With the world in enforced isolation, video software has become more important than ever. Conferencing apps like Zoom are a lifeline to people in lockdown. For many of us, they are the only way to see our loved ones face to face, as well as a tool for work and education.

But not everyone has managed to get their head around this new technology. Middle-aged technophobes keep accidentally turning on novelty filters. People are bad-mouthing each other without realizing that everyone can hear them. And politicians have an unfortunate habit of turning up for important meetings with no clothes on. More than a year since the start of the pandemic, the Zoom mishaps show no sign of slowing down. These are ten of the most embarrassing.

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10 Naked Meeting With Brazilian President

For many of us, it is the ultimate anxiety dream. You turn up for work only to realize you are completely naked. Everything is hanging out for all of your colleagues to see. Luckily for most of us, it is nothing more than an embarrassing nightmare. But for one businessman, this actually happened. And the president of Brazil was watching.

The man appeared completely nude in an online meeting with Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. Bizarrely, he decided to take a shower in the middle of the conference and accidentally left his camera on.

Paulo Skaf, an entrepreneur from São Paulo, organized the meeting for a discussion about industry. But, after spotting that one of the attendees was in his birthday suit, the president interjected, “Paulo, there’s a colleague there in the last little square. He left. Is he OK?”

Paolo Guedes, the Minister of Industry, then explained, “There is a guy having a shower there, naked.”

“Unfortunately we saw,” the president acknowledged. “It was a shaky picture but we saw.”

9 Boss Turns Herself Into A Potato

One Monday morning, workers in Washington DC logged into an online meeting to find their boss had turned herself into a potato. Lizet Ocampo had accidentally installed a filter that made her look like a spud. Her face was completely gone, replaced by an image of a potato in the soil with only her eyes and mouth visible.

As soon as they saw the potato-headed executive, everyone in the meeting burst into fits of giggles. Ocampo, a national director at People For The American Way, was bewildered by her tuberous appearance. She tried to turn the filter off, but it was no good. In the end, Ocampo decided to keep her spud-faced visage, much to the amusement of her colleagues. According to employee Rachele Clegg, who posted footage of her boss’ mishap on Twitter, the laughter lasted for a good ten minutes.

8 Irish Politician Forgets His Pants

In June 2020, Irish MEP Luke “Ming” Flanagan tuned into a European parliament meeting without wearing any pants. The Roscommon politician had just returned from a run. He threw a shirt on so that he was smartly dressed from the waist up and believed that his bottom half was off-camera. But, unknown to him, he was filming himself in portrait mode instead of landscape. Flanagan’s Continental colleagues tried to suppress their laughter as the MEP flaunted his bare legs during a discussion on agriculture policy.

Flanagan, an independent left-winger, is nicknamed Ming after the Flash Gordon character Ming The Merciless. Although, after his legwear fiasco, social media users have suggested he should be renamed Ming The Trouserless. Flanagan seems to have taken all of the ribbing in good humor. “Who could have known that my legs would be so popular? Should I get them insured?”

7 Half-Dressed Parents Get High During Their Kids’ Classes

Imagine the sight. You are getting ready for your first online class only to spot your classmate’s mom walking by in her underwear smoking a joint. Under lockdown, teachers are struggling to deal with some parents’ behavior in their remote lessons.

One Florida teacher used a school board meeting to issue a warning to the half-dressed moms and dads popping up in her online classes. Edith Pride of Boca Raton Elementary encouraged parents to put some clothes on and hide the marijuana while their kids are on Zoom.

“Parents, when you are helping your children at their computer, please do not appear with big joints in your hands and cigarettes,” Pride advised. “Those joints be as big as cigars. Oh yeah, we’ve seen it all.”

6 Lecturers Mouth Off About Student Presentations

When on Zoom, always check who can hear you before you start making rude comments. Two college lecturers found themselves in hot water after inadvertently broadcasting a stream of insults to their students.

The business lecturers were assessing student presentations at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology in Ireland. Neither was impressed by what they saw. After they thought the students had left the virtual meeting, the lecturers started venting about the quality of work. The pair described one student’s presentation as so painful it was like having their teeth drilled. Another, they said, was so slow it made them wonder if she was disabled.

But the lecturers’ private conversation was a lot more public than they thought. The pair failed to notice that the students were still connected to the Zoom call. Every word of their insults was broadcast live to the class. One of the students recorded their exchange and, after uploading it to social media, the college duly apologized.

5 Mexican Politician Skives Off Work Badly

Some people will try and find any excuse to sneak out of work. In September 2020, Mexican politician Valentina Batres Guadarrama was caught slyly dropping out of a Zoom meeting. The congresswoman had put up a photo of herself to feign attendance, then quietly edged out of the meeting.

But this was not the inconspicuous exit Guadarrama had hoped for. In a video of the meeting, she can be using Zoom’s background function to put up an image of herself then walking out of the meeting. After her less than discreet departure, Guadarrama’s baffled colleagues occasionally caught sight of her arm reaching over the webcam.

Jorge Gavino from Mexico’s Democratic Revolutionary Party shared the footage online, where it received over 70,000 views. “I was thinking you were paying a lot of attention to my speech,” he sassed, “until I realized that your attentive look was a photograph.”

Guadarrama denies playing truant from the meeting. She claims she put up the background by mistake and then dipped out to ask for technical help.

4 Congressman Flips Himself Upside Down

Sometimes, Zoom filters are more trouble than they are worth. In February 2021, US congressman Tom Emmer appeared in a video call with his face the wrong way round.

The Minnesota politician attended an online House of Representatives committee meeting with a filter accidentally installed. He planned to deliver a speech on job security, but his colleagues seemed distracted by his upended head. Attendees tried to hold in their laughter. “You’re upside down, Tom,” someone kindly pointed out. One person wondered whether his topsy-turvy appearance was a metaphor for the current state of the world.

Luckily, all Emmer had to do was turn his device off and on again, and he was back the right way round. If only all political issues were that easy to fix.

3 Californian School Board Bad-Mouths Parents

A school board in Northern California was caught ranting about parents after failing to realize that they were in a public Zoom meeting. The Oakley Union Elementary School committee was overheard venting about the number of complaints they had received about the school’s closure. But the group was unaware that their callous comments were being streamed live to the public.

The board accused parents of treating the school staff like babysitters, and claimed that some only want their children back in school so they can get high at home. “My brother had a delivery service for medical marijuana, and his clientele were parents with their kids at school,” they joked.

At one point, one board member went on a profanity-full rant about a parent who had criticized her on social media. “Bitch, if you’re going to call me out, I’m going to fuck you up,” she said to the laughter of her peers.

But their laughter soon turned to looks of horror when the group discovered that they were broadcasting to the public.

An NBC reporter posted footage of the meeting on social media, leading to an online petition calling for their removal. In the end, the whole board resigned.

2 Mexican Senator Goes Topless

In May 2020, a lawmaker in Mexico messed up when she joined a government Zoom meeting topless. Martha Lucía Mícher Camarena did not realize that her camera was recording when she bared her upper body during a discussion about the economy. The senator had taken her top off to get changed. The other attendees soon alerted Camarena to her slip-up, and she apologized to everybody watching.

However, the politician said she refused to be ashamed of her exposed body. “I am a woman of 66 years of age,” she wrote on Twitter, “who has breastfed four children, three of whom are today professional and responsible men, and I feel proud of my body for having nourished them.” Several of Camarena’s colleagues supported her stance, calling her an “exemplary woman.” Instead, they criticized the people who spread images of her mishap on social media.

1 Filipino Chief Caught Sleeping With Treasurer

Perhaps the worst thing you can be caught doing on Zoom is sleeping with someone. A government official in the Philippines accidentally live-streamed himself having sex with his treasurer during a video conference.

Fatima Dos village council chief Jesus Estil was discussing the pandemic with other local officials. In the middle of the meeting, he muted himself and, believing that he was hidden, began making love to his staff member. When the pair had finished, Estil slips back into the meeting as if nothing happened, unaware that he had just broadcast himself in the act.

Estil’s steamy mishap was recorded by another attendee. Both officials have resigned from their posts.

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When the Mona Lisa was stolen by a museum worker back in 1911, the global attention it got turned it into one of the most famous works of art in history. While it was recovered barely two years later, many other masterpieces by renowned artists remain missing to this day. Quite a few of them were taken during one particularly-famous heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990, when art thieves made off with paintings valued at over $500 million. 

10. Landscape With An Obelisk, Govert Flinck

Originally thought to be a Rembrandt, Landscape with an Obelisk is actually an artwork by the Dutch artist Govert Flinck. It’s an oil painting on wood measuring 21 by 28 inches, portraying a stormy landscape with an obelisk, a fallen tree trunk, and a miniature man on horseback. 

This artwork gained global popularity when it was stolen – along with several other pieces – during Boston’s infamous Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist in 1990. Two men disguised as policemen managed to break the museum’s security, overpowered the guards, and stole 13 artworks, including Landscape with an Obelisk. The will of the museum’s founder demanded that the hanging order of the pictures in the museum remains unchanged, which is why one can still see the empty frame that once housed the masterpiece. 

9. Just Judges, Jan Van Eyck

The Ghent Altarpiece is a set of panels created by Jan Van Eyck and his brother Hubert. One of them, the Just Judges panel, has been missing since 1934, thanks to a heist at the St. Bavo’s Cathedral where it was originally placed.

The crime was discovered by a sexton at the Cathedral, who was the first person to notice the missing panels. The thieves had forced the chapel’s door and removed the panels by dismantling their iron hinges, complete with a note that claimed that the theft was revenge for the WW1 Treaty of Versailles.

The police investigation initially revealed little, except the fact that the thief operated under the alias D.U.A. It got a bit more interesting when a ransom demand of one million Belgian francs was sent to the bishop of Ghent, though it was later found to be a diversion. While negotiations with D.U.A. led to the return of the other missing panel, John the Baptist, the Just Judges panel remains stolen and missing even today. 

8. Storm On The Sea of Galilee, Rembrandt

In 1990, Rembrandt’s 1633 masterpiece, The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, was another masterpiece stolen during the heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. As we mentioned above, it was one of the largest art heists in US history, when two people posing as police officers gained entry to the museum, immobilized the security staff, and made off with 13 known artworks. 

The thieves took many measures to seize these works, first cutting them from their frames and then removing them from the walls like professionals. Despite extensive investigations by the FBI and a $5 million reward offered for leads, the painting remains missing to this day. One theory suggests that local mobsters were behind the heist and wanted to sell the artworks on the black market. Till now, however, law enforcement agencies have explored more than 30,000 leads to little success. 

7. Poppy Flowers, Van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh’s Poppy Flowers – also sometimes referred to as Vase and Flowers – has been stolen more than once in history, and it remains missing to this day. Created in 1887, it depicts vibrant yellow flowers with red blooms contrasted against a dark background. After the artist’s death, the masterpiece made its way from Paris to Cairo, where it became a part of the prestigious Mohamed Khalil Museum collection.

The first theft occurred in 1977 when it was moved between palaces, with little information about the culprits, though it was eventually recovered in Kuwait. Poppy Flowers was stolen again in August, 2010, when the thief – or thieves – managed to cut it from its frame unnoticed in broad daylight. The heist exposed many glaring problems with the museum’s safety mechanisms, as only a fraction of the security cameras were operational at the time, with all of its alarms inactive. With a current estimated value of around $50 million, the painting’s current whereabouts remain unknown.

6. View Of Auvers-sur-Oise, Cézanne

Now valued at about $5.5 million AUD, View of Auvers-sur-Oise by Paul Cézanne was stolen from the Ashmolean Museum on December 31, 1999. It was taken during New Year’s Eve celebrations in Oxford, as the thieves took advantage of the festivities to break into the museum. They climbed the scaffolding around the museum’s library extensions, broke a skylight, and deployed a smoke bomb to block the security cameras, as they removed the painting from its frame and escaped using a rope ladder. Although the alarms worked well enough, security guards initially thought that they were caused by a fire and not theft. 

View of Auvers-sur-Oise was the museum’s only Cézanne, and surprisingly, nothing else was stolen from the gallery, which also housed pieces by artists like Renoir, Rodin, and Toulouse-Lautrec. According to theories, the specific nature of this crime suggests that the painting was stolen on demand, as its fame and limited marketability would make selling it on any market almost possible. Despite extensive investigations by British and international art crime specialists, however, the painting remains missing even today.

5. Nativity With St. Francis And St. Lawrence, Caravaggio

Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence was painted by the Italian Baroque master Caravaggio in 1609. The artwork portrays an infant Christ on a bed of straw surrounded by saints and shepherds, along with an ox watching over him as an angel reaches down from heaven with a banner reading ‘Gloria’.

The painting was stolen from the Oratory of Saint Lawrence in Palermo, Sicily, on October 18, 1969. Despite extensive investigations and theories about its ultimate fate, the painting’s current location remains a mystery. It is now valued at around $20 million and is listed among the FBI’s top 10 art crimes of all time.

Over the years, many accounts and rumors about the painting have emerged around the world, ranging from being burned, abandoned, or cut into pieces. Some believe that it remains intact and hidden in Sicily, possibly being used as collateral in drug deals. 

4. Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud

While most people know about the renowned artists Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, not many are aware of their 25-years-long friendship that began in the mid-1940s. They lived and collaborated in the backdrop of London’s bohemian scene, and were known for regularly scrutinizing and criticizing each other’s works, despite their contrasting artistic styles.

Lucian Freud painted a portrait of Francis Bacon in 1952 on a small copper canvas, which was then stolen during an exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 1988. Despite Freud’s extensive efforts to find it, including a ‘Wanted’ poster campaign in Berlin, the painting remains missing to this day.

3. Danish Jubilee Egg, Peter Carl Fabergé

The Danish Jubilee Egg was one of the six missing Fabergé Imperial Easter eggs, originally created by Peter Carl Fabergé for the Russian royal family. They were commissioned as Easter gifts from Russian Tsars to their wives, and out of the 52 eggs Fabergé created, only 46 are accounted for today, with the remaining six still missing in the wild.

According to the only known description of the Danish Jubilee Egg, it was an ‘egg with blue and white enamel in gold mounted on columns with lions, and an elephant above; in the middle a screen with a portrait of the Danish King and Queen, applied with precious stones’. Crafted in 1903, it symbolized the highest order of the Danish Kingdom, and the stand within the egg held a two-sided portrait of the Danish King Christian IX and Queen Louise of Hesse-Kassel. It was last seen at the Gatchina Palace in July 1917, though its fate after the events of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia remains unknown.

2. Portrait Of A Young Man, Raphael

While we don’t have a precise date for its creation, Portrait of a Young Man was painted by the Renaissance master Raphael some time around 1513 and 1514. Once a part of the Princes Czartoryski Museum in Kraków, Poland – alongside masterpieces by Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt – It now remains missing for over 75 years thanks to the Nazis.

According to some theories, the masterpiece was taken by Hans Frank – the Nazi official in charge of the Polish General Government during the war – though it’s not clear if he kept it or sold it off to another private collection. Its value potentially exceeds $100 million in today’s money, making it one of the most valuable missing works of art in history. Till today, the frame it sat in at the Princes Czartoryski Museum remains empty as a tribute to the famous artwork.

1. The Concert, Vermeer

Easily the single most expensive missing work of art in history, Vermeer’s The Concert was another casualty of the infamous 1990 heist at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Painted by Johannes Vermeer sometime between 1663 and 1666, it was a classic example of Vermeer’s portrayal of domestic scenes during the social life of that era, depicting a sitting room with three figures engaged in creating music. 

The value of The Concert extends beyond its monetary worth, as it was also the first major work of art acquired by the museum’s founder, Isabella Stewart Gardner. The missing painting – valued at over $200 million in today’s currency – is still the subject of an ongoing FBI investigation. The Gardner Museum continues to offer a large reward in exchange for information leading to the recovery of all of its stolen artworks, including The Concert.

The narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1835 short story “Berenice” asks a disturbing question: “How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness?” What if the narrator had asked this question in reverse, as “How is it that from unloveliness I have derived a type of beauty?” How much more disturbing might have been the inquiry?

This list of 10 eerie works of art inspired by horrific events offers an answer to our question, and the answer is disturbing, indeed

Related: 10 Crazy Things That Make Us Love Or Hate Art

10 Ten Breaths: Tumbling Woman II by Eric Fischl

The “Tumbling Woman” part of the title of Eric Fischl’s bronze sculpture, Ten Breaths: Tumbling Woman II (2007-2008), seems self-explanatory. However, it poses several significant questions. Why is the tumbling woman naked? If she is a gymnast, why isn’t she clothed? Why are her earthen skin tones streaked with red-orange? Why is she tumbling? What accounts for her awkward landing on her head, neck, and upper left shoulder? Such questions indicate that there is more to Fischl’s portrait of the tumbling woman than meets the eye.

The mystery is solved once the context, the painting’s origin, is revealed. The text on the plaque that accompanies the statue reads: “We watched, disbelieving and helpless, on that savage day. People we love began falling, helpless and in disbelief.” “That savage day” was September 11, 2001, when al-Qaeda perpetrated a series of attacks against the United States.

In one of these attacks, the terrorists piloted two hijacked airplanes into the World Trade Center in New York City. As a result, some people leaped from the towers’ upper floors to avoid burning to death inside the buildings. As the Smithsonian American Art Museum points out, the sculpture’s depiction of “the vulnerability of the human body…takes on special significance in this tragic context.”^[1]

9 The Raft of the Medusa by Theodore Gericault

The pyramid of desperate human figures in Theodore Gericault’s oil painting The Raft of Medusa (1818-1819) calls attention to the pathos of their plight, as does the steep pitch of the approaching wave, the force of which can almost be felt. Some of the figures are clothed. Others are half-dressed. Still, others are naked. Their lack of attire suggests that their departure was headlong and sudden, underscoring the panic they felt as they’d piled onto the raft, a precarious perch amid tempestuous seas. Closer attention to the passengers suggests that one or two among them are dead or dying. In a corner of the planks, a body lies, supine and listless, its head back. Another lies half-on, half-off the raft, head underwater.

As Dr. Claire Black McCoy observes, the subject of the painting, which was exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1819 and is now displayed in the Louvre, would have been recognized by those who saw it in the Salon. The July 1816 event it depicts, which had recently appeared in the news, would become “a political scandal.” Officials aboard the French naval ship Medusa, including the governor of Senegal and his family, McCoy explains, were headed for the colony to secure its French possession and assure the continuation of the covert slave trade, even though France had officially abolished the practice. En route, the captain accidentally ran the ship aground on a sandbar off the coast of West Africa.

When the ship’s carpenter was unable to repair the damage, the governor, his family, and other high-ranking passengers boarded the six lifeboats. The remaining passengers—nearly 150—were left behind to fend for themselves aboard a raft the carpenter constructed from the ship’s masts. Of their number, fifteen were rescued, of whom only ten “survived to tell the tale of cannibalism, murder, and other horrors aboard the raft.”^[2]

8 Grey Day by George Grosz

At first glance, George Grosz’s art often suggests ordinary incidents of everyday life. However, the grotesquery of his portraits, a common feature of his work, hints that the occasions he depicts may involve more than is initially apparent. His post-World War I painting Grey Day (1921) is no exception. A worker carrying a shovel strides briskly past a factory and its smoking chimney, while a businessman walks toward the viewer, down a narrow sidewalk alongside a building.

Before them, but behind another figure, a grim, angular, scar-faced, one-armed veteran in uniform walks along, carrying a cane. There is a partially-constructed brick wall between him and the figure before him, a wealthy, cross-eyed man who struts past in the opposite direction. He wears an expensive suit and carries a briefcase and an L-shaped ruler. His tool suggests that he may be a carpenter engineer. Outwardly, he is a man of respectability. However, his crossed eyes and the scars on his egg-shaped head, implying, perhaps, that he is an “egghead,” suggest that he, too, has experienced violence personally.

According to an article by the Tate, the British art institution, Grosz’s painting “illustrates how the wealthy profited from war [while] the disabled and forgotten veteran was left poor and divided from society.” This is revealed by the partially-built wall indicating the separation of “the two groups.” The wall itself, the Tate article suggests, is ambiguous to the extent that “the viewer [must] decide whether this half-built wall is being constructed or brought down.”^[3]

7 Big Electric Chair by Andy Warhol

After their conviction for espionage against the United States, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were electrocuted on June 19, 1953. Although Julius succumbed quickly, dying after the receipt of one shock, his wife survived three applications of electricity. The fourth charge finally killed her but caused a “ghastly plume of smoke [to rise] from her head.” Irene Philipson notes, in Ethel Rosenberg: Beyond the Myths. Ethel experienced a much harder death than her husband had.

Andy Warhol pioneered silkscreen painting, which allows “the artist to translate photographs as multiple, ‘mass produced’ works.” Initially, he used this mechanical printmaking process to market pictures of celebrities and everyday objects. However, his work later depicted more macabre subjects in his Death and Disasters series.

One of these paintings, Big Electric Chair (1967-1968), was inspired by a press photograph of the execution device taken inside Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York, where the Rosenbergs were put to death. Perhaps Warhol’s gruesome series was intended to desensitize viewers to the horrors of existence his paintings depicted. “When you see a gruesome picture over and over again,” he maintained, “it doesn’t really have an effect.”^[4]

6 Guernica by Pablo Picasso

A bull, a horse, bodies and body parts, terrified faces, a broken sword clutched in a dying man’s fist, a woman in agony—these are some of the macabre images in Pablo Picasso’s nightmarish Guernica (1937). According to a website devoted to the artist, the commissioned work represents Picasso’s immediate reaction to the Nazis’ devastating casual bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).

The mural, painted in black, blue, and white oils, is an amalgamation of pastoral and epic style showcasing “the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts upon individuals, particularly innocent civilians.” The lack of colors expresses the “starkness of the aftermath of the bombing.” Although interpretations of the painting differ, the rampaging bull is thought to symbolize fascism, while the horse represents the people of Guernica, a stronghold of the Republican forces who resisted the Nationalists led by Francisco Franco.^[5]

5 The Course of Empire: Destruction by Thomas Cole

For hundreds of years, starting in 27 BC, the Roman Empire essentially was the Western world. Although the Empire was by no means an earthly paradise, it did provide law and order, protection, and a way of life for a vast region of the Middle East and Europe. During the Pax Romana, or “Peace of Rome,” which lasted about 200 years, art and culture flourished in the Empire. To Roman citizens, it probably appeared that the Empire would exist forever. However, when Rome finally fell to barbarian invaders, it must have seemed to them that life itself had come to an end. Indeed, life as they had known it had changed drastically.

Not surprisingly, this catastrophic event became the subject of several paintings, one of which, Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire: Destruction (1836), dramatically envisions this monumental event. Displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the painting pictures great armies contending for victory during a dark storm against the backdrop of the city in flames. A flotilla of enemy ships (of unlikely Viking origin) besieges the defenders. One of their vessels is used to cross a gap between sections of a bridge leading to the steps and rooftops of buildings where Roman centurions have made a desperate stand.

Although a ship sinks, it is clear that the invaders have gained the upper hand. Many Roman soldiers are dead or lie dying. The city has been put to the torch. At the edge of a rooftop, one of the barbarians arrests a terrified Roman lady intent upon casting herself into the sea. A larger-than-life statue of a Roman soldier, rushing forward with shield aloft, symbolizes the fall of the legion and the imminent fall of Rome itself: part of the sculpture’s head lies broken on the rooftop below. The panoramic painting is a sweeping vista of the disaster that has befallen the Empire and its citizens.^[6]

4 Human Laundry by Doris Clare Zinkeisen

The Nazis’ dehumanization of Jews is indicated by the title of Clare Zinkeisen’s stark 1945 painting Human Laundry: Belsen, 1945, which is displayed in the Imperial War Museum in London. Painted mostly in grays and whites, the work shows a row of skeletal figures laid out, on their backs, atop rough tables. German nurses, supervised by a uniformed German military doctor, bathe them with soap and the water kept in pails at the ends of the tables. A pair of bearers has just arrived with the covered body of another item of “human laundry.” Or, perhaps, they are removing a body that has ceased to survive the harsh extremes of the Belsen concentration camp.

As a set of notes concerning the painting states, “Zinkeisen finds an effective motif in the contrast between the well-fed, rounded bodies of the German medical staff and the emaciated bodies of their patients.” This effect is heightened by the unconcerned looks on the nurses’ faces as they go about their duties; by the resigned and hopeless postures of the prisoners they handle, whose faces are not shown, further heightening their dehumanization; and by the nurse who nonchalantly carries a pair of buckets past the tables beside a long puddle of spilled water that has collected on the floor. The medics are nurses and doctors from a nearby German military hospital pressed into service to wash and de-louse the prisoners to prevent the spread of typhus before they could be admitted to the makeshift Red Cross hospital nearby.

Another set of notes offers additional information concerning the plight of the World War II prisoners and the theme of the painting: “The ‘human laundry’ consisted of about twenty beds in a stable where German nurses and captured soldiers cut the hair of the inmates, bathed them, and applied anti-louse powder before their transfer to an improvised hospital run by the Red Cross.”(LINK 9) ^[7]

3 Stories Behind the Postcards by Jennifer Scott

Jennifer Scott’s 2009 series of paintings and collages, Stories Behind the Postcards, was exhibited in America’s Black Holocaust Museum (ABHM) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The inspiration for them, she said, were souvenir postcards which, according to the museum’s website, “depicted images of lynching [and were] mailed around the country.” Such lynchings occurred between the 1880s and the Second World War. Upon seeing the cards, Scott wondered about what she did not see in them, such as “the family members left behind to take down the victim, to mourn and bury the remains—if there was enough to bury.”

Her objective in creating the series, she said, was to encourage viewers to relate to the plight of the victims and to “try to imagine the victim’s life before death was captured in a postcard.” In addition, she hoped to move the viewer “beyond typical politically correct thoughts and feelings about race and race relations” so that their reflection on her work and its subject matter might have a lasting impact on the next generation.

Concerning three of her paintings, Three Generations, The Impossible (pictured), and My Son, My Grandson, Scott explained that unlike the postcards—which were in black and white or sepia-toned, her paintings are in full color. Without the color, the viewer might be able to distance themselves from the disturbing images. However, her versions remind the world that “these horrors took place amidst the beauty of nature and often in clear daylight.” Three Generations shows a middle-aged woman comforting an anguished older woman who is “beside herself with anger and sadness” as she leans over the victim, a young woman who, Scott explained, was lynched after being raped.^[8]

2 The Price by Tom Lea

The Price (1944) is a gruesome reminder of the cost that individual fighters paid on the World War II battlefield. A U.S. Marine advancing across a field in Peleliu in 1944, amid thick smoke on the ground and in the air, seems to stagger. The left side of his face, his left shoulder, the left side of his chest, and his left arm are shredded and bright red with his blood. That Marine, the artist, Tom Lea, explained, was “hit with a mortar blast, staggered a few yards like that, and just fell down.” The Price hung outside of Eisenhower’s office at the Pentagon after the war, the artist added, “to remind him of the price of war.”

Adair Margo, a gallery owner and friend of the El Paso, Texas, artist, said, “He was the only eyewitness painter of the war who depicted shots being fired and U. S. soldiers being blown apart with blood and guts on the ground.” Lea’s artwork, Margo added, represents honest portrayals of the truth of war, then and today. Two reasons that Life dispatched Lea to paint the war, Margo said, were that Lea “could paint battle in color, when photography was in black and white,” and he had the skill to “piece together parts [of the fighting] to communicate the whole of battle.”

Larry Decuers, the curator of The National World War II Museum in El Paso, said that the Life and World War II exhibit of Lea’s paintings from the U.S. Army’s art collection, on loan from the U.S. Army Center of Military History, included twenty-six images which Lea painted during the war. The paintings in the exhibit were the ones that appeared in Life magazine during the conflict itself, offering readers a no-punches-pulled glimpse of the war. During the U.S. operation against an entrenched Japanese force at Peleliu, 1,100 Marines died and 5,000 were wounded, while virtually all 11,000 Japanese soldiers on the island were killed.”^[9]

1 The Broken Column by Frida Kahlo

Not all catastrophes are criminal, martial, social, or political, and they don’t all affect entire groups or nations. The tragedy that befell Mexican artist Frida Kahlo was accidental and personal. It was also responsible for the vast majority of her work as an artist. Her paintings largely depict her physical disabilities and suffering and their effects on her personal life.

Kahlo, who suffered from polio as a child, nearly died in a bus accident as a teenager. She suffered multiple fractures of her spine, collarbone, and ribs, a shattered pelvis, a broken foot, and a dislocated shoulder. Soon after this devastating accident, Kahlo adopted painting as a way to cope with and overcome her ordeal, the effects of which continued throughout her life. “From the outset of her recovery,” a website dedicated to the artist explains, “she began to focus heavily on painting while in a body cast.” Despite having 30 operations, she persisted in painting largely autobiographical, if symbolic, portraits of herself.

The Broken Column, a 1944 portrait of the artist, shows Kahlo topless, her arms at her sides, weeping as she gazes toward the viewer. A sheet is wrapped around her hips, and an orthopedic corset composed of straps over her shoulders and around her torso binds her abdomen. She is split by a large, wide fissure that shows, in place of her spine, the somewhat broken column of the painting’s title. The fissure, or cleft, writes art historian Andrea Kettenmann, author of Kahlo, becomes a symbol “of the artist’s pain and loneliness.” Another symbol of Kahlo’s pain is the nails that pierce her face and body. What Kettenmann states about another of Kahlo’s painting The Landscape (1946-1947) is also true of The Broken Column: “The desolate and fissured landscape [suggestive of the artist’s broken body] provides the background for Frida Kahlo’s work.”^[10]

Although people sometimes think of “art” as only or primarily the visual arts, fine arts are much more varied. According to The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, they include not only painting and drawing but also “sculpture, literature, architecture, drama, music, dance, opera, and television and movies.”

It is in this broad sense of the meaning of the term that the artists on this list are included. Each of them, whether a painter, a novelist, or a poet, is not only famous but also shares the rather surprising experience of having had one or more of their works inspired by a hallucination.

Related: Top 10 Frightening Facts About Hallucinations

10 Futuristic Images

Dr. Jean Kim believes Yayoi Kusama’s art teaches us how to live. The Japanese painter’s work features polka dots, the trademark theme she developed when she was 10 years old, and incorporates imagery from the hallucinations that the artist experiences.

Kim describes Kusama’s art as a mixture of abstract expressionism and conceptual art characterized by its graphic, colorful, and somewhat futuristic images. Kim cites the artist’s Infinity Rooms as an example: “These rooms are small self-contained mirror chambers, allowing the viewer to simultaneously lose one’s identity and sense of self in the infinity of a repeated image evoking the universe.” She adds the paintings capture the reality of selfies, which have become increasingly popular in recent years, as they’ve been distributed rapidly far and wide via social media.

Kusama’s art also helps the artist herself cope with, and even transcend, her mental illness. Kim points out that although not specifically diagnosed, it is consistent with psychosis and possible schizophrenia. While marked by hallucinations and “the disintegration of one’s sense of self and identity, leading to anxiety and paranoia.” Kusama’s art is therapeutic, allowing the painter to reconsolidate the fear of disintegration that the artist experiences.^[1]

9 Stalking Crustaceans and Bizarre Transformations

In 1935, French existential philosopher, novelist, and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) decided to take a trip—a very special kind of trip. He prevailed upon his friend, Daniel Lagache, a medical doctor, to punch his ticket, so to speak, by injecting his patient with mescaline, which was used at the time to treat alcoholism and depression.

As a result, Sartre experienced a “bad trip.” Writer Emily Zarevich describes some of the more salient features of Sartre’s mind-blowing adventure. Not only did bizarre, frightening crustaceans pursue him wherever he went, but ordinary objects transformed themselves into animals, “his clock [becoming] an owl, his umbrella to a vulture.”

Sartre’s adventure ended with a mental breakdown. Part of his campaign of redemption that followed included his consultation with famed psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. After that, Sartre understood that the crabs that had pursued him symbolized the philosopher’s fear of being alone. Although he was able to rid himself, intermittently, of the crustaceans that haunted him, the crabs reappeared in Sartre’s experimental and ground-breaking 1938 novel La Nausée (Nausea). In the book, readers are treated to a ludicrous sex scene in which the main character daydreams he’s trapped in a garden full of insects and animals walking crab-style.^[2]

8 Shapes on the Ceiling

Despite his eventual fame, Joan Miro (1893-1983) was once a starving artist. The surrealist painter himself explained the way that he conceived the subjects of his art. Janis Mink summarizes his process in her book, Miro. Upon returning to his Paris studio at night, he would go to bed sometimes without supper, where he would see things, including shapes on the ceiling, before jotting them down in a notebook. Sometimes, the sights were “remembered dreams” from his unrestful sleep; other times, they were images seen in “hallucinations caused by hunger.”

Although Miro might appear to have sufficient funds for necessities and “trips back and forth to Spain,” he was actually impoverished. His hunger, though, like the “ether, cocaine, alcohol, morphine, or sex” that his colleagues employed, helped him to get in touch with his subconscious. This worked out well for Miro, who was too deeply spiritual to destroy his own body and fully enjoyed his own connection to nature. His 1925 painting, The Birth of the World, quickly attained fame.^[3]

7 Blood Sky and Open Chest Wound

Edvard Munch (1863-1944), who, according to Dr. Albert Rothenberg, may have had bipolar disorder with psychosis, experienced visual and auditory hallucinations and received psychiatric hospitalization in 1908.

Munch himself explains the origin of his celebrated, if dark and disturbing, painting The Scream (1893): “I was walking along the road with two of my friends. Then the sun set. The sky suddenly turned into blood, and I felt something akin to a touch of melancholy. I stood still, leaned against the railing, dead tired. Above the blue black fjord and city hung clouds of dripping, rippling blood. My friends went on again. I stood, frightened, with an open wound in my breast. A great scream pierced through nature.”

The experience, clearly a visual hallucination, was creatively transformed by Munch in several phases over a period of eighteen months into a work of art. Five preliminary sketches in the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway, show changes in the position of the painting’s lone figure, resulting in the subjects being turned to face the viewer and being visually integrated with the scene. The successive changes show how Munch’s artistry transformed his hallucination into a significant and meaningful portrait of an emotional state of mind and reflected the artist’s own healthy creative processes.^[4]

6 Autoscopic Hallucination

An autoscopic hallucination is the perception of one’s own body or a part of it as existing separately and externally to the self. This type of hallucination occurred in conjunction with meningitis, seizures, space-occupying lesions, brain tumors, migraine, delirium, and post-traumatic brain lesions.

The Russian novelist Feodor (also spelled “Fyodor” and “Fjodor”) Dostoevsky (1821-1881) was regarded as an abnormally high-strung personality and suffered from an unknown ailment that made him subject to hallucinations. Even as a child, he had auditory hallucinations. Once, while hiking through a forest, he heard a voice warn that a wolf was loose. As Joseph Frank recounts in Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt 1821-1849, as an adult, the novelist confided, he had become the victim of some sort of strange and unbearably torturing nervous illness that he called “mystic terror.” For a time, the novelist was convinced that someone who snored shared his bed. He had other hallucinations as well.

In fact, the second Mr. Golyadkin featured in the novel The Double may have been inspired by an autoscopic hallucination experienced by Dostoevsky himself. In any case, it is clear Dostoevsky’s “first-hand acquaintance with hallucinatory phenomena and his exceptional talent” allowed Dostoevsky to verbalize and analyze such experiences.^[5]

5 Hypnagogic Hallucinations

The English novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1879) experienced hypnagogic hallucinations, defined as fleeting perceptual experiences during the transition from wakefulness to sleep. Such incidents are often associated with involuntary and imagined experiences, hypnagogic hallucinations, and hypnopompic hallucinations (in the period from sleep to wakefulness). Dickens was also an insomniac.

His characters experience similar conditions and hallucinations, including insomnia, sleep promotion, hypnagogic hallucinations, perhaps the first report of restless legs syndrome, sleep paralysis, dreams, nightmares, terror, and drowsiness. One example of Dickens’s literary depiction of a hypnagogic hallucination appears in A Christmas Carol, as Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by four ghosts, leaving Scrooge unsure whether they are a dream or reality. A second example is that of Oliver Twist, who, when he falls asleep, “sees his enemies, Monks and Fagin, apparently in an episode of dream-reality confusion.”^[6]

4 Archangels and the Face of God

At age four, the poet, painter, and printmaker William Blake (1757-1827) saw God’s face through a window of the child’s house. About six years later, he said he saw a tree full of angels, their “bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.” Later, archangels would dictate poetry to him and infuse the themes of his visual art. Blake’s hallucinations, which occurred again and again throughout his life, also included audible voices—those of his dead brother, to whom he spoke every day, and of angels.

A retroactive diagnosis of Blake suggests that he may have suffered from bipolar disorder or temporal lobe epilepsy. This latter condition could explain his seeing “ecstatic aurae,” such as those that typically indicate the presence of deities or angels in paintings and drawings.^[7]

3 Brobdingnagian Hallucination

As Jan Dirk Blom points out in A Dictionary of Hallucinations, the Gulliverian hallucination, aka the brobdingnagian hallucination, refers to a macroptic hallucination in which a human figure or figures are seen as disproportionally large. Terms like “lilliputian hallucination,” which involves the perception of tiny human figures, were inspired by Jonathan Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels.

Swift (1667-1745) experienced symptoms akin to those of Ménière’s disease, including cognitive changes, memory impairment, personality alterations, language disorder, and facial paralysis during the last three years of his life. And it is thought that the novel’s gigantic inhabitants of Brobdingnag and tiny people of Lilliput are based on Swift’s own visual hallucinations.^[8]

2 Hallucinations of the Sane

Whoever has seen The Garden of Earthly Delights must have wondered what, besides the fervent religious beliefs of Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450s-1516), inspired the paintings. To say that they are bizarre and perverse characterizes the triptych in relatively mild terms.

Strange architecture, part floral and part stone; hybrid creatures; nude men and women performing acrobatics or sexual acts or riding horses, camels, mules, boars, bulls, and unicorns; huge fruits; lovers trapped inside clam shells, transparent floral bodies, and glass tubes; flowers in strange places—these are only some of the surreal images in the central panel of the triptych, which shows scenes of an earthly paradise awash in lust, preceding the even-worse pictures reserved for the right panel’s depiction of hell.

Roger Blench, author of “The hallucinatory Hieronymus Bosch: Charles Bonnet syndrome?” briefly assesses the possibility that Bosch’s imagery is related to episodes of Charles Bonnet Syndrome [CBS], aka “hallucinations of the sane.” Although Blench dismisses attempts to pigeonhole Bosch according to any one interpretation, he also suggests that there is evidence to see the artist’s work as Bosch’s own hallucinations transferred to canvas framed in an iconography acceptable to his era. According to this interpretation, Bosch wanted to express his paintings’ themes in at least an ostensibly Roman Catholic worldview that could be viewed as doctrinal, if unusual.^[9]

1 Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven

In Dante Alighieri (c. 1265-1321), we meet a poet whose work is nearly as strange and surreal, if not as obscure, as Bosch’s Garden. It wouldn’t be surprising to find that Dante’s epic depiction of the poet’s journey through hell (The Inferno), purgatory (Purgatorio), and heaven (Paradiso) was based, at least in part, on the poet’s own hallucinations. Indeed, such may very well have been the case, as it has been theorized the author may have had narcolepsy.

In The Divine Comedy, the poet Dante references his fictional counterpart’s sleep, weariness, dreams, and, as Dante himself writes, “rested eyes.” These allusions are explained as indications that the actual Dante suffered from both narcolepsy and catalepsy. The former is a neurological disorder. It interferes with the body’s regulation of sleep-wake cycles, causing sleepiness during the day and the tendency to nap for brief periods during waking hours. The latter condition causes muscular rigidity and unresponsiveness to the stimuli of the objective world.

The fictional Dante’s entire journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven is marked by sudden wake-dreaming transitions, short and refreshing naps, visions and hallucinations, unconscious behaviors, episodes of muscle weakness, and falls which are always triggered by strong emotions. The evidence that Dante is writing from experience about the hallucinations implied by his poetry is there in The Divine Comedy itself, in the behavior of its protagonist, the fictional Dante.^[10]

Have you ever read a book that described a location so vividly that you wished you could visit it? Well, sometimes you can. Often authors are inspired by real-world places when crafting their book settings, whether based in our world or a fantasy one. This means that readers who have been bitten by the travel bug can set off on real adventures to explore some of their favorite locations from literature.

This list rounds up 10 UK locations from classic books that you can actually visit, providing a literary tour of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. They are listed from “loosely related” to “basically identical.” So even if you aren’t a bookworm, this list likely includes a true classic or a more modern work that you love with an accompanying destination worth exploring.

Related: 10 Rude-Sounding British Places With Unbelievable Backstories

10 Glamis Castle and Cawdor Castle: Macbeth (1606) by William Shakespeare

Although Macbeth is based on the life of a real Scottish king, Shakespeare was no historian, and his version is highly fictionalized. Macbeth is described as the Thane of Glamis and the Thane of Cawdor, but these castles weren’t actually built until around 300 years after Macbeth’s death. Both castles have fostered this literary connection, though.

Glamis, which looks like an ornate French chateau, has a walking trail that features wooden carvings of the main characters from Shakespeare’s play and a grand hall named after one of Macbeth’s victims, King Duncan. Of course, it has its own history of murder and witchcraft, too (as do the majority of Scottish castles).

Cawdor is a medieval fortress built around a holly tree (now petrified at the base of the old tower) due to a vision apparently experienced by the Thane of Cawdor (the real one, not Shakespeare’s Macbeth). He was instructed in a dream to let a donkey roam and then build a castle wherever it lay down to sleep. Like Glamis, Cawdor takes advantage of the Shakespeare connection and has previously staged a production of Macbeth.^[1]

9 Llandudno: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll

Alice Pleasance Liddell (now known as the real “Alice” in Wonderland) spent summer holidays with her family in the Welsh seaside town of Llandudno. The Liddells were close friends with Charles Dodgson, better known by his pen-name, Lewis Carroll, and the story goes that he was inspired by Alice’s adventures in Llandudno.

The Welsh town has made the most of this association, beginning with a White Rabbit statue installed in 1933 and continuing with a number of Wonderland Town Trails. These trails cover much of the Victorian resort town, which has the longest pier in Wales, and feature statues of characters from Carroll’s fantastical novel. You can now even explore the trails with augmented reality.^[2]

8 Unst: Treasure Island (1883) by Robert Louis Stevenson

While there is no record of exactly which island inspired Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson certainly had a few to pick from. His father was a lighthouse engineer, and Stevenson would often accompany him on visits to various islands. There are around 900 islands surrounding mainland Scotland, but Unst has a particularly strong claim.

Stevenson traveled to Unst, part of the Shetland Islands and the UK’s most northerly inhabited island, with his father in 1869. Beautiful and relatively isolated, it is easy to see why this island would spark a story about pirates. Paula Williams, the curator of the Maps, Mountaineering, and Polar Collections at the National Library of Scotland, explains that the outlines of both islands resemble each other “complete with corresponding inlets and [the] small islet Skeleton Island, [as it is called in the novel], or Uya [its real name].”^[3]

7 Edinburgh: The Harry Potter Series (1997–2007) by J. K. Rowling

J. K. Rowling created the Wizarding World while living in Edinburgh, and the city’s grand architecture and cobbled alleyways are reflected in the books. Candlemaker Row features a plaque and mural to mark it as the inspiration of Diagon Alley. But if you type “Diagon Alley” into Google Maps, it will send you to Victoria Street, which feels just as wizardly with its colorful shops and secret stairways.

Another link between the Scottish capital and Harry Potter can be found in Greyfriars Kirkyard, a 17th-century cemetery. The cemetery features the gravestone of Thomas Riddell, which only slightly differs in spelling from the birth name of Lord Voldemort, Tom Riddle.

You can also visit places where parts of Harry Potter were written. The earlier books were largely written in The Elephant House café, and the series was finished in a room (now named The J. K. Rowling Suite) at the Balmoral Hotel. The suite features subtle Harry Potter decorations, but it isn’t cheap, costing almost £2000, or $2700, for a one-night stay.^[4]

6 Haworth: Various Novels by the Brontë Sisters

This entry covers books written by the Brontë sisters, primarily Charlotte’s Jane Eyre (1847), Emily’s Wuthering Heights (1847), and Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). The sisters lived in the Yorkshire village of Haworth, which is surrounded by dramatic moorland, and they set their novels in the area, which is now known as Brontë Country.

Their family home has been turned into the Brontë Parsonage Museum, which houses the largest collection of Brontë manuscripts, letters, and early editions of poetry and novels. Around the area are various properties which inspired buildings from the novels. Top Withens, a ruined farmhouse located on the moors near Haworth, inspired Wuthering Heights, while Gawthorpe Hall and Wycoller Hall served as Ferndean Manor in Jane Eyre. There is even a 44-mile trail called the Brontë Way, which links key locations from the books.^[5]

5 Antrim Coast and County Down: The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956) by C. S. Lewis

In fiction, the world of Narnia is accessible through a wardrobe; in reality, it is located in Northern Ireland. C. S. Lewis’s fantasy world was inspired by the landscapes of the Antrim Coast and County Down. In a letter to his brother, he declared, “That part of Rostrevor which overlooks Carlingford Lough is my idea of Narnia.” And in his essay “On Stories,” he stated, “I have seen landscapes (notably in the Mourne Mountains) which, under a particular light, made me feel that at any moment a giant might raise his head over the next ridge.”

It is easy to see how the rugged vistas of Northern Ireland inspired Lewis. The ruins of Dunluce Castle, perched on a cliff above the sea, would fit comfortably within the world of Narnia. The hexagonal basalt columns of the Giant’s Causeway feel infused with the magic which Lewis saw in the country. Legend has it that the giant Finn McCool built the Causeway as a bridge over to Scotland. Although New Zealand was the filming location for the movies, the closest you can get to Lewis’s idea of Narnia is Northern Ireland. ^[6]

4 Oxford: His Dark Materials (1995–2000) by Philip Pullman

There are many magical locations visited in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, but the story starts in an alternate version of Oxford. Pullman attended the University of Oxford during the ‘60s, and it clearly left an impact on him because his main character, Lyra, grows up at the university. All of the college buildings spread throughout the city look impressive, but the basis for the fictional Jordan College was probably Pullman’s alma mater, Exeter College. When filming the TV series, though, New College was used as a substitute for Jordan.

There are many Oxford landmarks mentioned throughout the books. You can visit the Covered Market, which sells far more than just the fish mentioned in The Golden Compass; The Pitt Rivers Museum, which Lyra explores in The Subtle Knife; and Jericho, a neighborhood with canals where Pullman’s Gyptians moor their narrowboats.^[7]

3 Birmingham: The Lord of the Rings (1937–1949) by J. R. R. Tolkien

J. R. R. Tolkien, like his friend C. S. Lewis, was inspired by where he grew up when creating the fantasy world for his novels. Though, again like C. S. Lewis, the adaptations of his works were filmed in New Zealand. Tolkien grew up in and around Birmingham, and the area inspired his descriptions of Middle Earth.

The Shire, the idyllic home of the hobbits, was based on Sarehole, Tolkien’s childhood home, which he described as a “kind of lost paradise.” The peaceful English village was composed of old-fashioned cottages (now gone) and an old mill (which is now a museum). Close by is Moseley Bog, a densely wooded area that is reminiscent of the Old Forest on the edge of the Shire.

Landmarks in the city of Birmingham also inspired the author. For instance, Perrott’s Folly and Edgbaston Waterworks Tower helped Tolkien conjure up his Two Towers. The industrialized Black Country of Birmingham was expanding into his beloved countryside and can clearly be seen as a version of the hellish Mordor.^[8]

2 Whitby: Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker

Bram Stoker drew extensively on Transylvanian folklore when he was researching Dracula. Still, while the novel starts at Dracula’s castle in Transylvania, key elements of the Gothic story did not come together until he visited Whitby for a vacation in 1890. He then chose the English seaside town as one of the novel’s central locations.

Dracula, in the form of a wolf-like creature, runs up the 199 steps that wind up to the impressive ruins of Whitby Abbey. St. Mary’s Churchyard was featured as the location where Lucy is first attacked by the vampire. Whitby’s atmospheric scenery was not the only thing that inspired Stoker, though. He heard of a Russian ship, the Dmitry, which was wrecked on Tate Hill Sands in 1885, and this made it into his novel in the form of Dracula’s ship, the Demeter, meeting the same fate.

In the public library, he read a book that mentioned Vlad Tepes, known as Vlad the Impaler or Dracula. He added the note “Dracula in the Wallachian language means Devil,” and thus, he found the name of his Count. Before this, Stoker had planned to call his vampire Count Wampyr, a name so bad that it probably would have doomed the novel to obscurity.^[9]

1 Ashdown Forest: Winnie-the-Pooh series (1925–1928) by A. A. Milne

If A. A. Milne’s childhood classic books featuring Winnie-the-Pooh and friends adventuring in Hundred Acre Wood captured your imagination as a child, then I’ve got good news for you! Hundred Acre Wood is real, and it’s called Ashdown Forest. Christopher Milne, son of A. A. Milne and inspiration for Christopher Robin, wrote in his autobiography that “Pooh’s forest and Ashdown Forest are identical.”

In 1925 the Milne family bought a holiday home near Ashdown, located only 30 miles from London, in East Sussex. Their time among the pine trees and heathland inspired the classic children’s books. You can even visit the footbridge where Christopher and Pooh play Poohsticks. In the nearby village of Hartfield, you can find Pooh Corner, the village sweet shop that the family visited, which is now a Pooh-themed tea room and museum (called the Pooh-seum).^[10]

A new annual tradition will start at the end of 2018. On New Year’s Day 2019, hundreds of thousands of movies, books, paintings, drawings, and musical scores will be stripped of their copyright and enter the public domain. For decades, American copyright laws have kept Intellectual Property (IP) from 1923 on under copyrighted, but starting in 2019 all works created in 1923 will convert from copyright protected to copyright free. The next year, on January 1, 2020, the tradition will continue with IP from 1924, and so on year after year. Online companies are taking notice too, with Google Books setting up many of its millions of scanned books, that were published in 1923, to automatically allow full-text free online viewing.

When materials are copyright free and enter the public domain that means you, or anyone, can do whatever they want with the material. For example, you can legally make copies of movies that are in the public domain and give them away, sell them, remix them, add porn scenes and sell them (but don’t do that, it’d be super weird), or anything else you want, with no restrictions. Here are 10 classic works that are about to enter the public domain in just a few months…

10. Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last!

The 1923 movie Safety Last! contains one of the most iconic scenes in silent film history, where actor Harold Lloyd desperately clings to the hands of a large clock on the side of a skyscraper. Roger Ebert called it the most famous scene in a silent comedy. Back then, film safety was pretty much non-existent and a few years earlier, in 1919, Lloyd had actually lost a thumb and forefinger doing promotional work for another film, Haunted Spooks.

His performance in Safety Last! and the movie’s box office numbers cemented his place as an A-List leading man. In honor of its lasting influence and cultural importance, the Library of Congress added Safety Last! to its National Film Registry in 1994. On January 1, 2019, it will be stripped of its copyrighted status and enter the public domain, where you can do anything you want with the film.

9. Hélice by Robert Delaunay

Robert Delaunay and his wife Sonia Delaunay were some of the founders of the Orphism art movement, an offshoot of Cubism (of Pablo Picasso fame). Respected art critic Guillaume Apollinaire thought that art should be like music and that Orphism, with its colors and shapes, reflected that. At 38-years-old, in 1923, Robert Delaunay painted an Orphism masterpiece when he created “Hélice.” Today the original canvas is displayed in the German Wilhelm-Hack-Museum. And on January 1, 2019, it’ll be public domain so you can print it and use it however you want.

8. “The Charleston” jazz song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ7SNTSq-9o

“The Charleston” is the jazz song that, as you can probably guess, helped spark the Charleston dance craze. The lyrics were written by Cecil Mack and the musical score was done by Jimmy Johnson. When the song was released in 1923, conservative groups were outraged, with Rev. EW Walters, vicar of St Aidan’s, Bristol saying “any lover of the beautiful will die rather than be associated with the Charleston … It is neurotic! It is rotten! It stinks! Phew, open the windows.”

Popular culture did not listen to Rev. Walters, and the song and the dance are legendary in America and around the world. Whenever the roaring twenties are brought up in movies or TV you can count on hearing “The Charleston.”

7. The Ten Commandments

Considered one of the founding fathers of American cinema, Cecil B. DeMille made over 70 films before dying of heart failure in 1959. His films span every genre and over his career he created both silent movies and talkies (or movies with a soundtrack). He started acting in and producing plays, but entered into the world of movies with his first film, The Squaw Man, in 1914. It was the first feature-length motion picture filmed in Hollywood. A 17-minute short film, In Old California, was technically the first motion picture shot in Hollywood. The Squaw Man was a huge success and cemented Hollywood as the center of movie production.

Nine years later, in May 1923, DeMille started production on an epic biblical story, The Ten Commandments (no, not the Charlton Heston version). The movie stunned Hollywood insiders when DeMille became the first producer to spend over $1,000,000 on a film. He claims the backers actually fired him due to the cost overruns but were forced to hire him back, as he was the only man who could finish the production. When the movie was released in 1923 it smashed box office records and was Paramount’s highest grossing film for 25 years.

The period drama featured huge, life-size sets of Ancient Egypt. After filming, the sets were abandoned to the elements and buried under the shifting sands of California’s Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes, the largest remaining dune system south of San Francisco. In 2012 archaeologists uncovered the forgotten Egyptian “ruins” created for the film and unearthed several monuments, including one of the 12-foot tall, 5-ton Sphinxes that were produced for the movie.

6. Several Works of Kandinsky

Russian painter and art theorist Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky is considered one of the founders of abstract art and for decades was considered to have created the first purely abstract painting. His 1923 tension series paintings including Zarte Spannung (Delicate Tension) were painted while he worked at the Bauhaus, Berlin a German art school. After they were finished the paintings were in a museum until 1937, when it was shut down under Hitler’s crackdown on art.

The paintings and their owner, Baroness Hilla Rebay, a daughter of a Prussian General, then moved to America where she became one of the founding members of New York’s Guggenheim art museum. After the Nazis closed Berlin’s Bauhaus art school in 1933, Kandinsky moved to France, where he painted until he died from complications of cerebrovascular disease in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, on December 13, 1944.

5. Chaplin’s The Pilgrim

Charlie Chaplin had been doing films since 1914 and almost from the beginning played his iconic character, the Tramp. His movies attracted huge numbers and gave him fame and fortune. In 1919 he co-founded United Artists as a means to give him control over film production.

The Pilgrim was released on February 26, 1923. The 46-minute movie was his second shortest feature. Jeffrey Vance, in his 2003 book Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema, says that “The Pilgrim is one of Chaplin’s richest—and most neglected—films.” In 1959 Chaplin released The Pilgrim (1923) along with A Dog’s Life (1918), and Shoulder Arms (1918) as a trilogy called The Chaplin Revue in hopes of being able to reboot the Tramp character.

4. Poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

Robert Frost is an iconic American poet who tallied four Pulitzer Prizes for his work (New Hampshire in 1924; Collected Poems in 1931; A Further Range in 1937; and A Witness Tree in 1943). His work inspires many and these poems are a trusted foundation for eulogy speeches.

His piece “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is no exception and has been used to honor the dead, including during the funeral for assassinated President John F. Kennedy. Current Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also honored his father, former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, when he used an altered line of the poem during his father’s funeral.

Studied by students around the world, Frost’s poetry is carefully monitored by the Frost estate and when his prose is used without permission, cease and desist lawsuits are quick to fly. Famous composer Eric Whitacre found this out the hard way when he completed a commissioned piece for the funeral of the parents of a woman named Julia Armstrong. Listeners at the funeral were enamored with the piece and soon Whitacre was swamped by requests from conductors trying to get the musical score. Around the same time, Frost’s estate caught wind of the score and its use of the poem and, in a flurry of lawsuits, shut it down.

This all ends when “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” enters the public domain. It was actually set to enter the public domain in 1998, 75 years after first publication but on October 27, 1998, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which extended the copyright term to 95 years which makes the poem enter the public domain on January 1, 2019.

3. Still Life With Cat

German painter Georg Schrimpf is seen as the main founder of the art trend Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). Schrimpf also, after World War I, participated in the brief existence of the Bavarian Soviet Republic before it was crushed by the remnants of the Imperial German Army. As Hitler tightened the screws of Nazi power Schrimpf was fired from his university in 1937 and his work was banned as “Degenerate Art” because he was involved in the Bavarian Soviet and deemed a communist. On April 19, 1938, he died at age 49.

In 1923 he painted “Still Life With Cat.” Germany released a commemorative stamp of the image on January 12, 1995, but the original painting is at the Staatsgalerie Moderne Kunst Museum. 1995 was the last year that Deutsche Bundespost (German federal post office) existed and appeared on stamps, as that year it was dissolved during a government privatization push.

2. Bambi by Felix Salten

Felix Salten published Bambi: A Life in the Woods in 1923. His target audience was adults and it was first published as a serialized tale in Austria. The story was hugely popular and caught the eye of Max Schuster, co-founder of the now giant publishing company Simon & Schuster. He got the book translated, allowing the English world to follow the transformation of Bambi from a weak and powerless fawn into a mighty stag and Great Prince of the Forest.

Ohio State University professor Paul Reitter contends that Salten, a Jew that faced discrimination in Austria, wrote the story as a metaphor for the Jewish existence in Europe, arguing, “Could the deer living in a forest ever trust that human hunters would let them live in peace? That echoes a haunting question for Jews” and antisemitism in 1920s Europe.

From 1933, efforts were made to animate the story but the technical limitations of animation at the time prevented making the film, until Walt Disney was able to overcome all obstacles and in 1939 started making the now iconic cartoon, eventually spending three years on the project before releasing the movie in 1942. A close adaption of the book, Disney was able to use a loophole in copyright law to try and avoid paying Salten a dime.

1. Felix the Cat cartoons

Almost a decade before the 1928 debut of Mickey Mouse (in Steamboat Willie), animator Otto Messmer and his boss Pat Sullivan were trying to create a marketable character, toying with a cartoon black cat. After months of tweaking, two films were released: Feline Follies on November 9, 1919, and on November 16, 1919 it was Musical Mews (a film that has been lost). But the cat in these films was a prototype dubbed Master Tom. The first film with a cat named Felix was The Adventures of Felix, released on December 14, 1919. It was the first character created solely for the film industry, the first character to reach a high level of fame, and also the first character to be licensed and merchandised, bringing in huge money for Sullivan’s animation company.

One of the most popular cartoon characters, Felix the Cat has been beloved by millions for decades. His image has adorned everything from being the oldest recognized mascot in the state of Indiana to the official emblem of the United States Navy strike fighter squadron VFA-31, the second oldest Navy Fighter Attack squadron operating today. Come January 1, 2019, any Felix cartoons released in 1923 or before will be released into the public domain.

Jon Lucas covers WW1 live, 100 years ago. You can follow the action on Twitter, Tumblr or Instagram

The Interpol Stolen Arts Database houses an immense list—over 52,000 records—of stolen works of art, along with pictures and descriptions of each piece. Countries all over the world contribute records of stolen treasures—certified with police information—in an effort that spans oceans, crosses continents, and transcends borders. In the billion-dollar black market, it’s no surprise that both art theft and recovery are big business. Here are ten times lost works of art have been rediscovered through unusual circumstances.

10 Woman-Ochre

A late-November heist at the University of Arizona Museum of Art in 1985 resulted in the loss of the $160 million painting Woman-Ochre by American-Dutch artist William de Kooning and a 32-year mystery regarding the valuable art’s whereabouts. The theft was carried out by a couple shortly after the museum opened, with the woman distracting a security guard before the guard could reach her upstairs post. Meanwhile, the male cut the painting from its frame. The couple made off with the invaluable painting before the guard discovered Woman-Ochre had disappeared.

With no cameras or fingerprints to go on, Woman-Ochre remained missing until the death of two well-traveled schoolteachers. Jerome and Rita Alter passed away in the tiny New Mexico town of Cliff in 2017, leaving their nephew to execute their estate, including a painting that hung behind their bedroom door. Antique dealer David Van Aucker soon paid $2,000 for the deceased couple’s art, taking possession of pieces that included the valuable painting. He hung the art in his Silver City store, where customers recognized the piece.

After a process that involved the FBI and a 2½-year restoration, Woman-Ochre hangs back on the same wall she was removed from in 1985. Meanwhile, the Alter family is left to wonder if a short story Jerome Alter penned about a 120-carat jewel being stolen by a woman and her daughter while a guard is distracted, then hanging it behind a wall panel for the two thieves’ secret enjoyment is based on more than just imagination. ^[1]

9 Tiffany Glass

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

In May 2018, New York City-based art glass dealers Howard and Paula Ellman made a startling discovery. After placing the winning bid on several items at a Pennsylvania auction, they found that some of the glass, including a Tiffany Favrile Vase, had been stolen from them 37 years prior. The discovery happened when the shipping service the Ellmans hired delivered four of the items they’d won with call-in bids. While unpacking the items, Howard discovered their own shop labels on the bottom of the Tiffany pieces, labels which the couple always removed when a piece was sold.

Upon further investigation, the same auction the Ellmans had purchased their own stolen glass from had sold 16 more of the 40-50 Tiffany pieces they’d lost in the unsolved robbery. Thanks to the documentation Paula had held onto for nearly four decades, it was determined that the couple were entitled to the return or value of all 16 stolen Tiffany works; works whose worth had drastically increased during their missing years.^[2]

8 Marble Bust

Loyal Goodwill shoppers might mention the nonprofit’s mission to empower the less fortunate, the low-cost, or, less frequently, the discovery of literal treasure. This was the case for Laura Young, an antique dealer who stumbled across the find of a lifetime for $34.99 at an Austin Goodwill. The discovery, a 50-pound (22.7-kilogram) marble sculpture, turned out to be a first-century bust of Roman general Drusus Germanicus that went missing from the German museum Pompejanum during World War II.

After hiring a lawyer to facilitate the return of the 2,000-year-old bust to its rightful owners, Young’s lawyer brokered an agreement that included the San Antonio Museum of Art hosting the artwork until May 2023.^[3]

7 Palette

A Florida architect stumbled across a stolen work from Jon Corbino at an estate sale in Sarasota. The painting, named Palette for the actual artist’s palette it was painted on, was one of several owned by the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall from the same artist. Though it was not the most valuable, it was the most popular work in the collection. The painting hung in the lobby of the lower gallery of the hall and went missing during an Oak Ridge Boys concert in the early 1990s.

Eric Bower, the architect and weekend yard sale enthusiast, recognized Corbino’s piece when he spotted it. Having come across the works of famous painters at garage sales before, Bower purchased the piece for just $25 and made contact with the artist’s daughter, who informed him that Palette was a stolen work.

Bower returned the stolen painting to the performing arts hall, even refusing a reward. Though the location of the painting is no longer a mystery, the question of who took it still persists. According to the son of the estate from which Palette was purchased, his mother had stored several pieces of art for an unknown man who’d never retrieved them.^[4]

6 Walking Horses

Standing 16 feet tall and 33 feet long (4.8m x 10m), Josef Thorak’s bronze horses once stood on either side of the stairs leading into Adolf Hitler’s New Reich Chancellery in Berlin, Germany. The imposing sculpture disappeared with the Soviets during World War II, showing up in the 1950s in Eberswalde at a location used for the Red Army barracks’ sports grounds/ They had been painted gold to mask bullet holes. The horses disappeared again with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, with speculation being that the sculpture had been sold or the horses melted down.

In 2015, the horses were finally rediscovered after an investigation was launched when the sculpture was put on the black market with a reported price tag of $5.6 million. The story of the horses’ journey then unraveled. Shortly before the fall of the Berlin wall, Helmut Schumacher, a vintage car dealer, had discovered an article in which an art historian had noted her discovery of several bronze statues in Eberswalde, including Walking Horses. An intense, complicated smuggling operation ensued, with bribes sprinkled liberally and Red Army soldiers themselves assisting the smugglers.

Due to the horses’ sheer size, the sculpture had to be cut up in order to be smuggled to the Western side of Berlin, eventually ending up in possession of the man paying the bribes—a businessman by the name of Rainer Wolf. When Wolf’s property was searched in May 2015, investigators discovered not only Walking Horses but a number of other illicit Nazi artworks that were subsequently seized and turned over to the German government.^[5]

5 Tres Personajes

Plucked from a pile of garbage in Manhattan after noticing it during a morning walk, Elizabeth Gibson hung the oil painting titled Tres Personajes” by Rufino Tamayo on her wall before research led her to a segment on missing masterpieces on Antique Roadshow FYIs. The piece, considered an important work from Tamayo’s mature period, had been purchased from Sotheby’s auction house in 1977 for $55,000 as a gift from a husband to his wife. Ten years later, the painting, unique in that marble dust and sand were mixed into the medium, was stolen from a Houston warehouse where it was being stored during a move. Though the original owners reported the loss to both Houston and federal authorities, and the painting was listed in multiple databases, no leads turned up.

After learning the value of the oil painting, Gibson returned it to the original gift recipient, now widowed, and accepted a $15,000 reward. Gibson also received an undisclosed percentage of the painting’s $1,049,000 sale price when it was then sold through Sotheby’s New York auction house twenty years after the theft in 2007.^[6]

4 Madonna and Child

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Most of the works of Italian artist Giovanni Battista Salvi, born in 1609 at Sassoferrato in the Marches, reside in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle in Britain. So it was no surprise that when one of his drawings was donated to the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts in 2021, the museum staff was ecstatic. The rare, circa-1650 Baroque work had been purchased by John and Sylvie O’Brien in 1970 from an unknown French collector.

Fifty-one years later, the couple, unaware that the drawing had been listed as stolen since 1965, donated it to the museum. Though no one knows exactly when the Sassoferatto was stolen as it was discovered torn from its base by a student doing research at the Graphische Sammlung, employees of the Washington County Museum of Fine Art verified it was indeed the valuable drawing. It was due to be returned to its rightful museum in August 2022.^[7]

3 Poppy Field at Vetheuil and Blooming Chestnut Branches

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh are unarguably two of the most well-known impressionist artists in the world, their works commanding millions of dollars at auction. They also tempt thieves, hoping to cash in on the black market.

On February 10, 2008, three masked, armed men made off with a $163.2-million haul from the private impressionist and neo-impressionist museum, the E.G. Buehrle Collection. In addition to Edgar Degas’s Ludovic Lepic and Boy in a Red Waistcoat by Paul Cezanne, the thieves grabbed Monet’s Poppy Field at Vetheuil and van Gogh’s Blooming Chestnut Branches. Though rather than being specifically targeted, authorities believe the thieves simply grabbed the first four works of art they came to.

In an unexpected twist, both the Monet and van Gogh were discovered only days later—still protected by the museum glass they were displayed under—in a sedan abandoned in front of a psychiatric hospital just a few feet from the Zurich museum. Eventually, all four paintings were recovered, and though little information is available on the 2009 recovery of the Degas works, Boy in a Red Waistcoat was found hidden in the roof upholstery of a black van in Belgrade, Serbia, in 2012.^[8]

2 Third Imperial Easter Egg

In July 1918, the Russian Imperial Family’s executions shocked the world. After their tragic demise, some of the family’s most extravagant possessions, the Fabergé Easter eggs, were confiscated from the Romanov palaces by the Bolsheviks and taken to the Kremlin Armoury. The eggs, created for the family from 1885 to 1916, were considered to be both the crowning achievement of Fabergé as well as the last great art commissions. They remained unopened in their storage crates until Joseph Stalin came into power and determined the valuable eggs could be sold to the Western world. Though some of the eggs were sold, others were hidden by Kremlin curators, and over time, the whereabouts of eight of the original 50 Imperial Easter Eggs became unknown.

One of those, the third Imperial egg, created in 1887 and considered missing since 1922, was discovered at a flea market stall by a scrap metal dealer in the midwest in 2004. Having paid more than the egg was worth as scrap, the yellow-gold Romanov treasure sat in the dealer’s cabinet for nearly a decade until research led him to suspect his flea market purchase could, in fact, be one of the missing Imperial Eggs. Once the origin of the golden bauble was confirmed, the Easter egg was sold to a private collector for a sum estimated to be around $33 million.^[9]

1 Alleged Imperial Easter Egg

Currently awaiting authentication is yet another of the lost Imperial Easter Eggs. After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Western countries imposed sanctions on Russian oligarchs. Found aboard a 348-foot (106-meter) superyacht seized in Fiji is what is believed to be one of the seven missing Imperial eggs. The discovery was revealed by Lisa Monaco, U.S. deputy attorney general, after the $300 million vessel owned by Suleiman Kerimov was docked in San Diego in June 2022. Once confirmed, only six Imperial Fabergé eggs will remain missing.^[10]