin down.
Just like spring itself.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880–81)
There’s a particular kind of magic in Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party. You don’t just look at it—you enter it. The scene hums with life: sunlight spills across white tablecloths, wine glasses glint, laughter seems just a breath away. It’s a painting that makes you want to pull up a chair and become part of whatever conversation is happening just out of earshot.
Painted in the early 1880s, this work captures a moment of joyful leisure among friends on the balcony of the Maison Fournaise, a popular riverside restaurant in Chatou, just outside of Paris. Renoir was painting his world—his real friends, real afternoons, real conversations. That’s not just any woman at the center cradling a small dog; that’s Aline Charigot, who would later become his wife. The man leaning over the balcony in a straw hat? That’s Gustave Caillebotte, fellow painter and art patron. These weren’t anonymous figures—they were his people.
And maybe that’s what makes this painting feel so alive. Renoir isn’t composing a formal group portrait. He’s capturing the flow of a real afternoon: the mix of flirtation, fatigue, and idle pleasure that defines long, lazy meals with friends. The table is messy, drinks are mid-pour, people are mid-sentence. Nothing is staged. Everything is in motion.
The painting is also a quiet manifesto for Impressionism itself. Rather than crisp lines and dramatic stories, we get loose brushwork, glowing light, and the celebration of a fleeting moment. Renoir was interested in the atmosphere more than the details. He wanted to show how light hits a shoulder, how fabric folds in the sun, how joy can exist in the ordinary.
But underneath the beauty, there’s something else, too—something tender. This painting was completed during a time of great uncertainty for Renoir. The Impressionists were still struggling for recognition, and Renoir himself was grappling with where he fit in, both artistically and personally. And yet, in this work, he paints a kind of hope: that friendship and art and shared moments might just be enough.
Luncheon of the Boating Party doesn’t ask big philosophical questions. It doesn’t wrestle with myth or power. It simply offers a chair, a drink, and a little sunlight. And sometimes, that’s exactly what we need.
Rembrandt, The Return of the Prodigal Son (c. 1667–1669)
There are some paintings that don’t shout for your attention—they wait quietly until you’re ready to be undone by them. The Return of the Prodigal Son is one of those paintings.
Based on the parable from the Gospel of Luke, this work shows the moment a wayward son returns home after squandering his inheritance in reckless living. He’s come back in rags, barefoot, exhausted. And instead of judgment, he’s met with something softer, something far more difficult: unconditional love.
Rembrandt painted this late in his life, after losing his wife, his children, his fortune, and much of his public standing. This isn’t just a biblical illustration—it’s a personal reckoning. You can feel it in the father’s hands, resting so gently on his son’s back. One hand is broad and strong; the other, thinner, more delicate—almost like a mother’s. Scholars have noticed this detail and wondered: Is this Rembrandt’s way of showing that divine love contains both strength and tenderness? Justice and mercy?
The composition is simple, but the emotional architecture is immense. Look closely: the father leans forward slightly, his eyes closed, resting his cheek on his son’s shaved head. He’s not just forgiving him—he’s absorbing his shame, too. It’s not theatrical. It’s quiet. Which somehow makes it feel even more powerful.
And then there’s the older brother, standing off to the side in shadow, upright and untouched. He’s watching. Judging. Unmoved. Maybe even confused. It’s easy to overlook him, but Rembrandt doesn’t let us. He reminds us that there’s more than one way to be lost—and more than one kind of homecoming that needs to happen.
This painting isn’t about who was right or wrong. It’s not about rules. It’s about relationship. About what happens when love is bigger than failure. About what it means to return to someone who never stopped waiting for you—even when you thought you had nothing left to offer.
And if you’ve ever felt like the prodigal, or the parent, or even the bitter onlooker in the corner—this painting meets you exactly where you are.
