Artists beginning with C (part two)

Jean-Siméon Chardin - The Skate (c1725-1726), Soap Bubbles (c1733-1734)

Time stills and the world goes quiet when you look at Chardin's closely observed scenes and objects. His frequent depictions of people deeply absorbed in what they are doing — making a house of cards, pouring tea, blowing soap bubbles — is a metaphor for the patient work of painting a picture. In relaxing and slowing down to look at his humble scenes, you too join a triangle of contemplative attentiveness. A belief in the value of mental discipline drives this great artist of the 18th century Enlightenment. (JJ)

Cheo Chai-Hiang - Dear Cai Xiong (a Letter from Ho Ho Ying, 1972) (2005)

In 1972 the conceptual artist Cheo Chai-Hiang submitted a proposal to create an empty square measuring 5ft x 5ft that was to represent the Singapore River. The response from Ho Ho Ying — founder of Singapore's Modern Art Society — is reproduced in pencil on four large panels and sets out a discourse about the precarious nature of Singapore's art history. (JL)

Judy Chicago - The Dinner Party (1974)

A triangular table with place settings for 39 influential women from Sappho to Georgia O'Keeffe, via Elizabeth I, Hildegard of Bingen and Emily Dickinson. Its mission: "to end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women were written out of the historical record". (AH)

Eduardo Chillida - El Peine del Viento (1977)

Football's loss was monumental sculpture's gain when injury halted Chillida's career as Real Sociedad's goalie in the 1940s. His masterpiece, the Wind Comb, features three giant steel grappling hooks jutting from the cliffs at San Sebastian. It's unlikely that David Seaman will repeat this feat. (AH)

Ancient China - read more hereChinese landscape painting - read more herePetrus Christus - Portrait of a Carthusian (1446)

A fly crawls on the frame of this portrait of a white-robed young monk with a tremendous fuzzy beard. You wonder why the museum allows such insect behaviour but it's a painted fly on a painted frame; it has been settled there since the middle ages. (JJ)

Frederic Edwin Church -Twilight in the Wilderness (1860)

The Connecticut-born Church was one of the richest and most famous American artists of the 19th century, producing spectacular, vividly colouredlandscapes. Arguably, this one is too lurid with its huge red, purple and blue sky, but it undoubtedly has wow factor: it almost knocks you out. And it also suggests there is change in the air. The civil war was looming; this is America at a crossroads. (MB)

Pieter Claesz - Still Life with Stoneware Jug, Wine Glass, Herring, and Bread (1642)

The ruffled metallic skin of the fish, the silver sheen of the plate it rests on, the light reflecting magically in a huge tinted wine glass and the musty liquid within — this is a painting about surfaces. With Dutch still life painting, what you see is what you get. (JJ)

Harry Clarke - The Eve of St Agnes (1924)

Inspired by the medieval stained glass of Chartres, the Dublin artist spent years perfecting the intense jewel colours of his own glass, enriched with etching and engraving. Many churches in Britain and Ireland have Clarke windows, but this secular piece, his mesmerising illustration of the Keats poem, is perhaps his masterpiece. His early death was blamed on overwork and the chemicals used in glass- making. (MK)

Claude - Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba (1648), Landscape with Aeneas at Delos (1672)

Claude was a consummate landscape painter, his work hugely important to later artists, notably Turner. Many of his works seem to convey not only space but also time. In Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba a sense of temporality seems almost contained within the perspective, its background receding in layers like an old-fashioned theatre set. Points of departure are of interest to him; and in Landscape with Aeneas at Delos, there is a sense of the hero hovering between destinations — he is between his native city of Troy and his future home of Italy, accompanied by his soon-to- die father and his young son Anchises. (CH)

John Constable - Brighton Beach (1824), A Study for The Leaping Horse (1824-1825)

Forget the faded, badly reproduced version of Constable above your grandma's mantelpiece. This painter was no scenic picturesque faker. Observe, in these two astounding oil sketches, the way only he could unearth the rainbow tones in the seaside spume and countryside muck. It's as if he conjures almost tactile cross-associations between the stickiness of the oil paint and the quagmire that the horse is heaping from. The trees glisten with tics and flecks of lead white. And Brighton beach has never since looked so bracing. (RC)

Lovis Corinth - Death and the Artist (1921)

Here's the expressionist artist's lot. Corinth liked a drink or two and in this late self-portrait he catches himself in the mirror with the ravages of the bottle warping his face earthwards as a death's-head peeps malevolently from behind his shoulder. (RC)

Joseph Cornell - Taglioni's Jewel Casket (1940)

Artistic innovations often result from ludicrously simple shifts of convention. Cornell's innovation was the use of the box as a container of cryptic oddments, evoking reveries through the assemblage of created treasures and collected junk. Here, a velvet-lined box holds a glass necklace and 12 glass ice cubes alongside a legend recounting the 1835 plight of one Marie Taglioni, a famous ballerina, who, to save her jewellery from being stolen by a Russian highwayman, was made to dance upon a panther's skin spread over the snow and beneath the stars. (RC)

Correggio - Jupiter and Io (early 1530s)

A woman is embraced by a cloud — something you don't see every day — but the real surprise is Correggio's painterly triumph. Renaissance artists loved the challenge of the ancient Roman poet Ovid's tales of the loves of Jupiter, king of the gods, who took various forms to seduce nymphs — none stranger than that of a cloud. Correggio pictures a dark fluffy rain cloud seeping into the woods where Io sits naked; a green-grey vaporous paw slides around her waist as a face resolves out of the haze to kiss her. (JJ)

Piero di Cosimo - A Satyr Mourning Over a Nymph (c1495), The Forest Fire (c1505)

Enigmatic, romantic, deeply strange: these are paintings to make the imagination dance. In A Satyr Mourning Over a Nymph the dead nymph's head is cradled by her companion, while a dog sits sadly at her feet; in the background, more dogs footle around an otherwise deserted shore. In The Forest Fire, which perhaps illustrates themes in Lucretius's poem On the Nature of Things, animals and birds — woodcock, goldfinch, crane — take fright as the undergrowth bursts into flames; some of these animals are fantastical, with human faces staring out of pigs' bodies. (CH)

Sánchez Cotán - Still Life with Poultry, Vegetables and Fruit (1602)

Seven apples hang suspended from seven strings in the shape of a hexagon. Two songbirds hang dead, and two partridges. A great curving bunch of celery, some phallic carrots and three lemons add to the mystery. More dead birds are displayed on a stick propped against the stone frame that holds all these objects poised on the edge of a deep darkness. (JJ)

John Sell Cotman - Greta Bridge (c1807)

Cotman's approach to landscape could hardly be more temperamentally different from that of his contemporary Turner. While Turner revelled in nature's tendency to drench his vulnerability in waves of light, Cotman's special penchant was for those moments when the fleeting atmosphere appears transfixed. (RC)

Gustave Courbet - A Burial at Ornans (1849-1850), The Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair (1850-1855), The Painter's Studio: A Real Allegory (1855), Les Puits Noir (1860-1865), Woman with a Parrot (1865-1866), The Origin of the World (1866), The Trout (1872)

The immemorial French countryside seems to parade its ghosts before us in Courbet's great painting The Peasants of Flagey, with its man in a tall hat sitting like a stone monument holding the reins of a cart; it is a scene whose geological weight makes you realise that Courbet, prophet of Realism, is among other things the forerunner of Cézanne. Strength, solitude (in a familyor a crowd), enduring truths and silent rage make this master of craggy authority a tremendously powerful painter. If any one person invented modern art, it was Courbet. He called it Realism, capitalised, and in his self-portrait The Painter's Studio he depicts himself as a political as well as aesthetic hero, saving the working class of France by painting real life as it really looks. His sensational shocking masterpiece A Burial at Ornans rubs your nose in the blunt truth of death. At its centre is a hole, a nothingness that Courbet returns to again and again. Some of his most haunting paintings are landscapes in his native Jura region that force you to look into the lightless depths of cave mouths. The rough texture of Courbet's art, the dry broken brushwork that makes the faces of his country people so harsh and authentic, is far from being only a visual trait. His awkwardness extends to sexuality, which he acknowledged with a scandalous insistence on "truth" — his painting of a nude that looks right between her thighs is called The Origin of the World. And yet, with his sensationalism and radical courage — he painted his portrait of a hooked fish, The Trout, in exile in Switzerland after joining the Paris Commune — he is ultimately a great artist of the countryside. His stony-faced peasants and small town types contain in their impassive looks the silence of centuries. (JJ)

Lucas Cranach the Elder - Lamentation Beneath the Cross (1503)

The bodies of the three men nailed to crosses are broken, tortured and ugly: Cranach reveals the horrific antithesis of the beautiful Renaissance nude, the body wrecked and dying, ruinous prison of the soul. (JJ)

Carlo Crivelli - The Annunciation (1486)

Prior to a major clean-up, Crivelli's Annunciation was just another yellowing panel by a minor 15th century master. Afterwards its super-saturated colours, computer-game perspective and startling image of the Virgin zapped by a heavenly laser revealed it to be the missing link between the High Renaissance and outer space. (AH)