He himself was once convicted of painting erotica and jailed for 24 days -- the first three of which he spent desperately trying to make paintings on the wall with his own spittle.

The paintings, drawings, prints, and illustrations all reflect the manners, costumes, and mores of America in the first half of the present century.

While Renaissance artists sought nature to find their style, the Mannerists looked first for a style and found a manner. In Mannerist paintings, compositions can have no focal point, space can be ambiguous, figures can be characterized by an athletic bending and twisting with distortions, exaggerations, an elastic elongation of the limbs, bizarre posturing on one hand, graceful posturing on the other hand, and a rendering of the heads as uniformly small and oval.

Cuyp probably first encountered a painting by van Goyen in 1640 when van Goyen was, as Stephen Reiss points out “ at the height of powers .” This is noticeable in the comparison between two of Cuyp ’ s landscape paintings inscribed 1639 where no properly formed style is apparent and the landscape backgrounds he painted two years later for two of his father ’ s group portraits that are distinctly van Goyenesque.

Morisot's first appearance in the Salon de Paris came at the age of twenty-three in 1864, with the acceptance of two landscape paintings.

At the Salon of 1759 he exhibited nine paintings ; it was the first Salon to be commented upon by Denis Diderot, who would prove to be a great admirer and public champion of Chardin's work.

He had first come up with the idea when he developed a wish to see his paintings move, and he subsequently began discussing the idea of creating an animation with an artist named Bruce Samuelson.

Later, while explaining his developing " Grecian style " for paintings such as The Intervention of the Sabine Women, David further commented on a shift in attitude: " In all human activity the violent and transitory develops first ; repose and profundity appear last.

During his four years in Berlin, Munch sketched out most of the ideas that would comprise his major work, The Frieze of Life, first designed for book illustration but later expressed in paintings.

The later Chola paintings were discovered in 1931 within the circumambulatory passage of the Brihadisvara Temple in India and are the first Chola specimens discovered.

In Denmark too, church wall paintings or kalkmalerier were widely used in the Middle Ages ( first Romanesque then Gothic ) and can be seen in some 600 Danish churches as well as in churches in the south of Sweden which was Danish at the time.

Some people credit the band Bauhaus ' first single " Bela Lugosi's Dead ", released August 1979, with the start of the goth subculture, though many prior art house movements influenced gothic fashion and style, the illustrations and paintings of Swiss artist, H. R. Giger being one of the earliest.

He studied interior and industrial design at the School of Commercial Art in Zurich ( from 1962 to 1965 ) and made his first paintings as a means of art therapy.

From 1760 onwards the British Society of Artists, the first body to organize regular exhibitions in London, awarded two generous prizes each year to paintings of subjects from British history.

About Miro, he confided to his art adviser and friend Pierre Sterckx that he felt a shock the first time he saw one of his paintings.

For example, Joseph Goering of the University of Toronto has identified sources for Grail imagery in 12th century wall paintings from churches in the Catalan Pyrenees ( now mostly removed to the Museu Nacional d ' Art de Catalunya, Barcelona ), which present unique iconic images of the Virgin Mary holding a bowl that radiates tongues of fire, images that predate the first literary account by Chrétien de Troyes.

It is in a context attributed to the 5th century that the first mention of an image of Mary painted from life appears, though earlier paintings on cave walls bear resemblance to modern icons of Mary.

At that year's Salon, he exhibited Haymakers and The Sower, his first major masterpiece and the earliest of the iconic trio of paintings that would include The Gleaners and The Angelus.

In 1948 and 1949 Noland worked with Ossip Zadkine in Paris, and had his first exhibition of his paintings there.

In 1957 he had the first solo exhibition of his paintings in New York at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery and he had the final solo exhibition of his lifetime-Kenneth Noland Shaped Paintings 1981-82, which opened Oct 29 2009 at the Leslie Feely Fine Art Gallery on E. 68th St. in New York City and was scheduled to close January 9, 2010, though, the closing date was later extended to January 16.

French and Northern European works are in the Richelieu wing and Cour Carrée ; Spanish and Italian paintings are on the first floor of the Denon wing.

Gilliam also worked on the matte paintings, useful in particular for the very first shot of the three wise men against a starscape and in giving the illusion of the whole of the outside of the fortress being covered in graffiti.

He had a very successful exhibition of paintings at the Calmann Gallery in London in 1938 and his first book, the self-illustrated children's pirate romance Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor ( based on a story he had written around 1936 ) was first published in 1939 by Country Life.

These " modernist " landmarks include the atonal ending of Arnold Schoenberg's Second String Quartet in 1908, the expressionist paintings of Wassily Kandinsky starting in 1903 and culminating with his first abstract painting and the founding of the Blue Rider group in Munich in 1911, and the rise of fauvism and the inventions of cubism from the studios of Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and others in the years between 1900 and 1910.

The years 1812 and 1813 saw him in Germany and France again, but on this visit to Berlin he did not seek out the philosophers as he had on his first journey.

In the first half of the 20th century the Olympic Winter Games were held three times in Alpine venues: the 1924 Winter Olympics in Chamonix, France ; the 1928 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz, Switzerland ; and the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany.

The first regular auto racing venue was Nice, France, run in late March, 1897, as a " Speed Week.

New History in France: The Triumph of the Annales, ( 1994, first French edition, 1987 ) excerpt and text search

* 1908 – Wilbur Wright makes his first flight at a racecourse at Le Mans, France.

* 1893 – France becomes the first country to introduce motor vehicle registration.

* 1908 – Fantasmagorie, the first animated cartoon, created by Émile Cohl, is shown in Paris, France.

* 1978 – Double Eagle II becomes first balloon to cross the Atlantic Ocean when it lands in Miserey, France near Paris, 137 hours after leaving Presque Isle, Maine.

* 1944 – Alençon is liberated by General Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque, the first city in France to be liberated from the Nazis by French forces.

* 1875 – Captain Matthew Webb became the first person to swim across the English Channel, traveling from Dover, England, to Calais, France, in 22 hours.

He led two embassies to the Mongols: the first carried letters from Pope Innocent IV and the second bore gifts and letters from Louis IX of France to Güyük Khan.

In 1769, he worked on the first geological map of France.

In 1939 Grothendieck went to France and lived in various camps for displaced persons with his mother, first at the Camp de Rieucros, and subsequently lived for the remainder of the war in the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, where he was sheltered and hidden in local boarding-houses or pensions.

The U. S. Army brought truck-towed Bofors 40 mm AA guns along with truck-mounted units fitted with mechanized turrets when they sailed, first for Great Britain and then onto France.

* 2005 – The superjumbo jet aircraft Airbus A380 makes its first flight from Toulouse, France.

* 1809 – Two Austrian army corps are driven from Landshut by a First French Empire army led by Napoleon I of France as two French corps to the north hold off the main Austrian army on the first day of the Battle of Eckmühl.

Unlike France or Germany, there are no special administrative courts of first instance in the Netherlands, but regular courts have an administrative " chamber " which specializes in administrative appeals.

The first Baron was Hamelin de Balun, from Ballon, a small town and castle in Maine-Anjou called " Gateway to Maine ", near Le Mans, today in the Sarthe département of France.

Around the same time, in France, Charles-Louis Havas extended the services of his news agency, Havas to include advertisement brokerage, making it the first French group to organize.

Anaïs Nin (; born Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell, February 21, 1903 – January 14, 1977 ) was a French-Cuban author, based at first in France and later in the United States, who published her journals, which span more than 60 years, beginning when she was 11 years old and ending shortly before her death, her erotic literature, and short stories.

Her father's grandfather had fled France during the Revolution, going first to Saint-Domingue, then New Orleans, and finally to Cuba where he helped build that country's first railway.

The Pals ' first day of action, Saturday 1 July 1916, took place in Serre in the north of France.

It was first performed in France in 1894.

Bauxite was named after the village Les Baux in southern France, where it was first recognised as containing aluminium and named by the French geologist Pierre Berthier in 1821.